Urban Americans and Rural Americans: A Brief Overview of the Small Town/Big City Divide in American Literature
This 3-page undergraduate essay provides a synthetic account of the role played by the small town/big city opposition in the history of American Literature. Focussing particularly on the prose works of the period 1915-1945, this essay considers the ways that towns and cities have been used symbolically in American literature. Towns have been associated with the past, family, tradition, and entrapment, while cities were used to represent opportunity, individualism, fragmentation, and danger. However, as this essay points out, this method of representation became more complex during the early twentieth century, as Americans moved increasingly into cities, making rural areas even more idealized. At the same time, the differences between the two changed, so that suburban and urban areas were modelled on some aspects of rural communities, while rural areas became more modernized and more connected to the big cities.
