Research Paper on:
American Literature Trends

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
national identity - March, 2001 - properly! As Europeans began to explore and settle in the  land that they referred to as the "New World," they began producing a body of writing from the onset of their adventures. However, it took much more than merely transplanting  Europeans on the other side of the Atlantic to make them think - or write - differently from Europeans, or to consider themselves to be "American" (Baym, et al 5).  However, by the dawn of the nineteenth century, this situation had changed. Baym, et al, relate that in the first half of the nineteenth century, there was almost  as much lobbying for an American literature in US magazines as there was space devoted to printing American literature (389). However, it soon became evident that a national literature was  developing in the US, a literature that wasnt merely a transplanted European perspective, but rather one that was "homegrown" and unique to a new and adventuresome young republic. The following  brief survey of some of these distinctly "American" authors demonstrates the features that defined this emergent literature. Drawing his Puritan New England heritage, Nathaniel Hawthornes writing focused on a  narrow range of psychological themes that reflected that heritage - "the consequences of pride, selfishness and secret guilt" (Baym, et al 548). His short stories "Roger Malvins Burial" and "Young  Goodman Brown" exemplify these features. In both stories, Hawthorne addresses themes of good and evil, and how good men can easily slip from the path of righteousness and lose their  moral compass. Supporting this theme, both stories invoke powerful imagery in which nature - and the wild condition of the American landscape - symbolizes the action of the story, demonstrating