Talk:Literature/Related Articles

English literature

Is it ONLY confined to the British isles? I myself, if I use the phrase, tend to include (perhaps incorrectly) anything written by an American in the English language. I know that Henry James is a tricky case, since, although American, one thinks of him as being a British writer, but what about Mark Twain? I remember being forced to take an English 101 course at Harvard where the lecturer was a semi-celebrated Richard Poirier, and some of his lectures involved Twain and other Americans. (He insisted, by the way, that for a nom de plume, the FULL name HAD to used, ie, you always referred to Mark Twain and NEVER to Twain. He used to drive me crazy.) Hayford Peirce (talk) 20:41, 12 September 2020 (UTC)

Me too, but your question actually straddles a raft of topics, including American cultural nationalism. As I understand it, in the decades after the Am. Revolution there was a vast and far-reaching debate over this very question, and then a couple of generations of writers from Hawthorne to Whitman made the convincing case (by example and polemic) that American literature was a thing unto itself and different from "Brit Lit" (which I took from a similar pendant who also drove me crazy!) Roger A. Lohmann (talk) 22:16, 12 September 2020 (UTC)

Shore wish Edmund "Bunny" Wilson was still with us -- he could set us straight on this point. I just finished about 1300 pages of his various essays and he was very much at home with the whole Hawthorne, Whitman, earlier, and later people, including dozens that I had never even HEARD of. A true polymath, at least in the fields of writing, literature, and, I guess, Communism.... By the way, what do the WP people say at THEIR article on "English literature"? Hayford Peirce (talk) 22:26, 12 September 2020 (UTC)