American literature has never been content to be just one among the many literatures of the Western World. It has always aspired to be the literature not only of a new continent but of a New World.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Since its beginnings, American writing has been in dialogue with other literatures.
One of the great themes in American literature is the individual's confrontation with the vast open spaces of the continent.
American literature has always been immigrant.
The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.
There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.
I don't really know what the Great American Novel is. I like the idea that there could be one now, and I wouldn't object if someone thought it was mine, but I don't claim to have written that - I just wrote my book.
The main differences between contemporary English and American literature is that the baleful pseudo-professionalism imparted by all those crap M.F.A. writing programs has yet to settle like a miasma of standardization on the English literary scene. But it's beginning to happen.
Twentieth-century American poetry has been one of the glories of modern literature.
I've been as bad an influence on American literature as anyone I can think of.
The British and American literary worlds operate in an odd kind of symbiosis: our critics think our contemporary novelists are not the stuff of greatness whereas certain contemporary Americans indubitably are. Their critics often advance the exact opposite: British fiction is cool, American naff.