Spirit of Individualism

Rhetorical Question

This is a question to which no answer is expected because the answer is obvious.

Allusion

This is an indirect reference to a person, place, event, or literary work with which the author believes the reader will be familiar. In using these, the author draws on associations already in the reader's mind.

Edgar Allan Poe

This author, along with Nathaniel Hawthorne solidified the "Short Story." While Nathaniel Hawthorne added symbolism to the genre, this author refined the short story so that every part of each work, every detail, was designed to contribute to its "single effect."

Ralph Waldo Emerson

This author is considered to be the Father of Transcendentalism.

William Faulkner

Born in 1897, this author wrote "A Rose for Emily," The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Absalom! Absalom! among others. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature and a Nobel Prize for Literature. He is considered to be Southern Gothic.

Edgar Allan Poe

This author is considered the Father of the Detective Story.

Walt Whitman

This transcendentalist poet wrote Leaves of Grass, which includes poems such as "Song of Myself," "Oh Me! Oh Life!" and "Oh Captain! My Captain!"

Henry David Thoreau

This author's essay entitled "Civil Disobedience" (urging passive, non-violent resistance to governmental policies to which an individual is morally opposed) influenced individuals such a Ghandi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Cesar Chavez.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

This author penned these aphorisms in his essay entitled, "Self-Reliance," which encourages individuality. "There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation in suicide..." "Trust thyself..."

"What I must do is all that concerns me, not what people think...."

and "...to be great is to be misunderstood."

Nathaniel Hawthorne

This author, an anti-transcendentalist, wrote The Scarlet Letter. His novel is usually regarded as the first symbolic novel to be published in the United States.

James Fenimore Cooper

This Romantic author, a master of historical fiction, wrote The Last of the Mohicans and described Native Americans as "noble savage" creating that literary stereotype. The Baseball Hall of Fame is in a town in New York named after him.

Washington Irving

An American Romantic, this author studied Grimm's Fairy Tales and was inspired to write "Rip Van Winkle," "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," and "The Devil and Tom Walker."

Gothic

This literary movement is a subcategory of anti-transcendentalism. The difference is, however, that the authors treat the mind as evil rather than the heart. Poe and Faulkner were of this category.

Anti-Transcendentalism

This literary movement is another subcategory of Romanticism. These authors believe that man is born with an evil heart.

Transcendentalism

This literary movement is a subcategory of Romanticism. Its authors saw humans and nature as possessing an innate goodness.

Transcendentalism

Authors of this literary movement believed in living close to nature/importance of nature; nature is the source of truth and inspiration; taught the dignity of manual labor; advocated self-trust and confidence; valued individuality, non-conformity, and free thought; advocated self-reliance and simplicity.

Anti-Transcendentalist

Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne both explore the darker side of nature and human nature; both consider life in its tragic dimension; they believe that man will choose evil if left to themselves. This makes them this.

Romanticism

The period after the American Revolution when writers were interested in the examination of inner feelings and emotions over reason, logic and scientific observation.

repetition

repeated words or phrases, often at the beginning of two or lines (but not always)

cataloging

A poetic device that is lists of people, things, and attributes

parallelism

related ideas phrased in similar ways, often with the same grammatical structure

tone

A writer's attitude toward his or her subject revealed through diction (word choice), figurative language, and organization on the sentence and throughout the text.

Alliteration

Repetition of initial consonant sounds

Onomatopoeia

A word that imitates the sound it represents.

Aphorism

This is a short statement of general truth or wisdom.

Antithesis

This literary device consists of opposite ideas expressed in similar grammatical structure.

Symbol

An object or action that means something beyond itself.