Emerson, Thoreau, and the Transcendentalist Movement (original) (raw)
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American Transcendentalism doc 1
Despire the claims of some American linguists, the American language doesn't exist. So, from a theoretical point of view, American literature shouldn't exist too. But the dilemma, whether a separate literature can exist without a separate language and to what extent the state borders can determine to which literary tradition a writer belongs, is present all around the world. For example, Samuel Beckett was born an Irishman, sometimes wrote in English and sometimes in French, and later translated his works into English. So, we have to admit that the idea of national literature is a rather nebulous notion and that the American literature does exist as a set of influences, themes and literary solutions different from those in Europe. At the end of the 1920s even the European cultural elite started to view American writing as separate from English literature and in 1930 the Nobel Prize for literature went to an American writer for the first time. Paradoxically, American writers who lived in Europe during the same period played a great role in the recognition of American literary particularity. Through their creative works, writers like Henry James, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, changed European literary perceptions of American literature for ever. One of the first expressions of this new European view of American literature appeared in interview by Andre Gide. He claims that American literature is different, even bizarre when compared to the European. The question appears -what are the differences and what are main characteristics of American literature?