Historical Background
Overview
As you may already know from previous experience in other literature courses, understanding the relationship between literature and its historical context is essential.
Literature is the recorded voice of the circumstances and events of its time. In a very real sense, it is the product of its environment. As such, literature both reflects and influences the course of the human events in which it is situated. Literature, therefore, ought not to be examined separately or in isolation from its historical setting.
Authors are sensitive to their physical, social, political, and religious climate, creatively expressing what they observe and feel. Understanding and truly appreciating literary expression thus requires an awareness of its formative elements, the evolutionary developments along the ever-progressing historical continuum.
This study session’s brief reading assignment provides an initial overview of circumstances and events in America and the world from the decade following the Civil War to 1914, just prior to World War I.
Elements of this historical background provided not only the motivation to create literature, but also the basis for its subjects, content, and purpose. Historical events contributed to that which makes American literature especially American, differentiating it from its contemporary literary counterparts on other continents. This presentation of uniquely American subjects, literary devices, and compelling themes you are now poised to begin discovering for yourself.
