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What are the major themes in American literature?
What are the major themes in American literature?
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What commands attention and admiration are American literature’s variety and general themes. It epitomizes the society, the experiences, and the people of the United States. Some of the broad central themes in American literature are discussed as follows :
The American Vacation:
Definition:
There is a concept that suggests that anywhere would be better if people made the appropriate effort to become successful. People, therefore, get their success by making and obtaining riches, establishing a tycoon.
Examples: This has also been done to the fullest extent in the writers’ works. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a brilliant thematic work. It revolves around people’s dreams of wealth and status. Yet they are unsatisfied. The same idea can be found in John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. But here, the American dream of having one’s piece of land and being self-sufficient remains a mere pipe dream for the disenfranchised for most of the novel.
Collectivism and Individualism:
Definition: A person on her own without any assistance from any other constituent of society who is self-sufficient and frequently acts against the existing societal order.
Examples: This theme is well depicted in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s works, specifically Self-Reliance and Walden, which focus on the core of self and the individual’s freedom—in this case, morals and society. This theme is also very much present in many other works of Transcendentalism.
Freedom and Independence:
Definition: The idea of wanting for a collective and an individual. Or an individual about a society, political, however wide the aspects of liberty and democracy in American society.
Examples: In the narrative ‘A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,’ the writer, through the character of Frederick Douglass, who is within an evolved yet oppressed nation, criticizes the institution of slavery while advocating self-freedom. Similarly, this very base is brought out in the narratives of historical battles, such as the American Revolution, as narrated in Thomas Paine’s Common Sense.
Race and Racism:
Definition: Research in this strand addresses race-based oppression and inequality, discrimination, and the fight for civil rights in the US, with a focus on African Americans, Native Americans, and other minorities.
Examples: Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” a novel for the youth, tackles slavery and racism. The narrative is also very similar to Toni Morrison’s Beloved about the slave plantations and the impact of slavery on the family of African origin. Baldwin, in Tell It on the Mountain, faced American hypocrisy throughout his life by portraying the exiles who languished in America—the African American community.
Nature and the Wilderness:
Definition: Various components of such relationships are also relevant in the dynamics of these countries, colonies, and their borders. This is in addition to the stereotypes of strife, violence, pleasure, and danger in the American landscape you crossed or its portrayed architecture.
Examples: Jack London’s The Call of the Wild and White Fang focus on both sides of the cruel beauty of the wild. Thoreau’s Walden was more focused on the impact of nature on the spirit and consciousness of a person. This particular sub-theme is also significant in American Romanticism and American Transcendentalism.
Colonialism and Native American Experience:
Definition: Effects of colonialism on the Native Americans like cultural genocide, removal of peoples, or resistance against colonialism.
Excerpt: Native American literature is said, to an extent, to develop incrementally into modernist literature. Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, Sherman Alexie’s The One Ranger, and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven are calculated attempts at recording the modern-day lives of the Native American people and furthering the story of colonialism. Also, such works may import contact records with the Indians in those early American but colonial discrimination.
The Frontier and Westward Expansion in American Countries:
Definition: The frontier of a land filled with opportunities, excitement, and danger is the furthering of the American way of life, which is also known as Manifest Destiny.
Example: Willa Cather’s My Antonia and Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie are literary works that include obdurate encouraging factors as well as the sadness of times that the frontier faced. Many authors have explored this epiphany with an angle of interrogation, as seen in the works of Mark Twain, Hessin Times, and more, where writers focus on the expansion West of the United States of America. Adventure Writers have examined this theme with an angle of terminology, as Mark Twain in Roughing It and later Brett Harte in Western Emigration Tales adores, which most extend this theme closer to the American westward expansion interrogation.
Immigrants added as Other EP 161:
Definition: The perspective of immigration covers not only the life of the new inhabitants in America. It also covers the interaction of tolerances and reconciliation of cultures, as well as cultural assimilation trends.
Examples: Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers presents American Jewry. Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club is about American families. Sandra Cisneros’s The House on Mango Street is about a young Latina girl growing up in America.
Conflict Between Individual and Society:
Definition: This is essentially a tug-of-war between an individual and society regarding the individual’s needs, wishes, opinions, and emotions on the one hand and the norms and expectations of society on the other hand.
Examples: Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter illustrates social marginalization due to her hysterical need to spare herself the consequences of a Puritan culture. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible views social pressure and mass hysteria in early American history through the prism of the Salem witch trials. Catcher in the Rye is a novel about the protagonist’s struggle, who hates his surroundings and considers it a fake society.
War and Conflict:
Definition: American literature is also characterized by works devoted to war, encompassing its physical, psychological, and moral aspects. Among the Civil War, the Great War, the 2nd World War, the Vietnam War, and the Iraq War, more literary attention was paid to the Civil War of the American nation.
Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried are chosen to support the important concept of ‘wars and their effects on military personnel.’ The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, which is set during the American Civil War, addresses the psychological pain of combat endured by the character of a soldier.
Gender and Feminism:
Definition: This topic includes men’s domination in societies where women are located about men, demand for women, and, to some extent, gender – the imposition of ideas.
Examples: There is a struggle against the subjugation of women in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening and Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. This book depicts a step toward a woman’s maturity and self-identity in Zora Neale Hurston as she yearns for independence.
Religion and Spiritualism
Definition: This concerns the world, the inner world of people according to a system of values and prohibitions that, in most cases, correlate with historical processes and biographies.
Examples: Flannery O’Connor, well known for many elements of Southern Gothic, features the influence of religion on the Southern Gothic plot where characters face moral deterioration or spiritual decay. In Joperson’s The Grapes of Wrath, the main character encompasses a certain level of morality and faith in humanity, raising issues of humanity itself.
Slavery and the African American Experience:
Definition: This form concentrates on the institution of slavery and its effects, particularly slavery and the African epistemological experience.
For example, Harriet Jacobs’s sents in The Life of a Slave Girl and Frederick DouglaDouglass’s stive Life of Frederick Douglass relate to the experience of slavery. Other works, including Ralph EllisoEllison’s Sible Man and Richard Wright’s Wright’s Son, relate to the issue of racial discrimination and the struggle of African Americans in America in the 20th century.
American Capitalism in America and Class Struggle
Definition:
The everlasting battle of class or classes cuts across every society, or every society has a class struggle. This includes capitalism in America, which is the desire of humans to seek wealth.
Examples: In her novel The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald tears down the ambition of making money in the ‘Roaring Twenties.’ In John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Upton Sinclair’s Song of the District, neglect of the working class and the rule of the wealthy are illustrated.
Alienation, Isolation
Definition:
The state of being isolated from oneself and surrounding people or even oneself. In most cases, this aspect is addressed regarding the new era and the technology and industrialization of this generation.
Examples:
Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire involves two sentiments of individualism regarding alienation, both through the person with somewhat normal reality perceptions and those who remain with clearing. Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar is about a sick former patient with semantic schizophrenia directed toward the former patient and writer Molly Plath.
However, these themes can seem embedded in American texts throughout history since the American experience spills over time, geographical region, and culture.