Conditions in the field of American literature during the first four decades of the twentieth century were not always helpful or encouraging to aspiring writers in the United States. The literature which may be called characteristic of this period began with the novels which writers like Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser were publishing around 1900. These men initiated a new period in American writing, which developed in power and maturity especially during the twenties and thirties. For the first fifteen years of the century, however, neither academic criticism nor journalistic opinion were prepared to favor the new growth. Taking American universities as a measure of the prevailing attitude toward writers who were interested in becoming part of the new movement, Bernard De Voto pointed out that even as late as 1920 few universities provided any encouragement for the man (at the time he would hardly be called a scholar) who was interested primarily in literature written in the United States. Universities on the whole provided favorable climates only to that scholarship and criticism which was devoted to English literature of a respectable age, and looked upon American literature as “at best only a pleasant brook flowing toward the stream of English literature and acquiring merit only as it drew near.” Similarly the critical journals were not much interested in the American literary output. Even important periodicals like The Nation and The Bookman followed trends [...]
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.123817 |
| Date | January 1949 |
| Creators | Clark, Mary Margaret. |
| Contributors | Files, H. (Supervisor) |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Arts. (Department of English.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 000842036, Theses scanned by McGill Library. |
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