Literatura Amerykańska

Early American Colonial Writers & Settlements

• John Smith

• Thomas Morton

• William Bradford

• Roger Williams

John Smith

• Founder of Jamestown, the first permanent English settlement (1607)

• Wrote A Description of New England

Thomas Morton

• Founded Merry Mount colony

• Celebrated Maypole, clashed with Puritans

• Wrote New English Canaan

William Bradford

• Leader of Plymouth Colony (Pilgrims)

• Wrote Of Plymouth Plantation

Roger Williams

Founded Rhode Island for religious freedom

Early African American Literature

Literacy forbidden for enslaved people; writing = resistance

• Phillis Wheatley

• Olaudah Equiano

• Frederick Douglass

• Harriet Jacobs

• Sojoruner Truth

Phillis Wheatley

• First published African American poet

• Poems subtly protest racism (e.g., On Being Brought from Africa to America)

Olaudah Equiano

Autobiography exposing slavery horrors

Frederick Douglass

• Autobiographical slave narrative

• Advocated abolition and equality

Harriet Jacobs

• Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

• Focus on female experience under slavery

Sojourner Truth

• Famous speech “Ain’t I a Woman?”

• Advocated abolition and women’s rights

American Gothic Fiction

• Subgenre with American themes: haunted houses, madness, mystery, supernatural

• Explores the uncanny: familiar yet strange, causing discomfort

• Key authors:

  • Charles Brockden Brown (Wieland): religious fanaticism, madness, reality vs. delusion

  • Edgar Allan Poe (The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-Tale Heart): psychological horror, unreliable narrators, symbolism
    

Transcendentalism

• 19th-century American literary and philosophical movement

• Core beliefs: intuition over logic, self-reliance, nature as spiritual path, inherent goodness of people

• Rejected materialism and organized religion

• Influences: German Idealism, Romanticism, Eastern philosophy

Key figures & works:

• Ralph Waldo Emerson (Nature, Self-Reliance, The American Scholar)

• Henry David Thoreau (Walden, Civil Disobedience)

• Margaret Fuller (Woman in the Nineteenth Century)

Legacy: abolition, utopian communities, women’s rights, environmentalism, civil rights movements

Herman Melville (1819–1891)

• Novelist, poet, complex philosophical themes

• Early popular work: Typee (South Pacific, cultural relativism)

• Masterpiece: Moby-Dick

  • Initially failed, rediscovered in 1920s

  • Themes: obsession, fate, madness, spirituality

  • Characters: Ishmael (narrator), Ahab (obsessed captain), diverse crew (symbolizing America)

  • “Whiteness of the Whale” symbolizes paradox of purity and terror

• Short story: Bartleby, the Scrivener (passive resistance, alienation, critique of capitalism)

Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

• Poet of democracy, individuality, and the American experience

• Influenced by Emerson and American ideals

• Life stages: apprenticeship, poetic emergence (Leaves of Grass), Civil War nurse, later reflections

• Themes: body, democracy, nature, sexuality, death, urban life

• Style: free verse, catalogs, inclusive language

• Key poem: “Song of Myself” (mystical union of self and cosmos)

Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)

• Reclusive poet from Amherst, MA

• Wrote ~1800 poems, most unpublished in her lifetime

• Themes: success/failure, pain/truth/death, madness vs. conformity, artistic integrity, identity, love

• Style: short lines, elliptical, dashes, slant rhyme, ambiguous

• Legacy: anticipated Modernism, demanded close reading

Literary Movements Overview

• Realism (Mid-19th Century)

• Naturalism (Late 19th Century)

• Modernism (Early 20th Century)

Realism (Mid-19th Century)

• Focus: accurate, truthful depictions of everyday life

• Features: ordinary people, detailed social settings, vernacular speech

• Reaction to Romanticism, influenced by industrialization

• US authors: Mark Twain, Henry James, William Dean Howells

Naturalism (Late 19th Century)

• Scientific version of realism, determinism shapes humans

• Themes: survival, violence, biology, pessimism

• Focus on marginalized characters

• US authors: Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London

Modernism (Early 20th Century)

• Radical break with past, reflects alienation, uncertainty

• Techniques: fragmentation, stream-of-consciousness, symbolism

• Themes: loss, disintegration of meaning

• US authors: William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway

Southern Literature: William Faulkner

• Themes: decay, memory, race, guilt, Southern Gothic grotesque

• Techniques: fragmented narratives, stream of consciousness

• Setting: Yoknapatawpha County (fictional South)

• Key works:

  • The Sound and the Fury (multiple narrators, decline of aristocracy)

  • As I Lay Dying (family journey, multiple perspectives)

  • Absalom, Absalom! (dark counter-narrative of South, obsession, race)

John Dos Passos and Literary Modernism

• War veteran and radical thinker

• Captured urban life, capitalism, trauma

• Major works:

  • Three Soldiers (anti-war)

  • Manhattan Transfer (urban alienation)

  • U.S.A. Trilogy (historical narrative with innovative structure)

• U.S.A. Trilogy uses “Four-Way Conveyor Belt”: newsreel, biography, camera eye, fiction

Modernist Poetry Highlights

• Robert Frost

• E. E. Cummings

• Wallace Stevens

Robert Frost

• Traditional forms, modern themes (existential doubt, tension)

• Poem: “Fire and Ice” (destruction metaphors for desire and hate)

E. E. Cummings

• Experimental form, visual playfulness

• Themes: individualism, rebellion, love

• Poem: “in Just—” (childhood, spring, growth)

Wallace Stevens

• Philosophy + poetry

• Reality shaped by perception

• Poem: “The Emperor of Ice-Cream” (embrace impermanence and sensuality)