American Literature in 60 Minutes

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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

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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, 3rd-person hero
• Indians Savage but subduable
• Pocahontas Forest Fever

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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.

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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
  (pre-Romantic)
• Novelists you should know Susanna Rowson
  (Charlotte Temple 1794), Charles Brockden Brown
  (Wieland 1798), Hannah Webster Foster (The
  Coquette 1797)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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/chap5/5i
  ntro.html

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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)

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Robert Frost

• Pre-Modern poet
• Public image vs. poetic actualities
• The Road Not Taken

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Modernism(s)

• Ezra Pounds Make it new is the slogan of all
  modernisms.
• Marked by experimentation in form and content.

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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.

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Imagist Examples

• Pound In a Station of the Metro (1913)
• The apparition of these faces in the crowd 
• Petals on a wet, black bough.
• (this is the entire poem, pared from a 36-line
  original)

• William Carlos Williams The Red Wheelbarrow
  (1923)
• so much dependsupon
• a red wheelbarrow
• glazed with rainwater
• beside the whitechickens.

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Other Important Modernist Poets

• T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, e.e. cummings,
  Langston Hughes, Edna St. Vincent Millay

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20th Century Poetry after the Modernists

• http//www.literaryhistory.com/20thC/20CAmericanan
  dBritish.htm

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New Negro Renaissance

• Alain Locke, The New Negro
• Schomburg Exhibition http//www.si.umich.edu/CHIC
  O/Harlem/text/exhibition.html

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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)

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20th Century Fiction after Modernism

• http//web.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap10/1
  0intro.html

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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