Discuss the major stages of the first national period of the American Literature

 American literature is the body of written works produced in the English language in the United States. Like other national literature, American literature was shaped by the history of the country that produced it. The First National Period can be traced back to the history of American poetry, drama, fiction, and social and literary criticism from the early 17th century through the turn of the 21st century. From the colonial to the literature around the independence, American literature turned truly American by 1800 and got a Romantic turn by 1830, and finally, the First National Period ended in the Realism movement.

The first European settlers of North America wrote about their experiences starting in the 1600s. This was the earliest American literature: practical, straightforward, and often derivative of literature in Great Britain. A new era began when the United States declared its independence in 1776, and much new writing addressed the country’s future. American poetry and fiction were largely modeled on what was being published overseas in Great Britain, and much of what American readers consumed also came from Great Britain.

By the first decades of the 19th century, truly American literature began to emerge. Though still derived from British literary tradition, the short stories and novels published from 1800 through the 1820s began to depict American society and explore the American landscape in an unprecedented manner. Washington Irving published the collection of short stories and essays The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. in 1819–20. It included “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle,” two of the earliest American short stories.

In New England, several different groups of writers and thinkers emerged after 1830, each exploring the experiences of individuals in different segments of American society. Edgar Allan Poe most vividly depicted, and inhabited, the role of the Romantic individual—a genius, often tormented and always struggling against convention—during the 1830s and up to his mysterious death in 1849. Three men—Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman—began publishing novels, short stories, and poetry during the Romantic period that became some of the most enduring works of American literature. During the 1850s, as the United States headed toward civil war, more and more stories by and about enslaved and free African Americans were written. Emily Dickinson lived a life quite unlike other writers of the Romantic period: she lived largely in seclusion; only a handful of her poems were published before her death in 1886, and she was a woman working at a time when men dominated the literary scene. Yet her poems express a Romantic vision as clearly as Walt Whitman’s or Edgar Allan Poe’s. They are sharp-edged and emotionally intense.

The human cost of the Civil War in the United States was immense: more than 2.3 million soldiers fought in the war, and perhaps as many as 851,000 people died in 1861–65. Walt Whitman claimed that “a great literature will…arise out of the era of those four years,” and what emerged in the following decades was a literature that presented a detailed and unembellished vision of the world as it truly was. Naturalism, like realism, was a literary movement that drew inspiration from French authors of the 19th century who sought to document, through fiction, the reality that they saw around them, particularly among the middle and working classes living in cities. Samuel Clemens was a typesetter, a journalist, a riverboat captain, and an itinerant laborer before he became, in 1863 at age 27, Mark Twain. Twain’s story was a humorous tall tale, but its characters were realistic depictions of actual Americans. Twain deployed this combination of humor and realism throughout his writing. Henry James shared the view of the realists and naturalists that literature ought to present reality, but his writing style and use of literary form sought to also create an aesthetic experience, not simply document the truth. He was preoccupied with the clash in values between the United States and Europe. His writing shows features of both 19th-century realism and naturalism and 20th-century modernism.

Thus, the literature of the United States was shaped by the history of the nation. The colonial-era ended in independence which was followed by the true independence of American literature. But, Romanticism reached America from Europe soon. The Civil War’s harsh reality finally shook off the aesthetic and brought the nation back to Naturalism.