Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela

Ministry of Popular Power for University Education

National Experimental University "Simón Rodríguez"
Nucleus Palo Verde
Course: 20th Century North American literature
Code: 31121
Section: “A”

UNIT I
20th Century North American literature

Professor: Norelkis Fornerino

Participant:
Melania Marieth Pereira Pinto
I.D: 27.107.872
Puritanism
It was a religious movement in the late 16th century, and Puritans were
noted for a spirit of moral and religious earnestness that was focus on their
way of life, and they was seeking through church reform to make their lifestyle
the pattern for the whole nation. Their efforts to transform the nation
contributed both to civil war in England and to the founding of colonies in
America as models of the Puritan way of life.

Later, certain groups of Puritans migrated to Northern English colonies in

the new world in the 1620s and 1630s, laying the foundation for the religious,
intellectual, and social order of New England. Aspects of Puritanism have
reverberated throughout American life ever since.

The Puritan migration was overwhelmingly a migration of families unlike

other migrations to early America. The literacy rate was high, and the
intensity of devotional life, as recorded in the many surviving diaries, sermon
notes, poems, and letters, was seldom to be matched in American life. 

Rationalism

Rationalism is a movement during the Age of Reason of the 17 th century.

It is any view of appealing to intellectual and deductive reason (as opposed to
sensory experience or any religious teachings) as the source of knowledge or
justification. It holds that some propositions are knowable by us by intuition
alone, while others are knowable by being deduced through valid arguments
from intuited propositions. It relies on the idea that reality has a rational
structure in that all aspects of it can be grasped through mathematical and
logical principles, and not simply through sensory experience.

Pragmatism
Literature of the common place attempts to represent real life ordinary
people poor and middle class, ordinary speech in dialect use of contemporary
life, sentimentalized way democratic function of literature social criticism
effect on audience is key presents indigenous American life importance of
place regionalism, local color sociology and psychology.

Realism
American realism was a movement that began as a reaction to
Romanticism with emphasis on emotions, imagination and the individual. This
movement was also focus in fiction specifically in novels that were about real
life. The realist concerns himself with the here and now, centering his work in
his own time, dealing with everyday events and people, and social events.

Some of the Major Writers:

Samuel Clemens, fiction: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Life on the

Mississippi. "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses", a Connecticut Yankee in
King Arthur's Court.

Bret Harte, short fiction: Selected Stories of Bret Harte “The Outcasts of
Poker Flat" "The Luck.

William Dean Howells, fiction, essays A Modern Instance (1882), The Rise of
Silas Lapham, A Hazard of New.

Henry James, fiction "Daisy Miller," Portrait of A Lady, The American, The
Turn of the Screw.

George Washington Cable, fiction: The Grandissimes, Old Creole Days

Charles Chestnutt, fiction: The Conjure Woman (1899), The House Behind
the Cedars (1900).

Naturalism
Naturalism is a literary genre that started as a movement in late nineteenth
century in literature, film, theater, and art. It is a type of extreme realism. This
movement suggested the roles of family, social conditions, and environment
in shaping human character. Thus, naturalistic writers write stories based on
the idea that environment determines and governs human character.

Some of the most popular writers from the American naturalism are: Jhon
Steinbeck, in his novel The Grapes of Wrath, portrays the Joad family and its
changing environment from the naturalistic point of view, during the Great
Depression in the United States. Another writer is Stephen Crane, in his short
story The Open Boat, portrays men on a boat, representing human
endurance against indifferent nature, where they feel themselves helpless.
Thus, it contains a theme of naturalism. Whenever a huge wave of water
arrives, it shuts everything from the men’s view, and they imagine this
particular wave would be the final outbreak of the ocean.

Determinism
Determinism is a philosophical concept which says the people’s life is
predetermined by forces such as God, fate or destiny, History, etc. On the
other hand, free will is about that every human being is able to make choices
freely, and they are completely responsible for their choices.

In literature, the conflict between determinism and free will has been
portrayed from Greek tragedy to the novels of George Eliot and Thomas
Hardy and beyond. In a special sense, of course, any fictional character's
actions are determined by the author.

Regionalism
Regionalism is focus on works that describe a distinctive local geography
and culture. It emerged from the perception of modern geographic plurality;
writers and readers understand a larger unit of space (national territory) to be
diversified at its periphery according to topographical features, economy,
history, dialect, and manners. Regionalism indicates that a writer has chosen
to focus on one of the areas outside the centers of power, and to organize the
work around that region, and regionalism has been associated with the
sketch or short story, although the category can accommodate poetry and the
novel.

Post-wars literature
American literature attained a rich diversity in the 20’s and ’30s, and
significant works by several major figures from those decades were published
after 1945. Faulkner, Hemingway, Steinbeck, and Katherine Anne Porter
wrote memorable fiction, and Frost, Eliot, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore,
E.E. Cummings, William Carlos Williams, and Gwendolyn Brooks published
important poetry.

Not only did a new generation come out of the war, but its ethnic, regional,
and social character was quite different from that of the preceding one.
Among the writers were children of immigrants, many of them Jews; African
American. Eventually, women, who, with the rise of feminism, were to speak
in a new voice, Though the social climate of the postwar years was
conservative, even conformist, some of the most hotly discussed writers were
homosexuals or bisexuals, including Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote,
Paul Bowles, Gore Vidal, and James Baldwin.

Black literature or African American literature

Black writers of this period found alternatives to the Richard Wright
tradition of angry social protest. James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison, both
protégés of Wright, wrote polemical essays calling for a literature that
reflected the full complexity of Black life in the United States. Ralph Ellison
wrote a resonant comic novel that dealt with the full range of Black
experience; many considered his novel Invisible Man (1952) the best novel of
the postwar years.

Later two African American women published some of the most important
post-World War II American fiction. In The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973),
Song of Solomon (1977), Beloved (1987), Jazz (1992), and Paradise (1998),
Toni Morrison created a strikingly original fiction that sounded different notes
from lyrical recollection to magic realism. Like Ellison, Morrison drew on
diverse literary and folk influences and dealt with important phases of Black
history.

References
History Editors. (2019). Puritans (Document online) Available on:
https://www.history.com/topicscolonial-america/puritanism [Consulted:
2021, May 5th].

Rationalism. Web page: The Basics of Philosophy. (Document online)

Available on:
https://www.philosophybasics.com/movements_rationalism.html
[Consulted: 2021, May 5th].

American Realism: A Webliography and E-Anthology. (Document online)

Available on: http://www.longwood.edu/staff/lynchrl/English
%20336/american_realism.htm [Consulted: 2021, May 15th].

Naturalism. Definition of Naturalism. Literary Devices. (Document online).

Available on: https://literarydevices.net/naturalism/ [Consulted: 2021,
may 15th ].

Prof VZ. (2017). Realism, Naturalism, Regionalism, Romanticism. (Document

online) Available on: http://blogs.cofc.edu/american-
survey/2017/03/16/realism-naturalism-regionalism-
romanticism/#:~:text=Local%20color%20or%20regional
%20literature,particular%20to%20a%20specific%20region. [Consulted:
2021, May 20th ]

Britannica. American literature After World War II. (Document online)

Available on: https://www.britannica.com/art/American-literature/After-
World-War-II [Consulted: 2021, May 20th ].

Dterminism and free will. On: Crossref-it.info (Document online) Available on:
https://crooref-it.info/articles/364/determinism-and-free-will [Consulted:
2021, May 20th ].
William. L. African American Literature. (Document online). Available on:
https://www.britannica.com/art/African-American-literature [Consulted:
2021, May 25th ].