American Literature Notes
American Literature
Lesson Objectives:
Identify key themes in American literature: identity, freedom, and the American Dream.
Understand the historical and cultural contexts of American literary works.
Understand authors' perspectives on similar themes across literary movements.
The Colonial and Early National Period (17th century to 1830)
Early American literature (as early as 1600) was practical, straightforward, derivative of British literature, and future centered.
It consisted mostly of practical nonfiction written by British settlers.
Key writers and their contributions:
John Smith: Histories of Virginia (1608, 1624) - Account of his experiences as an English explorer and president of the Jamestown Colony.
Nathaniel Ward & John Winthrop: Books on religion focused on colonial America.
Anne Bradstreet: The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) - Earliest collection of poetry written in and about America, published in England.
Post-Declaration of Independence (1776), writing addressed the country’s future.
American poetry and fiction were modeled on British works.
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay: The Federalist Papers (1787-1788) - Influenced the political direction of the United States.
Benjamin Franklin: Autobiography (1770s-1780s) - Told his American life story.
Phillis Wheatley: Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773) - First African American book.
Philip Freneau: Notable poet of the era.
William Hill Brown: The Power of Sympathy (1789) - First American novel.
Early 19th Century: American literature began to emerge, depicting American society and landscape.
Washington Irving: The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819–20) - Included “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle.”
James Fenimore Cooper: Leatherstocking Tales (1823–41) - Novels about frontiersman Natty Bumppo.
The Romantic Period (1830 to 1870)
Romanticism emphasizes individualism and emotional experience over reason.
Appreciates the wildness of nature over human-made order.
Americans embraced the movement in the early 19th century.
Edgar Allan Poe:
Known for his tormented genius, struggled against writing conventions.
“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841).
“The Raven” (1845) - A gloomy depiction of lost love.
“The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) and “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846) - Tales of horror.
James Russell Lowell: Used humor and dialect to depict everyday life in the Northeast.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow & Oliver Wendell Holmes: Upper-class Brahmins, filtered America through European models.
Ralph Waldo Emerson: Influential essays.
Henry David Thoreau: Walden (1854) - Account of his life alone by Walden Pond.
Margaret Fuller: Editor of The Dial, a Transcendentalist magazine.
Nathaniel Hawthorne:
“Young Goodman Brown” (1835).
The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851).
Herman Melville
Walt Whitman:
Wrote poetry describing New York City.
Refused traditional rhyme and meter, used free verse in Leaves of Grass (1855).
Stories by and about enslaved and free African Americans became more common.
William Wells Brown: Clotel (1853) - First black American novel, The Escape (1858) - First African American play.
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper & Harriet E. Wilson: First black women to publish fiction in the United States (1859).
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851–52) - Raised opposition to slavery in the North.
Emily Dickinson:
Lived in seclusion, few poems published before death (1886).
Notable Poems:
“I’m Nobody! Who are you?”
“Because I could not stop for Death –”
“My Life had stood – a Loaded Gun”
“A Bird, came down the Walk –”
“Safe in their Alabaster Chambers”
Realism and Naturalism (1870 to 1910)
Civil War resulted in immense human cost.
More than 2.3 million soldiers fought.
Estimated 851,000 deaths (1861-1865).
Realism emerged as the literary movement, characterized by detailed, realistic, and unembellished vision of the world.
Writing became a means of self-expression.
Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain):
“The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” (1865) - Made him famous.
Humorous tall tales.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).
Naturalism: Intensified form of realism, inspired by 19th-century French writers.
Centered on the middle-class and working class in cities.
Theodore Dreiser: Sister Carrie (1900) - Important American naturalist novel.
Henry James:
Shared views with realists and naturalists but focused on aesthetic experience.
Preoccupied with the clash in values between the United States and Europe.
Features of realism, naturalism, and modernism.
Notable novels:
The American (1877)
The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
What Maisie Knew (1897)
The Wings of the Dove (1902)
The Golden Bowl (1904)
The Modernist Period (1910 to 1945)
Modernism: Radical break from the past.
Advances in science and technology intensified.
Devastation of World War I and the Great Depression caused widespread suffering.
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby (1925) - Skewered the American Dream.
Richard Wright: Native Son (1940) - Exposed and attacked American racism.
William Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury (1929) - Stream-of-consciousness technique.
John Steinbeck:
Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939) - Depicted the difficult lives of migrant workers.
T.S. Eliot:
The Waste Land (1922) - Quintessential modernist poem.
Post-Modernism/Contemporary Period (1945 to present)
The United States emerged from World War II economically strong and entered the Cold War.
The 1950s and ’60s brought cultural shifts due to the civil rights movement and the women’s movement.
American literature became more complex and inclusive.
African American literature shaped by Richard Wright.
Richard Wright: Black Boy (1945) - Autobiography.
Black writers wrestled with escaping or changing an unjust society.
Ralph Ellison: Invisible Man (1952) - Story of an unnamed black man ignored by America.
James Baldwin: Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953) - Wrote on race and sexuality.
Gwendolyn Brooks: First African American poet to win a Pulitzer Prize (1950).
Toni Morrison: The Bluest Eye (1970) - Focused on the lives of black women, Nobel Prize in 1993.
American novels took various forms: realist, metafictional, post-modern, absurdist, autobiographical, feminist, stream of consciousness.
The Beat movement had a lasting influence on American poetry.
Allen Ginsberg: Howl (1956) - Pushed aside traditional poetic conventions.