TOPICS AND PROBLEMS
Compare the use of California and California life by Sill with use of the same material by Joaquin Miller or Bret Harte or Mark Twain.
Compare Sill’s “Hermitage” with Robert Frost’s “A Boy’s Will.” What is the likeness in the general drift of the two and what are the essential differences in the treatments of the theme?
Read W. B. Parker’s “Life of Sill” with especial reference to Sill’s letters and the degree to which they reveal his humor and his seriousness. Note poems which correspond in spirit or in content with given letters.
Compare the treatment of primitive Western life and adventure by Miller with use of the same material by Mark Twain or Bret Harte.
Read Miller for evidences of literary influence upon him of Scott or Byron or Coleridge or Browning.
Read Miller’s “Song of the South” and his explanatory remarks on it and compare Longfellow’s treatment of the Mississippi; or compare Masters’s preface to his volume “Toward the Gulf” and his poems on the same subject.
Note the insistence of Miller on the idea that life is power and in his later poems the increasing respect for reflection.
Compare Miller’s “Columbus” with Lowell’s “Columbus” and Lanier’s “Sonnets on Columbus.”
CHAPTER XXVII
THE RISE OF FICTION; WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
It is very seldom in the history of literature that important developments take place without long preliminaries. From period to period new emphasis is placed on old ideas, and old forms are given the right of way in literary fashion. In the course of American literature, roughly speaking, the dominating forms of literature have been in succession: exposition and travel during the colonial period; poetry, satirical and epic, in the Revolutionary period; poetry in all its broader aspects during the first two thirds of the nineteenth century. After the Civil War for fifty years fiction came to the front; from about 1900 on a new emphasis was given to the stage and the playwright; at present the most striking fact in world literature is the broadening and deepening of the poetic currents again. Yet all of these forms are always existent. To speak of the rise of fiction, then, is simply to acknowledge the increased attention which for a period it demanded.
It is frequently said that America’s chief contribution to world literature has been the short story as developed since the Civil War. Yet in America the ground had been prepared for this development by many writers,—among them, as already mentioned in this history, Washington Irving with “The Sketch Book” in 1819 (see pp. 118–131), Hawthorne with “Twice-Told Tales” in 1838 (see pp. 240 and 243), Poe with his various contributions to periodical literature in the 1840’s (see pp. 185–187), Mark Twain with “The Jumping Frog” of 1867, Bret Harte with “The Luck of Roaring Camp” of 1870 and the great bulk of his subsequent contributions (see p. 381), and Thomas Bailey Aldrich with “Marjorie Daw” of 1873 and his other volumes of short stories. In the meanwhile the novel had had its consecutive history—from Brockden Brown beginning with 1798 (see pp. 100–109) to Cooper in 1820 (see pp. 141–157), William Gilmore Simms from 1833 (see p. 344), Hawthorne from 1850 on (see pp. 236–251), Mrs. Stowe from 1852 (see pp. 299–309), and Holmes from 1861 (see pp. 320, 321). And these writers of short and long fiction are only the outstanding story-tellers in America between the beginning of the century and the years just after the Civil War.
In a chapter such as this no exhaustive survey is possible, for it involves scores of writers and hundreds of books. The vital movement started with a fresh and vivid treatment of native American material, and it moved in a great sweeping curve from the West down past the Gulf up through the southeastern states into New England, across to the Middle West, and back into the Ohio valley until every part of the country was represented by its expositors. The course of this newer provincial fiction is suggested by the mention of Mark Twain’s “Jumping Frog” (1867, California), “The Luck of Roaring Camp” of Bret Harte (1870, California), G. W. Cable’s “Old Creole Days” (1879, Louisiana), “Nights with Uncle Remus,” by Joel Chandler Harris (1880, Georgia), “In the Tennessee Mountains,” by Charles Egbert Craddock (1884), “In old Virginia,” by Thomas Nelson Page (1887), “A New England Nun,” by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman (1891), “Main-Travelled Roads,” by Hamlin Garland (1891, the Middle West), “Flute and Violin,” by James Lane Allen (1891, the Ohio valley).
CHRONOLOGICAL CHART II. AMERICAN LITERATURE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
