A History of American Literature Since 1870

We are beginning to realize that the Civil War marks a dividing line in American history as sharp and definitive as that burned across French history by the Revolution. That the...

American literature from the first has been rich in humor. The incongruities of the new world--the picturesque gathering of peoples like the Puritans, the Indians, the cavaliers...

With Mark Twain, American literature became for the first time really national. He was the first man of letters of any distinction to be born west of the Mississippi. He spent h...

In his _Chronological Outlines of American Literature_, Whitcomb mentions only thirteen American novels published during the seven years before 1870: Taylor's _Hannah Thurston_,...

The new era of vulgarity in literature, complained of by Stedman, came as a revolt against mid-century tendencies. The movement was not confined to America. In the early seventi...

The work of Harte and even of Hay is the work of an onlooker rather than a sharer. One feels that both were studying their picturesque surroundings objectively for the sake of "...

The second generation of poets in America, those later singers born during the vital thirties in which had appeared the earliest books of the older school, began its work during...

One phase of the new discovery of America following the Civil War--return to reality, insistence upon things as they are--expressed itself in nature study. While the new local c...

Whitman and Thoreau stand as the two prophets of the mid century, both of them offspring of the Transcendental movement, pushing its theories to their logical end, both of them...

The nineteenth century both in Europe and America was a period of revolt, of breakings away from tradition, of voices in the wilderness. It was the age of Byron and Shelley, of...

The New England school, which had so dominated the mid-nineteenth century, left, as we have seen, no heirs. As the great figures of the "Brahmins" disappeared one by one, vigoro...

The novelists who began their work in the seventies found themselves in a dilemma. On one side was the new school which was becoming more and more insistent that literature in A...

The year 1866 saw the low-water mark, perhaps, not only of the American novel, but of American literature generally. On May 12 of this year _The Round Table_ of New York, in an...

Just as the West of Mark Twain, Harte, Miller, Eggleston, and others had been central in the literature, especially in the fiction, of the seventies, so the South became central...

Although prose forms, especially the novel and the short story, dominated the period, yet the amount of poetry published from 1860 to 1899 surpasses, in mere bulk at least, all...

Voluminous as may seem the poetry of the period when viewed by itself, it sinks into insignificance when viewed against the mass of prose that was contemporaneous with it. Overw...

In 1870 American fiction ran in two currents: fiction of the _Atlantic_ type, read by the cultivated few, and fiction of Bonner's _New York Ledger_ type, read openly by the lite...

In forms other than fiction and poetry the period was also voluminous. The greater part of our historical writings has been produced since 1870 and the same is true of our biogr...

Page 441: Index entry referring to "H. C. Clark" should be "Clark, C. H." Some other index references do not exactly match their targets. Index entries and references have not b...