or even British literature?
is there an influx of similarities from English to American or is it too different to be remotely similar?
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
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
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.
Pretty succinct about our desert of oblivion Ennison
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.
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.
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.
Wilde was Irish. :-P
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.
"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!
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!
"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.