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AMERICAN LITERATURE

THROUGH

ILLUSTRATIVE READINGS

AMERICAN LITERATURE THROUGH

ILLUSTRATIVE READINGS

GENERAL VIEW

When our forefathers came to America theirs was the business of a new people in a new land. The work of the pioneer lay before them, the conquering of a continent. The great struggle against nature and man at first occupied their whole attention; the forest and the aborigines were finally subdued. For a hundred years and more thereafter the all-absorbing task was the making of towns and the creation of larger social groups. Next occurred the momentous contest with kin across the water, the result of which was the birth of a nation. And then all thoughts were turned toward devising ways and means for the government of a free, new people.

Thus, during two hundred years of occupation of the new land there was little leisure for expressing the life of the people in literature. But then came the marvelous growth of America through the nineteenth century, when consciousness of self, as a nation, grew stronger with the passing years, when men had time after the stress and strain of the early days to reflect upon the deeds of the past and to cast those reflections into permanent form. It is only when the consciousness of kin with Englishmen gives way to a stronger "consciousness of kind" with Americans that a true American literature comes into being.

Hence we may look upon the output before the nineteenth century, broadly speaking, as preliminary to, rather than as an integral part of, American literature. The writings of this period fall naturally into two groups, those of the Colonial Epoch and those of the Revolutionary Era, respectively.

Since the opening of the nineteenth century, the life in America-political, social, and industrial has created a distinctive type of people, and this type has created a distinctive literature. From this time on, therefore, we may claim an American literature independent of that of England, and this period may justly be called the National Era in the history of American letters.

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