Nationalism in American Literature

Abstract

Very beautiful, within reasonable limits, is man's love of the familiar and the local, and certainly American literature would be poor without those who have celebrated the forests and fields, the hearths and homes, the aspirations and victories, of the fatherland. Like everything else, however, this love of the local is a matter of proportion. And one may well raise the question whether, during the last half century, under the auspices of science, democracy, and realistic literary theories, American literature has not continued to grow disproportionately national, disproportionately concerned with scenes and situations exclusively local and American. This tendency is evident in the work of such writers as Whitman, Howells, and Garland, not to mention contemporaries such as Dreiser, Sherwood Anderson, and Sinclair Lewis; this tendency is encouraged, and its extension urged and prophesied, by such critics as John Macy, Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Lewis Mumford, Vernon Parrington, and Fred Lewis Pattee.