Literature is supposed to be the backbone of any state. Literature of any nations illustrates the history and geographical presentation. Literature varies with the state and nation, as every nation has its own literature and accounts. In this study we have an encyclopedic glance over the American literature. The study is partitioned in three sections. In first section we have an encyclopedic eye on American literature, in next section we will compare two poems of American literature and lastly we will discuss the two plays written in the English literature. We have examined various articles and studies accounted on the American literature and found that it is a very old literature and provide the basic foundation to American nation. The purpose of this study is to define the prospective approach of the literature in building the American history and provide a hamper to the study in America. The study accounts the history of the American literature and provides the comparison and contrast of two different genres i.e. poems and plays.
Encyclopedic Review of American Literature: In the twentieth century, several historical surveys of American literature were untaken by individual scholars or groups of scholars. Among the chief publications of this lettering were Walter C. Bronson’s sound and meticulous Short History of American Literature (1900) and Isaac Woodbridge Riley’s American Thought: From Puritanism to Pragmatism and Beyond (1915) (Blassingame, 1986). The later was an especially valuable reading that weighed this inspires of European as opposite to English thought on American writers and thinkers. Riley was especially interested in American authors who had managed to digest the great German authors, such as Goethe and Schiller, remaking an American tradition from these influences as well as the clearer British sources.
Critics of these latest historical surveys have been suspicious of attempts merely to pick discordant, even dissenting, voices into an imaginary gazebo of some kind the liberal land-royal itself that totalizes and someway undermines the wound and fierce independence of voices impending from the margins (Jaskoski, 1996). This leaning inevitably will subsist in anything resembling an encyclopedia, with it heavily Enlightenment accent, its aspirations to comprehensiveness. I’m eager that, by the strain of decisive voices offering here, representing a considerable variety of approaches to literary studies and textual interpretations, something juicy will be made available. These volumes do hold a lot of old-fashioned ‘‘close readings,’’ and no apologies should be open for this. These articles, on works ranging from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Great Gatsby to A Raisin in the Sun and Beloved, should attest handy to students in particular. Nevertheless interested readers will also find speculative essays here in which critics explore the multicultural dynamics of African American, Native American, Hispanic, Asian American (including Filipino), Italian American, and Jewish American as well as gay and lesbian letters (Kanellos, 1989).