American Literature Notes
Colonial Times
In the 17th century, Europeans (German, French, Spanish) migrated to America, settling in Virginia.
From 1660, Puritans migrated from England to America, settling in New England.
Motives: religious freedom and prosperity.
English became the dominant language.
Puritan colonists wrote the first significant American literature, describing settler experiences and religious themes.
Harvard College was founded to educate men and women, especially in religious fields.
The 18th Century: The Enlightenment
Enlightenment writers believed in the inherent goodness of humanity, contrasting with the Puritan view of humans as sinful.
They emphasized reason and common sense.
Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson: typical Enlightenment writers.
Franklin: writer, printer, inventor, embodying the Enlightenment spirit through didactic works with moral advice and practical purpose.
Franklin invented the "tall tale": a short humorous story based on exaggerated lies (later used by Mark Twain).
Enlightenment literature: satiric prose pieces and poems in couplets in the manner of English neoclassicals.
The American Revolutionary Period
Conflicts arose between the English colonists and English authorities, leading to a movement for independence.
Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine expressed the idea of revolution and building a new nation.
Paine encouraged people to fight for independence.
Franklin persuaded Louis XVI to support the Americans in the war.
The Treaty of Paris was signed.
With America's victory in the War for Independence (1766), the United States of America was founded and The Declaration of Independence was written by Thomas Jefferson.
The Declaration of Independence: A statement of why America wanted its independence and a statement of basic human rights.
Famous statement: "All men are created equal."
The 19th Century: The Romantics: The American Renaissance
Desire for a uniquely American literature and culture.
American Renaissance: period from about 1830 to around the Civil War.
Literary nationalists called for a unique American literary style.
Washington Irving, Bryant, and Cooper: early figures.
Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, Whitman, Poe, Beecher Stowe, Dickinson, Longfellow, and Whittier: Later associated with the movement.
Every region of America started to be described by a leading writer:
Irving and Cooper: stories set in towns and wilderness of the U.S.
Bryant: natural beauties of New England.
Content was mainly American (setting, characters), but form and style were still modeled on English figures, like Wordsworth, Thomson, Scott, Addison, Steele, and neoclassical satirists.
Washington Irving
Wrote the first American short stories, Americanized versions of Dutch and German folk tales.
Masterpieces: "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" and "Rip Van Winkle."
"Rip Van Winkle": Rip sleeps for 20 years and awakes to find his wife dead, his daughter married, and America an independent country.
James Fennimore Cooper
First major American novelist.
Wrote about Native American life and frontier adventures in his Leatherstocking Tales.
Masterpiece: The Last of the Mohicans.
Novels told the story of Natty Bumpo: a skillful, brave woodsman.
Described the Indians and their way of life as well as the American natural landscape.
William Cullen Bryant
Described the beauties and details of New England hills and forests in his nature lyrics.
Thanatopsis shows a deep love and respect for nature.
Vividly described nature as a source of counsel, dreamy meditation, and delight, like Wordsworth.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
American short-story writer, poet, literary critic, and editor.
"The saddest and the strangest figure in American literary history."
Life
Full of struggle and disappointment.
Father deserted the family, and his mother died the following year.
Troubled relationship with his foster father.
Struggled to earn a living through his writings.
Poverty, illness, and the death of his young wife put a strain on his character.
Drank heavily, which damaged his health and brought about his death at 40.
School
Poe is one of the representatives of Dark Romanticism, a reaction to transcendentalism, which he strongly disliked, because of his concern with the supernatural, the mysterious, the Satanic, and the darker side of human nature.
Poe’s Work in General
Cultivated mystery and the macabre.
Works are characterized by terror, strangeness, and sadness, and are full of suspense.
Frequent theme: "death of a beautiful woman."
Interested in psychological horror; characters are tortured by strange thoughts, mysterious impulses, or nameless fears and longings.
Some works explore the chaos and terror of psychological disintegration and madness; e.g. "The Fall of the House of Usher".
An idealist and a visionary.
Works: often dreamy and surreal.
Fiction
One of the first American short-story writers.
Collection of short stories: Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque.
Wrote two kinds of stories: tales of supernatural horror and detective stories.
Best known fiction works: Gothic.
Method: putting his characters into unusual situations and describing their feelings of terror or guilt.
Famous for the startling effect of his tales of death (The Fall of the House of Usher, The Masque of the Red Death), his tales of wickedness and crime (The Black Cat, The Cask of Amontillado, The Tell-Tale Heart), his tales of survival after dissolution (Ligeia), and his tales of fatality.
Recurring themes: death, physical signs, the effects of decomposition, concerns of premature burial, the reanimation of the dead, and mourning.
Used the anguish of imminent death to cause the nerves to quiver.
Devised incidents to create terror in the reader.
Wrote about aristocratic madmen, self-tormented murderers, neurasthenic necrophiliacs, and other deviant types.
One of the creators of the modern detective story; e.g. "The Murders in the Rue Morgue."
Detective: Monsieur Dupin.
Influenced science fiction (Jules Verne).
Poetry
Poems: melancholy lyric beauty and highly musical.
Defined poetry as the "rhythmic creation of beauty."
Sought a transcendent world of inviolate idealistic beauty.
Wrote many poems about beautiful women who are now dead; e.g. "Anabelle Lee".
Tone best suited to beauty: sadness.
Poems: often contain supernatural elements.
Explored the possibility of experience beyond the factual, ordinary world.
Imagination: often carried him away from the material world into a dreamland.
Mixed sadness with horror; e.g. “The Raven.”
More popular in Europe than in the United States.
Deeply admired by French authors; e.g. Maupassant.
Considered to be the founder of modern Symbolist poetry.
Literary Criticism
Believed that beauty was the "essence of the poem."
Disliked didacticism.
Thought poetry should appeal only to the sense of beauty, and that its goal is pleasure, not truth; so he set himself against realistic details in poetry and became an advocate of art for art’s sake.
Believed that the appropriate tone associated with beauty is sadness.
Formulated several rules for the short story:
A work of quality should be brief and should focus on a specific single mood or effect.
The chief aim of a tale writer should be to create an effect on the reader’s mind and feelings.
Both poetry and prose should be short enough to be read at one sitting; otherwise the unity of effect would be dissipated.
The chief aim of a writer should be to create an effect upon the reader’s mind and feeling through the contribution of all the elements of the story: events, character, setting, imagery, language, etc.
He should therefore start by deciding what effect he wanted to create and then should make every happening and word help achieve it.
Annabel Lee
Poem included in the provided transcript as an example of Poe's poems.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
American essayist, lecturer, and poet.
Influenced by optimism and his Puritan background.
Ancestors were priests.
Went to Harvard Divinity school, but disagreed with the methods of the Church and questioned Christian doctrines.
Resigned and went to England, meeting Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Carlyle.
Carlyle’s Platonic worldview had a deep and lasting influence on his thought.
Formulated his philosophy in Nature.
Popular lecturer.
Believed in the moral and didactic role of literature: art for life’s sake—or moral’s sake.
The most influential American writer.
Transcendentalism
American literary and philosophical movement of the 19th century.
"Romanticism in Puritan soil."
Originated in German Idealism with Kant and influenced Coleridge and Carlyle.
A core belief: the inherent goodness of people and nature.
The superiority of intuition to intellect.
Mystical view: deeper truths exist beneath surface appearances.
Truths should be sought through feelings and immediate intuitive perception.
Transcendentalism: "the recognition in man of the capacity of knowing truth intuitively, (something you know without reasoning; a knowledge coming from within the human spirit) or of attaining knowledge transcending (going beyond) the reach of the senses."
Emerson is a mystic, believing that man can see deep inner meanings beneath the surface of things.
The secret of life lies not in the head but in the heart: The Truth lies in feelings, but it is imagination that finds it. Imagination is an instrument of insight into a truth above the field of the senses.
Outstanding American Transcendentalists: Emerson and Thoreau.
God is everywhere, in man and in nature.
Pantheism: Emerson saw God as inherent in nature and rejected views of God as separate from the world. He said that man should not see nature as something to be used; man’s relationship with nature transcends the idea of usefulness.
The whole material universe is an emblem of a deeper reality.
Nature, to the sensitive human spirit, was a revelation taking the place of the Bible.
Natural images like these created a kind of language. Through this language they discovered ideas already planted in the human soul.
Nature had an important place in Emerson’s life and thought.
He believed in man’s spiritual relation to nature, in kinship and correspondence of man with nature: The spirit within man is the same as the spirit within nature. Nature is a living being speaking to the soul in a language that feeling and imagination could understand. It is a personality, a friend, even a divine friend that sympathizes with man’s sorrows, works upon his feelings, speaks to him of beauty, freedom, peace, happiness, touches him with intimations of high truth.
No man placed a higher value than Emerson on the latent powers of every man.
God could best be found by looking inward into one's own self, one's own soul.
He preached the limitless powers and capacities of man, of every individual no matter how common. He believed in the divine nature of man: he magnified the spark of divinity that seems to touch man, till the self appeared to be God.
The supreme importance of the individual: “Self-Reliance”: his most famous essay: an expression of individualism. It shows the influence of Rousseau. In this essay his faith in the religion of the self is at its height.
Paradoxically, at the same time that men are different, they are also the same.
Henry David Thoreau
American writer and essayist, born in Concord, Massachusetts.
A follower of Emerson and Transcendentalism, he was an eccentric and an individualist.
Deeply influenced by reading Emerson’s Nature.
Similar opinions to Emerson.
Studied in Harvard, but started to live alone in a cabin he built for himself on the shore of Walden Pond.
Works were not well-received during his life.
The inner life: Transcendentalism encourages man to transcend the materialistic world of experience and facts and become conscious of the pervading spirit of the universe and the potentialities for human freedom.
Tried to rise above the material for the sake of his spiritual freedom and happiness.
Wanted to explore the inner life.
Rejected the things ordinary people desire in life, such as money and possessions.
Emphasized the search for true wisdom.
Tried to live as simply and self-sufficiently as possible.
Wanted to set his time free for leisure.
The plain independent life in nature.
Believed in self-realization through a life lived in harmonious appreciation of and coexistence with nature, a life lived organically in communion with nature, disciplined by the seasons, by the economy of self-support, and by the tension between the civilized and the primitive.
Interest in nature.
Nature is the key to great truths.
Believed in the mystical idea that God is everywhere: in nature (pantheism) and in men’s hearts.
Wild Nature.
Walden describes the life of wild creatures and plants as well as his own among them.
Thoreau is best known for his masterpiece, Walden, or Life in the Woods, which described his two-year experiment in simple life in solitude in nature.
Encouraged people to live sincere, joyful lives.
Individualism.
Demanded for all men the freedom to follow unique lifestyles, to make poems of their lives and make living itself an art.
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Short story writer and novelist born in Salem, Massachusetts.
His ancestors had been early Puritan settlers in America.
Hawthorne felt guilty about these facts and felt that his family was paying for these unjust actions.
Influence of Puritan New England on his Themes.
He was strongly impressed in his boyhood with the Puritan tradition of New England.
He believed that he had inherited many of the traits of his Puritan ancestors.
Although he didn’t personally share the Puritan view of life, he agreed with his ancestors in focusing on the problem of sin: In his works he often explored the ideas of original sin, the natural depravity of humans, the sinful human heart, preoccupation with guilt, the claims of law and conscience, the problem of evil, the nature of sin, the contrast of pride and humility, and man’s consciousness of sin. His themes include loneliness, isolation, waste, and evil.
Didactic: He believed that literature should point a moral. His works have moral intentions and probe into complex ethical problems.
Subjects and Setting: Hawthorne had deep interest in the Puritan past of the 17th century New England. He drew upon historical incidents and legends of the past for his material. He always wrote about man in society, rather than simply about man in nature. His characters usually have some secret guilt or problem which keeps them at a distance from other people. They are troubled by pride, envy, or the desire for revenge. Remembering his dangerous tendency to break with the world, he constantly dealt with man’s relationship with his fellows. Often he pictured the difficulties of individuals cut off from society by oversensitiveness and aggressiveness.
Interest in wild nature: He set his work in the old Puritan forest.
Dark Romanticism.
The Dark side of Human nature.
Hawthorne attacked the Transcendentalists for ignoring those doubts which “darken over the world.” He believed that they had failed to deal with difficulties as doubt and sin in human life. His work is thus profound in its treatment of life's darker side, the side that the Puritans had freely acknowledged but that Hawthorne's contemporaries often chose to ignore.
Gothic Elements: Hawthorne’s interest in the dark part of the human mind caused him to create tales similar to those of the Gothic novelists. He shared the feeling of the Romantic movement for the strange and mysterious. He was attracted by the horrors and mysteries of Gothic literature. But perversion, horror and mystery and the like are never with him, as they were with Poe, merely materials for aesthetic use.
Mixture of Realistic and Unrealistic elements in his works.
Favorite techniques: allegory and symbol; His stories often have a strong allegorical quality
Symbols: Hawthorne also shared the feeling of the Romantic movement for symbolical imagination. His art is above all an art of symbols. He often uses a symbol, or clusters of symbols from the concrete world, to give body to his spiritual meaning. e.g. the scarlet letter itself takes on a wider significance and application that is out of all proportion to its literal character as a scrap of cloth. His symbols often mean various things. Some critics considered this ambiguity a defect in Hawthorne’s art, a sign of weakness and confusion; while later critics believed that it was a sign of strength, an enrichment of meaning and effect.
Criticism of Puritanism: He was skeptical of the Puritan theology and found the old intolerance repugnant.
Psychological Insight: Hawthorne is a psychological type of literary artist, analyzing the inner life, the workings of the human heart and will. He carefully describes the psychology of his characters.
The Scarlet Letter, a tragedy in the form of a novel with a tight structure.
The House of the Seven Gables: is a somber study in hereditary sin based on the legend of a curse pronounced on Hawthorne's own family by a woman condemned to death during the witchcraft trials.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
American abolitionist and author.
Worked hard to end slavery in U.S.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an anti-slavery novel; vividly describes the difficult life and sufferings of the enslaved African Americans and the oppressions and horrors they faced.
Had a direct and powerful influence on American history.
Inspired the people of the northern states against slavery and thus brought about the American Civil War.
Herman Melville
American novelist, short-story writer, and poet, regarded as one of the greatest authors in American literature.
School: dark romanticism: his works deal with the dark side of life.
Period: American Renaissance
Proved that great fiction could come out of intense adventurous experience.
Life at sea was to become the most important material for his books and short stories.
Voyages on whalers: inspired his whaling novel, Moby Dick.
He drew his material from his readings and his own experiences as a sailor.
Melville was a friend and admirer of Hawthorne and dedicated his Moby Dick to him.
Moby Dick: perhaps the greatest novel of American literature.
An extremely complex work: an epic, a tragedy, a novel, an accurate treatise on the whaling industry, and a spiritual autobiography.
Contents of Moby Dick
Realistic picture of whaling in the South Seas: pictures life on a whaling ship with realistic facts and details in the South Seas
An exciting adventure story.
Captain Ahab: has been crazed by his desire for revenge and obsessed with the belief that the whale is the emblem of the malice and the evil of the universe, searches the 7 seas obsessively on the Piquod to kill the white whale that bit off his leg; when he finds the whale and attacks him, his ship is destroyed. Ahab himself is pulled down into the sea to his death.
Symbol and allegory: voyage and the whale are both symbolic.
Deep religious spirit.
Melville’s works, man lives in a world divided into 2 warring parts: good against evil, God against Satan, the head against the heart.
Has a tragic view of life.
Billy Budd: Provoked by a false charge, the young sailor Billy Budd, who represents the goodness of human nature, accidentally kills the evil satanic master-at-arms who is his enemy. In a time of threatened mutiny he is hanged, going willingly to his fate. Thus the two destroy each other. Melville seems to be saying that the world has no place for pure goodness or pure evil.
Style: Similar to Hawthorne’s: Both of them were concerned with similar problems: the secret workings in men’s souls, the mixture of the imaginary and reality, the use of symbol and allegory, to suggest moral meanings. His style was also deeply influenced by the Bible, Shakespeare, Milton; and he alluded to them abundantly, echoing and imitating them. He had a rich vocabulary; His habits include exaggerated repetition of words, unusual adjective-noun combinations, and long, elaborate sentence structures.
Walt Whitman (1819-92)
Late Romantic American poet.
Lived in New York, working as a teacher, editor and journalist.
Little formal schooling, but read extensively from Shakespeare, Homer, and Dante.
His most influential collection of poems is Leaves of Grass.
One of his well-known poems, “O Captain! My Captain!” was written on the death of Abraham Lincoln.
Was part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works.
His work was praised by Emerson and Thoreau.
Celebrated democracy, nature, love, and friendship.
Subjectivity
Chief function of the poet was to express his own personality in his verse.
The Precious Uniqueness of Every Man
Self-Pride
Universal Sympathy
Men are basically the same, so all the powers and privileges which lie in any, lie in all.
Glorification of the Common Man
Described himself as a rough workingman in it, a natural, earthy man, intending to show the ideas, beliefs, emotions, and experiences of the common man in a great period of American individualism.
Optimism
Nationalistic Spirit
America’s national poet.
Democracy
Champion of democracy and equality.
Realism
Form and Style
To communicate the spirit of modern, democratic America, he abandoned the confining poetic forms of his day and aimed instead at a freer verse form based on organic principle, a form not imposed upon but growing out of content. To him, message was always more important than form. He wrote without the usual poetic ornaments, in a plain style, so that ordinary people would read him.
Importance
Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is a landmark in the history of American literature.
Mark Twain
Real name: Samuel Langhorne Clemens.
Pseudonym: derived from the leadsman’s call for safe water.
School: realism
Local Colorist Style: Twain used the everyday colloquial American speech in his works, and thus set a new style in fiction. He created an American literature built on American themes and language.
Life: Twain was reared in Missouri in a small Mississippi river community in slaveholding times. Watched river boats, seeing the people who passed through, fishing, and roaming the nearby woods, hearing many Indian legends and listening to the stories of the black slaves became the basis for many of his storiesInfluenced By the life of the riverHis Mississippi River stories:
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
*Adventures of Huckleberry Finn said to set a new style in fiction
American Naturalists:
Naturalism often shows man’s helplessness in determining his life and fate
Biological Determinism
*Man is helpless in controlling his life and destiny as he is constantly at the mercy of powerful inner and outer forces. His life is largely determined by his character, a result of heredity, over which he has no control
Sociological Determinism
*Naturalism often shows how the life and character of human beings are determined or even destroyed by social problems:Human beings are constantly struggling with social conventions, poverty, and social abuses; their lives are often embittered and even destroyed by social problems.
Stephen Crane
Best Known For The Red Badge of Courage
Also known for Maggie, a Girl of the Streets, The Open Boat
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Life
Was a modernist and part of the lost generation. Lost generation describes the post-World War 1 generation
The Jazz Age
Fitzgerald gave the name to this era
Ernest Hemingway
His lifestyle was extremely adventurous and used this in his writings
*His writings were simple and direct
William Faulkner
His works talk about:
* Family
*History of his hometown
*Decadence of the south
#T.S. Elliot
*Used Christian allisuions