The Oxford Book of American Essays (Classic Reprint)

The customary antithesis between American literature andE nglish literature is unfortunate and misleading in that it seems to exclude American authors from the noble roll of those who have contributed to the literature of our mother-tongue. Of course, when we consider it carefully we cannot fail to see that the literature of a language is one and indivisible and that the nativity or the domicile of those who make it matters nothing. Just as Alexandrian literature is Greek, so American literature is English; and as Theocritus demands inclusion in any account of Greek literature, soT horeau cannot be omitted from any history of English literature as a whole. The works of Anthony Hamilton andR ousseau, Mme. deS tael and M. Maeterlinck are not more indisputably a part of the literature of the French language than the works ofF ranklin andE merson, of Hawthorne and Poe are part of the literature of theE nglish language.
(Typographical errors above are due to OCR software and don't occur in the book.)

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