The beginning of American literature American has always been a land of beginnings. After

The beginning of American literature

American has always been a land of beginnings. After Europeans " discovered" America in the fifteenth century, the mysterious New World became for many people a genuine hope of a new life, an escape from poverty and persecution, a chance to start again. We can say that, as a nation, America begins with that hope. When, however, does American literature begin？

American literature begins with American experiences. Long before the first colonists arrived, before Christopher Columbus, before the Northmen who found America about year 1,000, Native Americans lived here. Each tribe's literature was tightly woven into the fabric of daily life and reflected the unmistakably (不会弄错的) American experience of lining with the land. Another kind of experience, one filled with fear and excitement, found its expression in the reports that Columbus and other explorers sent home in Spain, French and English. In addition, the journals of the people who lived and died in the New England wilderness (荒野) tell unforgettable tales of hard end sometimes heartbreaking experiences of those early years.

Experience, then, is the key to early American literature. The New World provided a great variety of experiences, and experiences demanded a wide variety of expressions by an even wider variety of early American writers. These writers included John Smith, who spent only two- and-a-half year. on the American continent. They included Jonathan Edwards and William Byrd, who thought of themselves as British subjects, never suspecting a revolution that would create a United States of America with a literature of its own. American Indians, explorers, Puritan ministers, frontier wives, plantation owners — they are all the creators of the first American literature.

What does "that hope" in the first paragraph refer to？

A．The hope that America would be discovered

B．The hope to start a life.

C．The hope to see the mysteries of the New World

D．The hope to find poverty here.