Literature
In the early 19th century, a number of American authors began to create literature emphasizing native scenes and characters.

Prior to the 19th Century, the United States consisted of a series of colonies which remained dependant to the British Empire. After being successful at rebelling against the British Empire in the last half of the 18th Century and the Civil War of 1812, the United States has never been the same//was no longer the same.
New ways of thinking were starting to be considered by American society as the rise of industry and science introduced many modifications in the way people lived. Concerning the field of literature, its origins in the United States were so far inherently related to British history and cultural lore. However, in the early 19th Century, American writers started to express their perceptions, ideas and experiences while being under the influence of fresh feelings of independence which forged the nation’s sense of identity. Therefore, the literature produced in this time was distinctively characterized by emphasizing native scenes and characters. Many authors contributed to this area of art:

four authors of very respectable stature appeared. William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe initiated a great half century of literary development.

The authors who began to come to prominence in the 1830s and were active until about the end of the Civil War—the humorists, the classic New Englanders, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, and others—did their work in a new spirit, and their achievements were of a new sort. In part this was because they were in some way influenced by the broadening democratic concepts that in 1829 triumphed in Andrew Jackson’s inauguration as president. In part it was because, in this Romantic period of emphasis upon native scenes and characters in many literatures, they put much of America into their books.

Particularly full of vivid touches were the writings of two groups of American humorists whose works appeared between 1830 and 1867. One group created several down-east Yankee characters who used commonsense arguments to comment upon the political and social scene. The most important of this group were Seba Smith, James Russell Lowell, and Benjamin P. Shillaber. These authors caught the talk and character of New England at that time as no one else had done. In the old Southwest, meanwhile, such writers as Davy Crockett, Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, Johnson J. Hooper, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, Joseph G. Baldwin, and George Washington Harris drew lively pictures of the ebullient frontier and showed the interest in the common man that was a part of Jacksonian democracy.

Number of themes in this field including the work of literature in defining nation; racial formations in American literature; constructions of urban, rural, and frontier spaces; and the American expatriate or traveler. I am particularly concerned with the use of the figure of the Indian and what Toni Morrison calls "Africanist presences" in the works on this list.

the traditions that African American authors may be writing in and against in the 19th century. The articulations of nation in the works listed here will inform my readings of the texts on my other minor list which addresses mappings of nation and other communities in literature. Many of these works struggle to articulate models of nation that texts on my other minor field list will later resist.