Henry Rider Haggard's About Fiction

In the 19th century, political philospher Alexis de Tocqueville claimed, “the in habitants of the United States have… properly speaking, no literature.” This will be demonstrated as false by looking into the unique literature produced by America. Two examples we will be looking at are from Sarah Orne Jewett and Edgar Allen Poe. The pair will prove that Alexis de Tocqueville’s statement is not accurate, and that America has very distinct literature.

In Gardner’s writing, On Moral Fiction, he speaks of society’s view of morals and how they could be skewed from a reader’s interpretation of an author’s writing. In relation, Ethan Frome and The Awakening deal with different views of the characters passions versus what is morally right in society. These novels represent the ongoing internal confusion within all people of what we believe is morally right or if we should simply follow our passions.

Although the United States of America in the 1800s was a fairly new country, it was very hectic due to the Civil War. For a while, people wanted to get away or hide from their realities when they wrote or read literature. During the Civil War, mindsets changed and people were tired of the fantasies. People craved realistic stories with real, life-like endings. Realist writers answered the cry of Americans who wanted to explore realistic literature; Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I A Woman” is a true representation of literature during the realistic era.

Books labeled dramatic, humorous, and romantic share of times of American success and happiness. Now imagine, in the back dusty corner of this marvelous library are the books that represent the Puritan’s time in the 1690’s. These books have no color on their covers and no titles; reflecting the strict, joyless,

Studying several author’s’ works from a single period of time enables readers to have a better understanding of their way of life. Even though Anne Bradstreet and Jonathan Edwards,were both Puritans, they had two different types of point of view.

Literature during the Colonial times was extremely influential and reflective oft people’s thoughts and beliefs. The colonial period in America took place approximately between 1607 and 1800. This is a crucial time for America because the first colonies began in the early 1600s. America also saw the creation of its first original government. Many themes that are seen in American literature, like religion and politics, are direct reflections of what was happening in America at the time. In American literature, there is a great deal themes which focus on religion, political freedom, and an early push for women’s rights because these themes reflect the climate of America in the Colonial period.

While writers have different ways of critiquing American society during these three periods, they try to improve people’s understanding of the world based their perspective of the world. As a result, the authors from these different time periods have similar qualities of critiquing society; they want to escape from society, to discover truth, and to awake

The nineteenth century was a period of controversy, reform, and revolution. Among it were people longing to spread new ideas, discover new things, and find who they truly were. Though the desires of those in this time were not entirely contrastive to the ones of those in any other century, differences lie in the difficulty nineteenth century people faced in fulfilling said desires. This is not to say that people of the time lacked ambition—in fact, this is to say the exact opposite. Despite their abundance of ambition, contrary to current times, people were often suppressed from using their ambition to promote ideas that were considered socially unacceptable. Though there are many pieces of evidence to support this, multiple literary works

Using examples from Rider Haggard 's King Solomon’s Mines and Mills and Boon publishers Desired by the Desert king by Maisey Yates. This essay will support the above statement and will define how popular fiction works reflexively in constructing and perpetuation ideas of the self in society.

Moral power held by literature or art has often smashed against some form of material power and censorship. For instance, books against the ideas of the Nazi regime such as Marx’s “The Communist Manifesto” were burnt in the Nazi’s book burning of 1933 and The Bible is currently banned from North Korea. Authors have therefore been pressured into finding a method to avoid the strict restrictions forced by material power. In this paper, I will argue that Philip K. Dick was able to criticize the government and the situation of America in the 1960s, without suffering consequences, thanks to the generation of a time shift in his novel and the construction of a parallel between story and history hence manipulating the line between fiction and reality.

One of the many advantages of written language is the ability to pass down important knowledge to younger generations for as long as the text exists. Some of these writings were meant to pass along examples of how to live one’s life and attempt to answer the unanswerable through moral or character instruction. Fiction literature, however, is superior at delivering these lessons because fiction allows for far more creative freedom for the author to craft their lesson. By its very nature as moral guidance, this type of writing often appears within a religious context.

Throughout the centuries of time, American literature has been characterized and shaped by the writers of the then present time. Each century seemed to have its own rules of what the concept of literature was. In the early years of American writing, the literature standards were strict; focusing more on the structure and content. This strict way of writing soon gave way to a type of literature that was allowed a looser form and focused on the individual and their feelings rather than the social aspect of life. This time period of literature came to be known as the Age of Romanticism. Throughout the Age of romanticism many new literary elements were introduced. One such element was Theme. Writers that typically used theme to their advantage during the age of Romanticism were the abolitionists. Writers ,such as Frederick Douglass, used theme in their works to express to the reader how they felt during slavery. By using certain structure and points of view, the author plays to the readers emotions by giving them a picture through the first person point of view. From a formal standpoint, Romanticism experienced a steady loosening of the rules of artistic expression that were saturated during the earlier times. The high-flown language of the previous generation’s poets was replaced with a more natural intonation and verbiage.

The phrase ‘American Renaissance,’ as applied to literature, was popularly established by the Harvard scholar F. O. Matthiessen in his 1941 book American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. Matthiessen calls the years between 1850 and 1855 an “extraordinarily concentrated moment of literary expression.” (p. vii) This text centers its discussion around five nineteenth century authors—none of which include women. They are: Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman. Matthiessen reveals their origins of the nature and function of literature and the extent to which these were realized in their writings.

American literature has helped to change the face of a nation. From a nation heavily dependent on European influence to a society which has become its own, literature has always been there to help pave the path. American authors have used their own unique style in a country unlike any other, creating their own category of literature, shaping and reflecting society and expressing a relationship between place and literature. All evidence in this blog is taken from Prentice Hall Literature, The American Experience.

Between the end of the civil war in 1865 to about 1910, two styles of literature dominated American literature: realism and naturalism. Realism presents the world as it really is. One of the well known writers of realism, William Dean Howell’s, wrote “realism in nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” Realism in literature tends to be the plain and direct account of whatever is being written about. Writers of realism fill their work with facts to complement the readers’ feelings of the fact that these things can happen in their everyday lives. Realists are sure to write about normal, everyday people, living