Religion In The 19th Century

Along with this century, another important subjects can be seen for many writers like Hawthorne’s novel The House of the Seven Gables (1851) which centred on the importance of determining the identity of families by inherited property or subject that show the idea of the relationship between property and women’s body in the novel The Squatter and the Don (1881) by Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton and to reflect the social manners as it in the novel The Portrait of a Lady (1881) by Henry James. There is a significant remark of the nineteenth century that some novelists turned to emphasize the religion aspect of life as it described by Shirley Samuels as following: “some of the most popular novels of the United States focused on religion”

Three historical periods for novel can be noticed in this century; the first one was from 1780 to 1860 and this period was explained in previous papers. The second was from 1860 to 1890 and this period led to the rise of realist novel and later to witness many attempts to produce transgeneric works of romance and realism and the third one was from 1890 to 1920. The third period was characterized by flourishing the kind of literary realist-naturalism which prevailed a quarter century and continued for two decades after World War I. The variation of modes and the requirements for explanation offered the novel/romance at this time for discussion. G.R. Thompson mentioned that “The novel/romance issue was a version of the perpetual debate of the real and the ideal shaping western tradition including the conflict of empiricism versus transcendentalism, of mimetic versus poetry, of history versus fiction and of romanticism versus realism (Thomson: 2012,

For instance, there was Claude Mckay (1889-1948) who was one of the earliest and most central figures of the Harlem Renaissance and he got great reputation with his book Harlem Shadow (1922) and his first novel Home to Harlem (1928). African American writers of the Harlem Renaissance such as Arna Bontemps, Jesse Fausset, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston reflected the experiences of African Americans with the forms and technique of modernism and their works had a continuing influence on American literature. With the novel Their Eyes were Watching God (1937) by significant female novelist Zora Neale Huston (1891-1960), the experiences of African Americans were addressed