how does American literature compare to English literature?

[cacian]

or even British literature?

is there an influx of similarities from English to American or is it too different to be remotely similar?

[Jackson Richardson]

They both use the same language.

[North Star]

They both use the same language.

That might be debatable. ;)

[cacian]

They both use the same language.

they do???
i did not notice
haha :D

[ennison]

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.

[Eiseabhal]

Pretty succinct about our desert of oblivion Ennison

[Pompey Bum]

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.

[PeterL]

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.

[Emil Miller]

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.

[Pompey Bum]

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 :)


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.

[mortalterror]

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?

[mortalterror]

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?

[Emil Miller]

Wilde was Irish. :) :-P :)

True, but at the time Ireland was still ruled by Britain. Wilde would have been deemed a British subject.

[Pompey Bum]

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.

[Pompey Bum]

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.

[cacian]

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?

hat values has america got britain has not?
and more to the point is
literature about values?

[Pompey Bum]

hat values has america got britain has not?

We drink tea any damn time we want. :)

[Pompey Bum]

hat values has america got britain has not?
and more to the point is
literature about values?

Oh sorry, from a linguistic point of view? The British call escalators elevators, elevators lifts, garter belts suspenders, and suspenders braces. Imagine the confusion that causes!

[cacian]

Oh sorry, from a linguistic point of view? The British call escalators elevators, elevators lifts, garter belts suspenders, and suspenders braces. Imagine the confusion that causes!

more like intrusion
one makes the other bruises.
motorway highway style

[cacian]

We drink tea any damn time we want. :)

soda goes to the american fizz fizz till it quizz
i guess tea is much more civilised
we drink it and rightly so write about it
it expresses the amount of love we feel about it ;)

[Pompey Bum]

This tea makes a mighty odd lover:
A cozy must pass for a cover;
But speak to me, miss,
When pressed to your lips
Is it not quite like kissing a brother?

[Jackson Richardson]

Pants is a word Americans should not use in the UK if they don't want to be laughed at. I know what they mean by bathroom, but it is not what I do. A bathroom is a room with a bath. A rest room, if we had them, would be a room with a chaise lounge or bed to rest on.

I'm not sure about elevators in UK usage. I'm not sure we use the word at all. I think we say escalator or moving staircase.

And if you order tea over here it comes ready infused. I was charmed to be brought a selection of tea bags on a plate together with a tea pot of hot water on my only visit to the US (West Coast California, so maybe not typical) but it means the tea is tepid. (I bought a packet of leaf tea yesterday, but I'm very old fashioned.)

[cacian]

Pants is a word Americans should not use in the UK if they don't want to be laughed at. I know what they mean by bathroom, but it is not what I do. A bathroom is a room with a bath. A rest room, if we had them, would be a room with a chaise lounge or bed to rest on.

I'm not sure about elevators in UK usage. I'm not sure we use the word at all. I think we say escalator or moving staircase.

And if you order tea over here it comes ready infused. I was charmed to be brought a selection of tea bags on a plate together with a tea pot of hot water on my only visit to the US (West Coast California, so maybe not typical) but it means the tea is tepid. (I bought a packet of leaf tea yesterday, but I'm very old fashioned.)

old fashioned is not an american term is it?
ia m the same tea is a priority and it has to be right to be drunk:)

[cacian]

This tea makes a mighty odd lover:
A cozy must pass for a cover;
But speak to me, miss,
When pressed to your lips
Is it not quite like kissing a brother?
nice
and not it is not and thank god for that.. :)

[Jackson Richardson]

old fashioned is not an american term is it?


I think in the US it means a sort of cocktail.

[Pompey Bum]

And if you order tea over here it comes ready infused. I was charmed to be brought a selection of tea bags on a plate together with a tea pot of hot water on my only visit to the US (West Coast California, so maybe not typical) but it means the tea is tepid. (I bought a packet of leaf tea yesterday, but I'm very old fashioned.)

It was typical. As someone who has spent chunks of my life in the Far East, I can assure you that many Americans are clueless about good tea (rice, too). That's changed quite a lot since global trade, and with the continued influx of East Asian immigrants into mainstream Amarican culture. But many Americans are content with a simple truth: coffee, which we do know about, is much better. And pardon any vulgarity, but young British ladies usually explain all about pants to young American gentlemen during freshman year summer abroad programs. Explaining being a euphemism.

[Jackson Richardson]

I was unimpressed by American coffee. Mind you I'm unimpressed by British coffee. Italy and France are my bench marks here as much else. I'm not a Eurosceptic.

[Pompey Bum]

I think in the US it means a sort of cocktail.

An Old Fashioned can mean a whiskey (or brandy) with citris and a little sugar. But the far more common usage is identical to the British.

[Pompey Bum]

I was unimpressed by American coffee. Mind you I'm unimpressed by British coffee. Italy and France are my bench marks here as much else. I'm not a Eurosceptic.

Then with respect, you bought the wrong coffee. (It wouldn't have come from America, by the way, but the coffee you can get here puts anything in Europe to serious shame). In any case, rather than quibble like this, we should look to our commonality and history of friendship, IMHO. :)

[Clopin]

Brits use a lot of stupid words and expressions, but Americans don't know how to spell. How about Australian English? Canadians of course have adopted the perfect mix ;)

[Jackson Richardson]

It was the coffee brought to me at breakfast. Dishwater, as I remember. Starbucks are OK here, but I prefer Cafe Nero. As I hint, it is my Italophilia.

[biblophile]

that is a difficult question. England has Dickens, Gissing, Dr. Johnson, but we have Melville. Twain, Poe, and Hawthorn.

[ennison]

Much better. Wider.

[ennison]

Damn. This is an old thread to which I have already replied with excessive vituperation. Anyway I've made my feelings
and faint ideas known so will say no more. PB you are a model of diplomacy

[JBI]

In simplistic terms, the American Pastoral landscape is Martha's Vineyard (especially now that the plantation is out of the question as an innocent space), the British Pastoral Landscape is Avallon. Lets say half of literature, especially earlier literature, tries to draw the reader back to these pastoral worlds.

The power of the best American poets then, with a truly American voice - Williams, Frost, Longfellow - or even in the prose of James, Thoreau, Emerson and Faulkner, all seem to be driving us back to this rural world of innocence in New England.

The British seem to have the idea of Jolly old England behind almost all their work prior to the end of the 19th century. It is this Arthurian space that gives destinction and formation to the English tradition - from Chaucer's tales, to Shakespeare's histories, to Spenser's Farie Queene and even through Milton and Wordsworth, and Hardy and so on.

[mande2013]

In simplistic terms, the American Pastoral landscape is Martha's Vineyard (especially now that the plantation is out of the question as an innocent space), the British Pastoral Landscape is Avallon. Lets say half of literature, especially earlier literature, tries to draw the reader back to these pastoral worlds.

The power of the best American poets then, with a truly American voice - Williams, Frost, Longfellow - or even in the prose of James, Thoreau, Emerson and Faulkner, all seem to be driving us back to this rural world of innocence in New England.

The British seem to have the idea of Jolly old England behind almost all their work prior to the end of the 19th century. It is this Arthurian space that gives destinction and formation to the English tradition - from Chaucer's tales, to Shakespeare's histories, to Spenser's Farie Queene and even through Milton and Wordsworth, and Hardy and so on.

You mean Avallon in France? As for the American Pastoral Landscape, perhaps any place that counts as rural or small town coastal New England would qualify. Even so, I would say the aforementoned notion of American Pastoral only applies to Americans who hail from east of the Mississippi River. I'm sure people in Arizona or Washington State have their own respective notions about what a Pastoral landscape would consist of. I suppose French Pastoral would be standing at the top of Montmartre overlooking Paris pretending nothing built after 1900 is in your view.

[ajvenigalla]

In simplistic terms, the American Pastoral landscape is Martha's Vineyard (especially now that the plantation is out of the question as an innocent space), the British Pastoral Landscape is Avallon. Lets say half of literature, especially earlier literature, tries to draw the reader back to these pastoral worlds.

The power of the best American poets then, with a truly American voice - Williams, Frost, Longfellow - or even in the prose of James, Thoreau, Emerson and Faulkner, all seem to be driving us back to this rural world of innocence in New England.

The British seem to have the idea of Jolly old England behind almost all their work prior to the end of the 19th century. It is this Arthurian space that gives destinction and formation to the English tradition - from Chaucer's tales, to Shakespeare's histories, to Spenser's Farie Queene and even through Milton and Wordsworth, and Hardy and so on.

I wonder how Melville and his work fits into this scheme.