AN EXAMINATION OF THE EFFECTS THAT AMERICAN

An Examination of the effects that American Naturalism had on American Literature

An Examination of the effects that American Naturalism had on American Literature

Students of American culture have long known that a very high proportion of eighteenth - century Americans, of all classes, could read. According to long-standing tradition, those Americans read serious books--about religion, politics, and the practical arts; they seldom read for entertainment.Two women particularly embody this dynamic: Aphra Behn and Mary Wollstonecraft. Ambiguous, fluid figures who turned their daring and derogated sexuality into literature, who made the female body the site of ideological conflict, and who used confession as feminist polemic, these writers link the Restoration with the Romantic era as peaks of gender reformation holding together the frothy blend of the political and the personal arenas that is now the long eighteenth century. Samuel Richardson, and a host of other playwrights, poets, and novelists, Behn remained remarkably powerful in culture even while eighteenth - century male critics condemned her, and ultimately--by 1800--banished her from the English literary canon. (Lance 85)

Otherness and difference as the foundations of identity in the early modern period also appear in Laura Brown's Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century. In constructing two forms of "other," the woman and the non-European, Brown argues that eighteenth - century England turned to material culture for metaphors to represent the modern: the city sewer which emblematizes the metropolis in Swift's "Description of a City Shower"; the torrents and oceans that represent fate in texts such as Johnson's The Vanity of Human Wishes and in works by Dryden, Pope, and others; finance and the fable of Lady Credit; capitalism; the native prince; and pets that symbolize the nonhuman being.

These marginally literary texts document the invention of cultural myths of modernity, which are the triumph of capitalism, urbanization, commercialization, and the historical differentiation of today from yesterday. The first step in outlining the growth of novel reading in America is to show that the reading public, in general, was expanding rapidly after 1750. (Whicher 195) The primary index of the growth of the reading public is the growth of the sources of their reading matter. In eighteenth - century America, readers obtained their books from three sources: the bookseller, the social library, and the circulating library. In the second half of the century, all three of these enterprises grew prodigiously and at a much faster rate than the population. Between 1773 and 1798, the number of firms in the book trades in the five major American cities increased almost fourfold, while the population of these cities doubled over the same period of time.

Both the booktrade and the traffic in magazines unconsciously reflected the democratic nature of American society, for there was no tradition of a literary aristocracy. Even the most distinguished products of American literature were, more so than at present, written for the people by the people--for the most part unconsciously ...