ARAB ISLAMIC ELEMENTS IN NINTEENTH- CENTURY AMERICAN LITERATURE

Abstract

In 1837 Ralph Waldo Emerson asked American scholars to tear Ameri- ca away from lavish adherence to European thought and literary models. enthusiastically received, address entitled The American have listened too long to the courtly * In his famous Scholar , he asserted that scholars“ ... muses of Europe"(1)and should now guide their steps to the East. A year later in An Address delivered at Harvard Divinity School he noted that "Eur- ope has always owed to oriental genius its divine impulses," (2) and looked for the hour when"...that supreme Beauty which ravished the souls of those Eastern men, shall speak in the west also".(3)Seven years later in his Journal of 1845 he wrote : " The East is grand and makes Europt: appear the land of trifles" (4).

Keywords

• arab
• islamic elements
• ninteenth
• century
• american
• literature