American Literature in 60 Minutes
In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? Sidney Smith, 1820 Some thinkers may object to this essay, that we are about to write of that which has, as yet, no existence. Margaret Fuller, in her 1846 essay American Literature Ah, yes, American Literature. I must take an afternoon and read it some time.Allan Carroll, former University of Tennessee English Dept. Chair and terminal Brithead
Tale of Two Smithies
John Smiths 1608 A True Relation Promotional Literature Smith as 1st-person master negotiator Indians: Savage but can be worked with No Pocahontas Rescue story! John Smiths 1624 Generall Historie Captivity Narrative Smith as swashbuckling, 3rdperson hero Indians: Savage but subduable Pocahontas: Forest Fever
Other Promotional Lit
Draytons Ode: To get the pearl and gold/And ours to hold/Virginia,/Earths only Paradise. Point: to get settlers over to work the land and make it profitable for joint-stock companies Promotional Literature begins long tradition of projecting on the idea of America whatever dreams/aspirations/desires an immigrant can imagine.
Other Captivity Narratives
Mary Rowlandsons Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration (1682) basis, with Smith, of nearly all Indian captivity narratives to follow Olaudah Equianos The Interesting Narrative (1789) Susanna Rowsons Slaves in Algiers (1794) Herman Melvilles Typee (1842) Frederick Douglass Narrative (1845) Mocked in Huckleberry Finn (1880) Captivity narratives
Gave an illicit peek at the other without fear of contamination Helped establish racial categories and, later, attitudes toward slavery The most popular type of adventure fiction in U.S. popular culture
Puritans
Ed Ward, on Boston, from A Trip to New England, 1699: The buildings, like their Women, being Neat and Handsome. And their Streets, like the Hearts of the Male Inhabitants, are Paved with Pebble. A Captain of a Ship who had been on a long Voyage, happend to meet his Wife, and Kist her in the Street, for which he was Find Ten Shillings, and was forcd to pay the Money. What a Happiness, thought I, do we enjoy in Old-England, that cannot only Kiss our own wives, but other Mens too without the danger of such a Penalty.
So Why Care About Them?
Spiritual Autobiography Jeremiad 3-part sermon form that foreshadowed nearly all American political speeches 1) listing of community sins; 2) threat of utter doom; 3) call to repentance and promise of future [return to] glory Bradford, Taylor, and Mather (for the test) Women Writers: Bradstreet and Rowlandson
William Bradford
William Bradford Of Plymouth Plantation (1647) The History of How Far We Have Fallen; using Exodus as his style book, memorializes the first settlers: Being thus passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles before in their preparation (as may be remembered by that which went before), they had now no friends to welcome them nor inns to entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodies; no houses or much less town to repair to, to seek for succour. And for the season it was winter, and they that know the winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent, and subject-to cruel and fierce storms, dangerous to travel to known places, much more to search an unknown coast. Besides, what could they see but a hideous and desolate wilderness, fall of wild beasts and wild menand what multitudes there might be of them they knew not.
Edward Taylor
New Englands metaphysical poet poems as meditations on Calvinist theology Huswifery - Make me, O Lord, thy Spinning Wheele compleat; Thy Holy Worde my Distaff make for mee. Make mine Affections thy Swift Flyers neate, And make my Soule thy holy Spoole to bee. My Conversation make to be thy Reele, And reele the yarn thereon spun of thy Wheele. I Am the Living Bread - In this sad state, Gods Tender Bowells run Out streams of Grace: And he to end all strife The Purest Wheate in Heaven, his deare-dear Son Grinds, and kneads up into this Bread of Life. Which Bread of Life from Heaven down came and stands Disht on thy Table up by Angells Hands.
Cotton Mather
Wonders of the Invisible World (1693) and Magnalia Christi Americana (1702) and about 450 other printed works. From Wonders: Samuel Preston testify'd, that about two years ago, having some Difference with Martha Carrier, he lost a Cow in a strange Preternatural unusual manner; and about a month after this, the said Carrier, having again some Difference with him, she told him, He had lately lost a Cow, and it should not be long before he Lost another! which accordingly came to Pass; for he had a Thriving and well-kept Cow, which without any known cause quickly fell down and Dy'd.
Anne Bradstreet
The Tenth Muse (1678) Prologue: I am obnoxious to each carping tongue/Who says my hand a needle better fits. The Author to Her Book: I washed thy face, but more defects I saw,/And rubbing off a spot, still made a flaw./I stretcht thy joints to make thee even feet,Yet still thou run'st more hobbling than is meet. Verses Upon the Burning of Our House: Farewell, my pelf; farewell, my store./The world no longer let me love;/My hope and Treasure lies above. In Honour of that High and Mighty Princess, Queen Elizabeth: She hath wip'd off th' aspersion of her Sex,/ That women wisdom lack to play the Rex.Let such as say our sex is void of reason/ Know 'tis a slander now, but once was treason.
Mary Rowlandson
Narrative (1682): I can remember the time when I used to sleep quietly without workings in my thoughts, whole nights together, but now it is other ways with me. Before I knew what affliction meant, I was ready sometimes to wish for it. When I lived in prosperity, having the comforts of the world about me, my relations by me, my heart cheerful, and taking little care for anything, and yet seeing many, whom I preferred before myself, under many trials and afflictions, in sickness, weakness, poverty, losses, crosses, and cares of the world, I should be sometimes jealous least I should have my portion in this life, and that Scripture would come to my mind, "For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every Son whom he receiveth" (Hebrews 12.6).
Compared often to the narratives (written by others, esp. Mather) of Hannah Dustan, who killed and scalped her captors.
Eighteenth Century
Enlightenment Revolution Post-Colonial Inferiority Complex Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (1771-90): rags to riches, program of moral perfection (actually a bagatelle) Royall Tyler, The Contrast (1789) Important Poets: Phyllis Wheatley, Philip Freneau (preRomantic) Novelists you should know: Susanna Rowson (Charlotte Temple 1794), Charles Brockden Brown (Wieland 1798), Hannah Webster Foster (The Coquette 1797)
Nineteenth Century Literary Movements as Bumper Stickers
Romanticism: Life is what you make of it! Realism: Life is what it is. Naturalism: Life sucks and then you die.
Early Romantics Mutability (hence lots of Death), Pantheism
Philip Freneau, poet, The Wild Honeysuckle (1785) : If nothing once, you nothing lose,/ For when you die you are the same;/ The space between is but an hour,/The frail duration of flower. William Cullen Bryant, poet, Thanatopsis (1817): The hills Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun; the vales/ Stretching in pensive quietness between; /The venerable woodsrivers that move/In majesty, and the complaining brooks /That make the meadows green; and, poured round all,/Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste, /Are but the solemn decorations all Of the great tomb of man! NOTE: BRYANT INTRODUCES BLANK VERSE INTO AMERICAN LIT IN THIS POEM.
Early Romantics in Prose Nature, Sensibility, Noble Savage, Gothic, Fashion Sense
William Fenimore Cooper The Leatherstocking Tales are a series of novels written between 1826 and 1841describing the adventures of Natty Bumppo, set in frontier communities west of the Allegheny Mountains: The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, The Deerslayer, The Pathfinder,The Prairie. Natty Bumppo is celebrated for his closeness to nature, and is the mouthpiece Cooper uses to decry the wasty ways of man and the twisty ways of the law. Washington Irving His The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon (1819) contains his two most famous stories, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. In his dozens of other sketches, he celebrates the sentimental over the commercial and entertainment over didacticism. Invents the old English Christmas in his 5 Christmas Sketches and in Philip of Pokanoket, rewrites Mary Rowlandsons captivity narrative from the Wampanoag point of view, calling them a native band of untaught heroes.
American Renaissance
Term coined by F. O. Matthiessen in his book of the same name in 1940. Established the following as canonical American writers: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Emily Dickinson, Walt WhitmanMargaret Fuller has since been added to this list as major American writers.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Famous for his essays: Nature (1836) was used as a launching pad for the Transcendentalist movement. Most famous for this image: Standing on the bare ground, -- my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, -- all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.
Henry David Thoreau
Seen sometimes as the legs of the Transcendentalist movementwas more political than RWE. Most famous works are Resistance to Civil Government (1849) and Walden (1854): I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life
Margaret Fuller
Feminist journalist, essayist, travel writer, and transcendentalist thinker. Most famous work Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845): We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to Woman as freely as to Man. Were this done, and a slight temporary fermentation allowed to subside, we should see crystallizations more pure and of more various beauty. We believe the divine energy would pervade nature to a degree unknown in the history of former ages, and that no discordant collision, but a ravishing harmony of the spheres, would ensue.
Edgar Allan Poe Romantic Quadruple Threat (but NOT a Transcendentalist)
Poet: The Raven, Annabel Lee, Horror Fiction writer: The Tell-Tale Heart, The Masque of the Red Deathgreat with unreliable narrators Detective Fiction inventor (Auguste Dupin): Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Purloined Letter Critic: The Philosophy of Composition, The Poetic Principlein his newspaper reviews of lit, earns nickname The Hatchet Man
Nathaniel Hawthorne THE typical Romantic novelist
Novels: The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables Short Stories: Young Goodman Brown, The Ministers Black Veil like Poe, master of unreliable narration
Herman Melville Yarns on the High Seas
Moby-Dick, of course, is his most famous novel, but his more popular novels were south-sea Island captivity/adventure tales Typee and Omoo. Critic who, in Hawthorne and His Mosses in 1850, sets the adoring critical tone others will follow: What a mild moonlight of contemplative humor bathes that Old Manse!--the rich and rare distilment of a spicy and slowly-oozing heart. No rollicking rudeness, no gross fun fed on fat dinners, and bred in the lees of wine,--but a humor so spiritually gentle, so high, so deep, and yet so richly relishable, that it were hardly inappropriate in an angel. It is the very religion of mirth; for nothing so human but it may be advanced to that. Though he wrote what purports to be poetry, Im not convinced.
Walt Whitman a Kosmos
Leaves of Grass revised 8 times between 1855 and 1892. Major poems: Song of Myself, Crossing Brooklyn Ferry, Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking O Captain, My Captain, When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomd Democratic in subject matter, style (free verse), and theme: I have said that the soul is not more than the body,/ And I have said that the body is not more than the soul,/ And nothing, not God, is greater to one than one's self is,/ And whoever walks a furlong without sympathy walks to his own funeral drest in his shroudDo I contradict myself?/ Very well then I contradict myself,/ (I am large, I contain multitudes.). I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,/ I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.
Emily Dickinson Your Easiest ID on the Exam
Major poet more influential on modernists than in her own timemost of her work wasnt published until the 1890s. Her work is very easy to spot: Hymn meternearly all of her poems can be sung to the tunes of either Amazing Grace or The Yellow Rose of Texas Slant Rhyme room rhymed with storm, for ex. Dashesher signal punctuation: I heard a Fly buzz when I died / The Stillness in the Room /Was like the Stillness in the Air / Between the Heaves of Storm Death is as overriding a theme in Dickinsons poetry as Life is in Whitmans
Realism
As a reaction against Romanticism, it aimed to depict life as it was, ragged edges and all. Much of Realist fiction had a muck-raking, political impetus, like Rebecca Harding Davis Life in the Iron Mills (1861) Some aimed at a realistic aesthetic in the depiction of persons, situations, and language, as Mark Twain indicates at the beginning of Huckleberry Finn (1880): In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods Southwestern dialect; the ordinary "Pike County" dialect; and four modified varieties of this last. The shadings have not been done in a haphazard fashion, or by guesswork; but painstakingly, and with the trustworthy guidance and support of personal familiarity with these several forms of speech. I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding. Doesnt end with subsequent literary movements (Naturalism, Modernism), but informs them. See this link for major concerns and texts: http://web.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap5/5intro.html
Naturalism
Either a branch of realism or a reaction against itsome call it realism infused with determinisms. Economic and Social Determinism the work of Marx and condition of American working class informs works such as Stephen Cranes Maggie, a Girl of the Streets (1893) and Theodore Dreisers Sister Carrie (1900) Psychological and Biological Determinism the work of Freud and Darwinour behavior controlled by our unconscious drives; plays on a fear of a de-evolutionary state; see Frank Norris McTeague (1899), Kate Chopins The Awakening (1900), and Jack Londons To Build a Fire (1910)
Robert Frost
Pre-Modern poet Public image vs. poetic actualities The Road Not Taken
Modernism(s)
Ezra Pounds Make it new is the slogan of all modernisms. Marked by experimentation in form and content.
Modern Poetry
Goals of Imagism Ezra Pound, from A Retrospect: 1. Direct treatment of the 'thing' whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation. 3.As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome. Pound wanted to get the Victorian slither out of poetry.
Imagist Examples
Pound: In a Station of the Metro (1913) The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough. William Carlos Williams: The Red Wheelbarrow (1923)
so much depends upon a red wheel barrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.
(this is the entire poem, pared from a 36-line original)
Other Important Modernist Poets
T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, e.e. cummings, Langston Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay
20th Century Poetry after the Modernists
http://www.literaryhistory.com/20thC/20CA mericanandBritish.htm
New Negro Renaissance
Alain Locke, The New Negro Schomburg Exhibition: http://www.si.umich.edu/CHICO/Harlem/te xt/exhibition.html
Modernist Fiction
F. Scott Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby (1925) Ernest Hemingway The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell to Arms (1929) William Faulkner The Sound and the Fury (1929), Light in August (1932)
20th Century Fiction after Modernism
http://web.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/ chap10/10intro.html
20th Century Drama
Eugene ONeill and the Provincetown Players: The Hairy Ape, The Emperor Jones, Desire Under the Elms, Mourning Becomes Electra, A Long Days Journey Into Night Other dramatists: Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Tony Kushner, Suzan-Lori Parks
