Page 1 of 3 123 LastLast
Results 1 to 15 of 37

Thread: how does American literature compare to English literature?

  1. #1
    confidentially pleased cacian's Avatar
    Join Date
    Nov 2011
    Location
    London
    Posts
    13,930

    Lightbulb how does American literature compare to English literature?

    or even British literature?

    is there an influx of similarities from English to American or is it too different to be remotely similar?
    it may never try
    but when it does it sigh
    it is just that
    good
    it fly

  2. #2
    Registered User Jackson Richardson's Avatar
    Join Date
    Sep 2012
    Location
    Somewhere in the South East of England
    Posts
    1,273
    They both use the same language.
    Previously JonathanB

    The more I read, the more I shall covet to read. Robert Burton The Anatomy of Melancholy Partion3, Section 1, Member 1, Subsection 1

  3. #3
    Registered User North Star's Avatar
    Join Date
    Dec 2014
    Location
    Finland
    Posts
    1,040
    Quote Originally Posted by JonathanB View Post
    They both use the same language.
    That might be debatable.

  4. #4
    confidentially pleased cacian's Avatar
    Join Date
    Nov 2011
    Location
    London
    Posts
    13,930
    Quote Originally Posted by JonathanB View Post
    They both use the same language.
    they do???
    i did not notice
    haha
    it may never try
    but when it does it sigh
    it is just that
    good
    it fly

  5. #5
    Registered User
    Join Date
    Oct 2006
    Posts
    3,123
    Divided by a common language! In my (not at all humble) opinion, American literature is hugely superior to the bulk of what is being produced here. Scottish literature in English is mainly crap ( if I may be permitted to use a suitably elite Critical Term) England has a few writers who pop up producing interesting and skilled writing still but in a population of 60 million there is a dim, dark emptiness in most of it - they have no opinions of interest , no values, no sense of liking human beings. Junk is too good a word for it. The comic thing is that they think themselves very good.

  6. #6
    Eiseabhal
    Join Date
    Nov 2012
    Location
    Scotland
    Posts
    459
    Pretty succinct about our desert of oblivion Ennison

  7. #7
    Closed
    Join Date
    Oct 2014
    Location
    Uncanny Valley
    Posts
    6,373
    It's a little puzzling to me that, although my favorite country is my own, and I find fashionable British anti-Americanism nauseatingly stupid, I still prefer English literature to American. In my lifetime (I'm in my mid-fifties), I have seen the difference between them reduced to almost nothing; American writers may even have gone ahead. But before than that, I'm solidly in the Queen's camp. I appreciate that writers like Twain and Melville expressed something especially American in their prose--I'm glad they didn't try to sound English)--but to me they seem like provincials compared to Fielding and Dickens (and this is even more so of Poe, who did try to sound European).Today, Moby Dick is more of a national artifact than a novel to most Americans: they read it because they think they're supposed to read it (or because someone makes them); but they have no real connection to the ideas of the story or how they anticipated the 20th century. Faulkner, who can stand next to his British contemporaries, has the opposite problem. He is an academic artifact, and not in fact much read by the kinds of Americans whose lives he captured. I haven't read Willa Carther or John Dos Passos (although they are on my list), but their reputations certainly do not exceed those of D.H. Lawrence or Virginia Woolf. Hemingway is probably preferred these days to Joseph Conrad and Ford Madox Ford, but not by me. No doubt I should read more of Faulkner, and Fitzgerald, and Hemingway (I've read no Fitzgerald at all, which is rather shameful); so I'm not being dismissive of these 20th century American authors in preferring their British contemporaries. But those are my tastes, at least until I have read more American literature.
    Last edited by Pompey Bum; 07-14-2015 at 01:55 PM.

  8. #8
    Voice of Chaos & Anarchy
    Join Date
    Apr 2005
    Location
    In one of the branches of the multiverse, but I don't know which one.
    Posts
    8,720
    Blog Entries
    556
    I think it may be a mistake to generalize about English and American literatures as such. There have been some great authors in both, but there have been many more authors who should have been encouraged to take up flower arranging, or something, instead of writing. There is a longer train of evidence in English literature, but there wasn't much in the early stages of the train. America didn't have Shakespeare, but the Brits didn't have Lovecraft or even Poe, and G.C. Edmondson was quite American.

    Decide who your favorite author in the English language was, and make the country of origin of that person the place where the best literature was produced.

  9. #9
    Registered User Emil Miller's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jul 2008
    Location
    London, England
    Posts
    6,499
    Quote Originally Posted by Pompey Bum View Post
    It's a little puzzling to me that, although my favorite country is my own, and I find fashionable British anti-Americanism nauseatingly stupid, I still prefer English literature to American.
    Well Oscar Wilde's late 19th century tour ("America had been discovered many times before Columbus but they had always managed to cover it up" ) shows that British anti-Americanism has a long-standing pedigree. However, the question of literary differences is very interesting in itself.
    It's inevitable that, given the time span of English literature, its American variant is going to appear somewhat gauche in comparison but, paradoxically, the influx of European emigrants to the USA gave broad scope to 19th and 20th century writing. A book like The Great Gatsby could not have been written anywhere but the USA despite the fact that its themes are universal. Notwithstanding the novels of writers who may seem two-dimensional in comparison to those of the Old World, as a reflection of the way things currently are, they show it how it is.
    Last edited by Emil Miller; 07-14-2015 at 05:36 PM.
    "L'art de la statistique est de tirer des conclusions erronèes a partir de chiffres exacts." Napoléon Bonaparte.

    "Je crois que beaucoup de gens sont dans cet état d’esprit: au fond, ils ne sentent pas concernés par l’Histoire. Mais pourtant, de temps à autre, l’Histoire pose sa main sur eux." Michel Houellebecq.

  10. #10
    Closed
    Join Date
    Oct 2014
    Location
    Uncanny Valley
    Posts
    6,373
    Quote Originally Posted by Emil Miller View Post
    Well Oscar Wilde's late 19th century tour ("America had been discovered many times before Columbus but they had always managed to cover it up" ) shows that British anti-Americanism has a long-standing pedigree.
    Wilde was Irish. :-P

    Quote Originally Posted by Emil Miller View Post
    paradoxically, the influx of European emigrants to the USA gave broad scope to 19th and 20th century writing. A book like The Great Gatsby could not have been written anywhere but the USA despite the fact that its themes are universal.
    You are correct, although "Europeanness" is also a quality associated with earlier American writers like Hawthorne and sometimes Irving. We had to become Americans before we could speak in our own voices, I suppose, but ironically many of those voices ended up having European accents.
    Last edited by Pompey Bum; 07-14-2015 at 08:07 PM.

  11. #11
    Alea iacta est. mortalterror's Avatar
    Join Date
    Mar 2008
    Location
    LA
    Posts
    1,914
    Blog Entries
    39
    Quote Originally Posted by ennison View Post
    Divided by a common language! In my (not at all humble) opinion, American literature is hugely superior to the bulk of what is being produced here. Scottish literature in English is mainly crap ( if I may be permitted to use a suitably elite Critical Term) England has a few writers who pop up producing interesting and skilled writing still but in a population of 60 million there is a dim, dark emptiness in most of it - they have no opinions of interest , no values, no sense of liking human beings. Junk is too good a word for it. The comic thing is that they think themselves very good.
    Yeah, I noticed that too. It's like Europe just gave up on culture. The art, the literature, the music, it's all gone downhill. Do you think they're maybe in a period of transition where the old values are dying while the new ones are yet to be born?
    "So-Crates: The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing." "That's us, dude!"- Bill and Ted
    "This ain't over."- Charles Bronson
    Feed the Hungry!

  12. #12
    Alea iacta est. mortalterror's Avatar
    Join Date
    Mar 2008
    Location
    LA
    Posts
    1,914
    Blog Entries
    39
    20th century

    Infinite Jest by William Foster Wallace (USA)
    Angels in America by Tony Kushner (USA)
    Beloved by Toni Morrison (USA)
    Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy (USA)
    Portnoy's Complaint by Philip Roth (USA)
    Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut (USA)
    The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon (USA)
    Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee (USA)
    Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (USA)
    On the Road by Jack Kerouac (USA)
    Seize the Day by Saul Bellow (USA)
    Long Day's Journey Into Night by Eugene O'Neill (USA)
    The Emperor of Ice Cream by Wallace Stevens (USA)
    The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway (USA)
    Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (USA)
    The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger (USA)
    Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller (USA)
    A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams (USA)
    The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck (USA)
    The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (USA)
    The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (USA)
    The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot (USA)
    Main Street by Sinclair Lewis (USA)
    Hugh Selwyn Mauberley by Ezra Pound (USA)
    Mending Wall by Robert Frost (USA)
    The Call of the Wild by Jack London (USA)
    The Ambassadors by Henry James (USA)

    The Homecoming by Harold Pinter (Britain)
    The Shield of Achilles by W.H. Auden (Britain)
    Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night by Dylan Thomas (Britain)
    1984 by George Orwell (Britain)
    Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence (Britain)
    Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf (Britain)
    The Good Soldier by Ford Maddox Ford (Britain)
    Of Human Bondage by W. Somerset Maugham (Britain)
    Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad (Britain)
    Kim by Rudyard Kipling (Britain)

    19th century

    Richard Cory by Edwin Arlington Robinson (USA)
    Poems by Emily Dickinson (USA)
    The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (USA)
    Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (USA)
    Moby Dick by Hermann Melville (USA)
    The Scarlett Letter by Nathanael Hawthorne (USA)
    Evangeline by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (USA)
    The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe (USA)
    The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper (USA)

    A Shropshire Lad by A.E. Housman (Britain)
    Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (Britain)
    The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde (Britain)
    A Study in Scarlett by Arthur Conan Doyle (Britain)
    The Makado by Gillbert and Sullivan (Britain)
    Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson (Britain)
    The Wreck of the Deutschland by Gerard Manley Hopkins (Britain)
    The City of Dreadful Night by James Thomson (Britain)
    Middlemarch by George Eliot (Britain)
    Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Caroll (Britain)
    A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens (Britain)
    The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by Edward FitzGerald (Britain)
    Barchester Towers by Anthony Trollope (Britain)
    Sonnets From the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Britain)
    Death's Jest Book by Thomas Lovell Beddoes (Britain)
    In Memoriam A.H.H. by Alfred Lord Tennyson (Britain)
    Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray (Britain)
    Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte (Britain)
    Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (Britain)
    Dramatic Lyrics by Robert Browning (Britain)
    Don Juan by George Gordon Byron (Britain)
    Confessions of an English Opium Eater by Thomas De Quincey (Britain)
    Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott (Britain)
    Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (Britain)
    Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock (Britain)
    Endymion by John Keats (Britain)
    Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley (Britain)
    The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Britain)
    Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen (Britain)
    Milton: a poem by William Blake (Britain)
    Poems in Two Volumes by William Wordsworth (Britain)

    Britain did way better in the nineteenth century and America did way better in the twentieth. You can explain this by America gaining a larger population, or becoming more developed, but how do you explain Britain not doing as well as it previously did? A change in the basic curriculum maybe? From literature, art, and music based to math and science based perhaps?
    "So-Crates: The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing." "That's us, dude!"- Bill and Ted
    "This ain't over."- Charles Bronson
    Feed the Hungry!

  13. #13
    Registered User Emil Miller's Avatar
    Join Date
    Jul 2008
    Location
    London, England
    Posts
    6,499
    Quote Originally Posted by Pompey Bum View Post
    Wilde was Irish. :-P
    True, but at the time Ireland was still ruled by Britain. Wilde would have been deemed a British subject.
    "L'art de la statistique est de tirer des conclusions erronèes a partir de chiffres exacts." Napoléon Bonaparte.

    "Je crois que beaucoup de gens sont dans cet état d’esprit: au fond, ils ne sentent pas concernés par l’Histoire. Mais pourtant, de temps à autre, l’Histoire pose sa main sur eux." Michel Houellebecq.

  14. #14
    Closed
    Join Date
    Oct 2014
    Location
    Uncanny Valley
    Posts
    6,373
    Quote Originally Posted by Emil Miller View Post
    True, but at the time Ireland was still ruled by Britain. Wilde would have been deemed a British subject.
    ...by the British! Anyway, I was just teasing you.

  15. #15
    Closed
    Join Date
    Oct 2014
    Location
    Uncanny Valley
    Posts
    6,373
    Quote Originally Posted by mortalterror View Post
    Britain did way better in the nineteenth century and America did way better in the twentieth. You can explain this by America gaining a larger population, or becoming more developed, but how do you explain Britain not doing as well as it previously did? A change in the basic curriculum maybe? From literature, art, and music based to math and science based perhaps?
    Perhaps a hiccough in cultural vision after the First World War, or a rupture of confidence with the loss of empire after the Second. The former is a bit of a cliche, but that doesn't mean it isn't accurate.
    Last edited by Pompey Bum; 07-15-2015 at 09:11 AM.

Page 1 of 3 123 LastLast

Similar Threads

  1. Replies: 20
    Last Post: 10-16-2017, 09:23 PM
  2. Does writing a novel in English makes it an English literature?
    By caddy_caddy in forum General Literature
    Replies: 40
    Last Post: 01-08-2013, 04:08 PM
  3. British Literature vs. American Literature
    By Brendan Madley in forum General Literature
    Replies: 266
    Last Post: 09-02-2011, 09:36 PM
  4. The best Non-English/American Literature
    By Dark Muse in forum General Literature
    Replies: 76
    Last Post: 05-04-2009, 04:48 PM
  5. American literature
    By Omnipotent in forum General Literature
    Replies: 23
    Last Post: 01-06-2007, 04:31 AM

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •