American Literature Clep

Pathetic Fallacy

Pathetic Fallacy

is the assigning of a human emotion or behavior to inhuman things found in the natural world

Iterary Conceit

which is an extended and/or extravagant metaphor.

Sky Woman, Wolverine, and Turtle

are all part of Native American oral tales

Epigram

which is a short, often satirical poem with a witty ending

Hyperbole

is an extreme exaggeration

John Smith

is most closely associated with The Virginia Colony

John Winthrop

is most closely associated with the Massachusetts Bay Colony

Roger Williams

is most closely associated with The Colony of Rhode Island

Margaret Fuller

associated with the American Transcendentalism and known for her book Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845)

Edward Taylor

was famous for his poetry

Samson Occom

a Native American member of the Mohegan Nation, wrote A Short Narrative of My Life (1768)

Ben Franklin

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (1791)

Mary Rowlandson

A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682), recounting her experiences as a captive during King Philip’s War

Elizabeth Ashbridge

a spiritual autobiography titled Some Account of the Fore Part of the Life of E******** ********e (1774)

Assonance

is also repetition, but repetition of vowel sounds.

Enjambment

is a device in which a sentence or phrase spills over from one line to the next

Iambic tetrameter

is a kind of poetry meter

Apostrophe

which is a call to someone who is not physically present (either dead or gone) or to something that is being personifie

Synecdoche

is a figure of speech in which a part represents the whole, or vice versa

Ralph Waldo Emerson

American Transcendentalism, wrote Self-Reliance

Nathaniel Hawthorne

wrote The Scarlet Letter (1850) Hester Prynne has affiar and has baby is displined by colony, and Ethan Bran (1850) left behind his humanity in his search for intellect and knowledge, and this is the unpardonable sin

Sarah Orne Jewett

she wrote about local life along the coast of Maine like in her novel A White Heron (1886), including her novella The Country of the Pointed Firs (1896) and her short story collection A White Heron (1886)and was part of the regionalism movement.,

Rebecca Harding Davis

famed for her works of literary realism, including the short story Life in the Iron Mills (1861). She sought social change for the working class and marginalized groups.

Louisa May Alcott

a feminist and abolitionist, is the famed novelist of Little Women (1868)

Bret Harte

wrote about the California Gold Rush, as seen in his popular short story “The Luck of Roaring Camp” (1868).

Zora Neale Hurston

is the famed Harlem Renaissance author of Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937); she also wrote a literary anthology on African American folklore titled Mules and Men (1935).

Joel Chandler Harris

a white writer and folklorist, whose “Brer Rabbit” and “Uncle Remus” stories were popularized in the 19th and 20th centuries. They were derived from African American storytelling

Toni Morrison

is the acclaimed novelist of the Pulitzer Prize winning Beloved (1988), among many other works, which uses folkloric elements to explore the psychological effects of slavery.

Henry Fleming (Character)

the Civil War novel The Red Badge of Courage (1895) by Stephen Crane

Thomas Supten (Character)

a character in William Faulkner’s 1936 novel Absalom, Absalom!

Clyde Griffiths (Character)

is the protagonist from Theodore Dreiser’s 1925 novel An American Tragedy

Frederic Henry (Character)

is from the 1929 novel by Ernest Hemingway A Farewell to Arms

Nick Carraway (Character)

is from F. Scott Fitgerald’s 1925 novel The Great Gatsby

Life in the Iron Mills

an 1861 short story written by Rebecca Harding Davis, which exposed the brutal conditions of being a mill worker.

The Yellow Wallpaper

an 1892 short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which explores the mental and physical health of women in the 19th century

The Scarlet Letter (1850)

follows Hester Prynne, who has an affair and ends up pregnant in a Puritan society.

The Lamplighter

an 1854 sentimental novel by Maria Susanna Cummins, is a bildungsroman about an orphaned girl who overcomes her suffering ithrough her strength of morals.

Motif

a repeated element in a piece of literature

Realism

William Dean Howells is known for his novel The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885), about a man who loses his fortune. Mark Twain is one of the most celebrated American Realist writers, the author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884). Henry James is known for his novels such as The Portrait of a Lady (1881) and his novella The Turn of the Screw (1898), and is considered to be a bridge between the realism and modernism movements.

Transcendentalists

stress the subjective experience rather than the objective; they believe in independent self-reliance and intuition, as well as the inherent goodness in people and nature

Symbolists

use figurative language to represent truth; the movement is a reaction against naturalism and realism.

Romantics

are more aligned with transcendentalists than realists; they emphasize emotion and individualism, and represent life in a subjective point of view rather than objective. They also tend to use exotic settings and strange events and protagonists rather than the mundane and familiar. They aim to represent a reality through ideals.

Naturalists

strive to depict reality objectively like realism, focusing on mundane life and settings and characters. However naturalism is a little more pessimistic with its philosophy of determinism—everything is already determined by external forces; there is no free will.

Edgar Allen Poe

was one of the earliest American short story writers, publishing in the 1830s and 1840s. Some of his most famous short stories include “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843). Known as Father Of Detective story (Dark Romantic)

Zitkala-Ša

was a Yankton Dakota who wrote about her time at boarding school and the violations of cultural assimilation, among other socio-political issues she faced throughout her life. Her boarding school experiences are in her work The School Days of an Indian Girl (1900).

Sui Sin Far

wrote about life for Chinese Americans during the period when the Chinese Exclusion Act was in place, eventually publishing Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912), a collection of short stories and articles.

Joy Harjo

is a writer of the Muscogee Nation, and the first Native American to be the US Poet Laureate; some of her more well known works include her poetry collection An American Sunrise (2019) and the classic She had some horses (1983).

Willa Cather

wrote about life on the Great Plains, like in her famed novel My Ántonia (1918). Ántonia is a Bohemian immigrant,as many of her novels take place there, including O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918).

Diane Glancy

is a writer who reclaims her Cherokee descent in her work, as in her historical novel Pushing the Bear (1996).

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892), told in the form of journal entries written by a woman suffering from hysteria. Her husband tells her to take a break from work and any form of expression (such as writing) in order to get better.

Edith Wharton

was a novelist and short story writer, known for writing about New York aristocracy in novels like The Age of Innocence (1920) and The House of Mirth (1905)

Sojourner Truth

was a famous abolitionist and women’s rights activist, most known for her “Ain’t I a Woman” (1851) speech.

Lydia Maria Child

was also an abolitionist and women’s rights activist, who wrote popular journals and domestic manuals in the first half of the 19th century.

Mary Wilkins Freeman

was a feminist writer most famous for her collections about New England Life, including A Humble Romance and Other Stories (1887) and A New England Nun and Other Stories (1891). as well as her 1894 novel Pembroke wrote about New England life

George Washington Cable

paired with New Orleans; his collection Old Creole Days (1879) was an exercise in realism, depicting Creole life in New Orleans.

Bret Harte

paired with San Francisco; he was most known for writing about the California Gold Rush, in short stories such as “The Luck of Roaring Camp” (1868) and “The Outcasts of Poker Flat” (1869)

Theodore Dreiser

be paired with Chicago; his book Sister Carrie (1900) was set in Chicago, as was An American Tragedy (1925) in part.

“The New Colussus”

(a colossus is a statue much larger than life) is a sonnet written in 1883 to raise money for the pedestal for the Statue of Liberty. It aims to turn the statue into a symbol of hope and welcome towards all. Written by Emma Lazarus

Charles W. Chesnutt

was an African American author who wrote about racial and social identity in the South. His collection The Conjure Woman (1899) contains elements found in Southern Black folk tales also known for his novels and short stories addressing racial and social identity. The House Behind the Cedars (1900) is his first novel, about passing and interracial relations. The Marrow of Tradition (1901) is a novel about white supremacy, fictionalizing the Wilmington Insurrection of 1898.

Mark Twain

is the American Realist author of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)

Frederick Douglass

is famous for his antislavery writing, his speeches and his autobiographies, the first being Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845); he did not write novels.

Theodore Dreiser

was part of the naturalism movement, and wrote the novels Sister Carrie (1900) and An American Tragedy (1925) exploring morality and the American dream.

Paul Laurence Dunbar

was an African American writer, most well known for his poetry, including the 1899 poem “Sympathy.”

The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

chronicles the Great Depression and all its obstacles (drought, bank foreclosures, the dust bowl), following the Joads, a poor family of farmers from Oklahoma Written by John Steinbeck

F. Scott Fitzgerald

short story “The Rich Boy” (1926). is famous for writing about class in America, and his critical stance on the rich, which is all in play in his novel The Great Gatsby (1925).

W. E. B. Du Bois

wrote The Souls of Black Folk, published in 1903. It is a seminal collection of essays about race in America, including his concept of “double-consciousness.”

Langston Hughes

was a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance and was most famous for his poetry.

Jean Toomer

was also a figure of the Harlem Renaissance, and wrote poetry and fiction, and is well known for his novel Cane (1923).

Imagism

Ezra Pound is known as the leader, which is a poetry movement from the early 20th century that used clear images written with colloquial, direct language. It’s all about precision.

Romanticism

in poetry is all about emotions and the subjective, imaginative experience; it often deals with nature and the concept of the sublime.

Surrealism

is about the unconscious mind, and exploring a dream-reality over one of reason or logic.

Futurism

is an avant-garde aesthetic that rejects romanticism and its lyricism, embracing the modern subjects of industry and technology.

Postmodernism

is characterized by its disenchantment with modernism’s ideologies and its uncertainty towards an ultimate or certain truth or meaning

The Harlem Renaissance

was a cultural resurgence of African American arts and academia, and took place in the 1920s through 1930s in Harlem, NYC. Zora Neale Hurston is a key figure of the movement, and wrote about the contemporary African American experience, especially the unique issues faced by Black women. She is most known for her 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.

Alice Walker

was born after the Harlem Renaissance; she is most well known for her 1982 novel The Color Purple.

James Baldwin

also grew to prominence after the Harlem Renaissance, publishing the bulk of his work in the 1950s-1960s, including his novels Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) and Giovanni’s Room (1956).

Sinclair Lewis

wrote the novel Babbitt (1922), a satire criticizing middle class conformity and social life; from this, the term “babbittry” was born, meaning a person, especially a professional man, who conforms to current middle class standards.

Flannery O’Connor

is associated with the deep South with her Southern Gothic writing, seen in her novels Wise Blood (1952) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1962)

Ernest Hemingway

Wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) takes place during the Spanish Civil War

Norman Mailer

Wrote The Naked and the Dead (1948) first novel and is about a platoon during WWII

Tim O’Brien

Wrote The Things They Carried (1990) is a related collection of short stories about a platoon in the Vietnam War.

William Faulkner

wrote three novels, called The Snopes Trilogy, which depict the Snopes family in a fictional town in Mississippi: The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), and The Mansion (1959). The Compsons are depicted in his novel The Sound and the Fury (1929), and also can be found in Absalom, Absalom! (1936) and short stories like “That Evening Sun” (1931). The Sartoris family is in the novel Sartoris (1929), about the decay of Southern aristocracy after the Civil War.

T. S. Eliot

Wrote modernist poem The Waste Land (1922) combines the legend of the Holy Grail with his contemporary British society. Jessie Weston’s book From Ritual to Romance (1920) covers the King Arthur legends and the Holy Grail.

August Wilson

wrote The Piano Lesson (1987) and Fences (1985). He is best known for The Pittsburgh Cycle, a series of 10 plays about the African American community in the 20th century.

Arthur Miller

wrote The Crucible (1953) and A View from the Bridge (1955)

Eugene O’Neill

wrote The Iceman Cometh (1939) and Desire Under the Elms (1924) most closely associated with drama; he wrote plays in the realism tradition, often involving tragedy

Amiri Baraka

wrote Dutchman and The Slave (both 1964)

Tennessee Williams

wrote Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1955) and Sweet Bird of Youth (1959).

O. Henry

is associated with the short story; his most well known works include “The Gift of the Magi” (1905), “The Duplicity of Hargraves” (1902), and “The Ransom of Red Chief” (1907); his stories usually include surprise endings.

Frank Norris

is associated with the novel; his most well known novels include The Octopus (1901) and The Pit (1903). He favored naturalism.

Carl Sandburg

was especially known for his poetry, which included his collection Chicago Poems (1916). He was also a biographer (and wrote Abraham Lincoln: The War Years (1926)), editor, and journalist, and was a reporter for the Chicago daily news.

Upton Sinclair

The Jungle (1906) is about immigrant life in Chicago and other cities

Carson McCullers

Wrote The Ballad of the Sad Cafe (1951) is a southern Gothic novella containing six short stories.

Nella Larsen

Passing (1929) explores race, racial passing, gender and sexuality.

Thomas Wolfe

Wrote Look Homeward, Angel (1929) is a coming of age story.

James Baldwin

Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) is a semi-autobiographical novel set in Harlem, about teenager John Grimes and his relationship with his family and his church

Richard Wright

Black Boy (1945) is a memoir chronicling growing up in the South and his eventual move to Chicago, where he writes and becomes involved with the Communist Party.wrote about the discrimination and violence faced by African Americans during the late 19th to mid 20th centuries; these thematics are present in his novel Native Son (1940).

Maya Angelou

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) is an autobiography

Sherwood Anderson

wrote Winesburg, Ohio (1919), a series of related short stories and one of the first pieces of modernist literature.

Dorothy Parker

also was a modernist writer, known for her wit; she wrote the screenplay for A Star is Born (1937)