ENGL 23501 American Literature: Breaking Free
GE-Human Culture: Literature What does the old time song “Breaking Up is Hard to Do” have to do with Colonial through Antebellum American literature? Everything, if you consider how this young, only-200-plus-years-old country had to bust loose from European constraints in religion, government, art, and literature in order to create a land that could provide sanctuary for the fugitive freedom hunted down for destruction everywhere else in the world. American writing then becomes a conscious breaking away from British and European style and setting and voice in American Romantic poets, writers like Emerson and Thoreau, and Hawthorne’s tales of the psychological and spiritual damage of “that old time religion.”
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