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American Origins
In the new nation, America's writers and thinkers felt compelled to live up to the political challenge of the Revolution by creating a democratic literature, one that celebrated the distinctiveness of the American experience. America would be their subject and they would have to create new methods -- even new vocabularies -- to depict the lives and characters of Americans. In confronting this challenge, writers such as Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Whitman found a theme commensurate with the promise of American life: the individual confronting both society and nature. Their writings were the literary re-enactment of the argument between America's two founding documents: the Declaration of Independence, which stated the case for almost unlimited personal potential, and the Constitution, which created the institutional framework within which that potential had to be fulfilled. In the inherent tension between these two impulses, America's artists declared their creative and intellectual independence from the Old World. |