Past and Present Discussions of American National Literature

T HE PROBLEM of an American national literature is being widely discussed in our time, even though the great artistic achievements of the literature of the United States over the past hundred and fifty years are already an accomplished fact. The guns of the American War of Independence had scarcely been stilled before American writers and critics began debating the question of the need for creating their own national literature. The debates over this question have continued without interruption to this very day, although in recent times they have moved to a new stage. In the last century English and continental European critics assumed that because the Americans were creating their literature in English, American literature was merely a branch of English literature. Nowadays no one confuses American with English literature. On the contrary, new theories explaining the establishment of an American literature are continually appearing. Quite frequently these theories reflect a subjective-idealistic conception of literary development-Freudian, mythic, existentialist, and so forth. Their common tendency is to confirm the estrangement of American literature from the sociohistorical conditions of its formulation.