How has American Literature changed over its history and how has it remained the same? Support your answer

This question is certainly too broad to address satisfactorily in a few lines. American literature, like literature at large, has undergone a profound evolution from its origins in the Colonial period to our own times. And yet, there are certain themes and motifs that permeate the literary production from the different periods. One conspicuous theme is Nature and the relationship of humans with the environment. In Oh Pioneers!, Willa Cather's narrator encapsulates in a...

This question is certainly too broad to address satisfactorily in a few lines. American literature, like literature at large, has undergone a profound evolution from its origins in the Colonial period to our own times. And yet, there are certain themes and motifs that permeate the literary production from the different periods. One conspicuous theme is Nature and the relationship of humans with the environment. In Oh Pioneers!, Willa Cather's narrator encapsulates in a single sentence the essence of the American experience: "the great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes." Even though Cather refers to the settlers of the Nebraska territory, the same words can be used to describe the struggles undertaken by all those early Americans who carved a civilization out of the primeval wilderness that they had to contend with. Anne Bradstreet’s “Contemplations” anticipate the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, as well as the writings of Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, but also that of 20th-century authors such as William Carlos Williams or Wallace Stevens, to name just a few writers who share a similar contemplative attitude of the natural surroundings. Obviously, Native-American literature is an exceptional example of the intimate, or spiritual, relation of humans with the environment. William Faulkner in novels like Absalom Absalom! or Light in August, and Cormac McCarthy in novels like The Crossing or All the Pretty Horses convey a similar nostalgia for the once pristine nature that has been literally devoured by the “machine,” as Leo Marx would say in his seminal study The Machine in the Garden (1964). And yet, nature is not always viewed under a positive light but rather as a place of danger and death, as we can see in such disparate texts as Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative (1682) or Jack London’s tales such as “To Build a Fire” (1908).