Download Fakulta humanitných vied UMB, Banská Bystrica

Fakulta humanitných vied UMB, Banská Bystrica,
Katedra anglistiky a amerikanistiky
M-UAAJ-102
AMERICAN LITERATURE 1
Školský rok:
Semester:
Hodinová dotácia:
Vyučujúci:
2010/2011
letný
1/2
PhDr. Katarína Feťková, PhD.
WEEK 1
1. Introduction
Texts for the seminar to be annotated and prepared for the discussion:
1. Periods of American Literature and Their Characteristics (Abrams)
2. The Literature of European Settlement (HA-146-148)
Periods of American Literature
1. Colonial Period
2. Revolutionary Age
3. Early National Period
4. Romantic Period, the American Renaissance, the Age of Transcendentalism
The division of American literature in to convenient historical segments, or „periods“ lacks the fairly clear consensus
among literary scholars that we find with reference to English literature. The many syllabi of college surveys reprinted
in Reconstructing American Literature (ed. Paul Lauter, 1983) demonstrates how variable are the temporal divisions
and their names, especially since the recent efforts to do greater justice to literature written by women and by ethnic
minorities.
A number of recent historians, anthologists, and teachers of American literature simply divide their survey into dated
sections, without affixing period names. A prominent tendency, however, is to recognize the importance of major wars
in marking significant changes in literature. This tendency, as the American scholar Cushing Strout has remarked,
„suggests that there is an order in American political history more visible and compelling than that indicated by
specifically literary or intellectual categories“.
The following divisions of American literary history recognize the importance assigned by many literary historians to
the Revolutionary War (1775 – 81), the Civil War (l861 – 65), World War I (1914 – 1918), and World War II (19391944). Under these broad divisions are listed some of the more widely used terms to distinguish periods and subperiods
of American literature.
This terms, it will be noted, are diverse in kind: they may signify a span of time, or else a form of political
organization, or a prominent intellectual or imaginative mode, or a predominant literary form.
I. COLONIAL PERIOD (1607 – 1775)
(Overall era, from the founding o f the first settlement
at Jamestown to the outbreak of the American Revolution)
Writings were for (he most part religious, practical, or historical. Notable among the 17th century writers of journals
and narratives concerning the founding and early history of some of the colonies were William Bradford, John
Winthorp and the theologian Cotton Mather. One of the leaders of the first permanent British settlement in America
was John Smith, whose most writings belong to the genre of travel literature.
In the following century Jonathan Edwards was a major philosopher as well as theologian, and Benjamin Franklin
an early American master of lucid and cogent prose. Not until 1937, when Edward Taylor's writings were first
published from manuscript, was he discovered to have been an able religious poet in the metaphysical style (of the
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English devotional poets Herbert and Crashaw). Anne Bradstreet was the chief Colonial poet of secular and domestic
as well as religious subjects.
The publication of 1773 of Poems on Various Subjects by Phillis Wheatley, then a nineteen-year-old slave who had
been born in Africa, inaugurated the long and distinguished, but until recently neglected, line of AFRICANAMERICAN writers in America. The unique complexity and diversity of the African-American cultural heritage –
both Western and African, oral and written, salve and free, Judeo-Christian and pagan, plantation and urban,
integrationist and Black nationalist – have effected tensions and fusions that, over the course of time, have produced a
highly innovative and distinctive literature, as well as musical forms that have forms that to be considered America's
unique contribution to the Western musical tradition.
TEXT for the Seminar
The Literature of European Settlement (ethnocenticity, Puritan thought, models, forms of literature, privileged
genres, representatives). In: Heath Anthology Volume I, pp. 146 – 148.
The European settlers who came to the new world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries left the old world at the height
of a rebirth of interest in the arts and sciences, an interest based upon the Renaissance rediscovery of classical texts about strange lands and
pagan gods, about epic wars and superhuman heroes. The new world offered the earliest explorers and settlers a pristine contemporary arena
in which they could test themselves, and create new texts of life experience. The explorers and settlers produced epic poems (like
Villagra's history of New Mexico) that render the Spaniards' battles according to classical models like Virgil's Aeneid, and imposing epic
histories (like those of Bradford and Winthrop), histories based upon the Biblical past of Israelite heroes who could be reformulated in the
context of the new world.
Spain and France and England (along with the Netherlands) were competing for territory, for the domination of the environment and its
peoples, surely; but they competed for the language of dominance as well. That is, the Spanish, French, and English settlers who came to
America knew that if they could find the language in which they could best promote interest in their colonial efforts, their efforts would be
funded and thus secure. The competition was not just among the different nations, however—not just Spain against France and then,
after the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588, England against Spain and France. The competition was within each group as well. And
the competition was rendered primarily in the English language, for the English settlement efforts—coming as they did after Spain's
loss of power at sea and loss of funding at home—occurred at a particularly fortuitous time for England.
Englishman fought Englishman in order to have his report be the one favored by patrons. If he did not succeed in keeping the power in
the colony, then he wrote his own report. At Jamestown, for instance, John Smith competed for dominance with John Newport and with
Edward Maria Wingfield, a man who in old England was his social superior. Smith's and Wingfield's reports, written for those in England
who did (or might) fund the colony, stress their own abilities and profess forthrightness while placing blame for failures upon others whom
they call recalcitrant, lazy, and unhappy. And the reports of those like Smith and Wingfield who were in power in Virginia show only one
side of the conflict of opinion. Smith and Wingfield had their differences, and each wished to air his position precisely because he sought
to establish his own power center and remain in the colony. But others who traveled to Jamestown, like Richard Frethorne, an
indentured servant, were powerless from the start, and they wished only to return home. The letters from people like Frethorne, in fact,
provide an intriguing corrective to the promotional (and self-promotional) efforts of those who had power. .
For different reasons, a competition between factions of the settlers likewise emerged in New England. William Branford’s tale of
Thomas Morton's activities among the Indians of the Plymouth colony could not silence Morton, who told his own version of the story
in New English Canaan, a discourse devised from a Renaissance rhetoric based upon classical satire. Telling of his mistreatment at the
hands of the too-serious Separatists, Morton offered a version of the Puritan past rarely considered because it was a discourse that
lost the battle for power in the new world. The language of the Puritans was the one that prevailed.
The Puritan discourse was one based upon the plainness of the Geneva Bible, (which they preferred above the Anglican King James
version); the Puritan text was the one established in the Old and New Testaments. Like the Israelites of old, Branford’s pilgrims
searching for their holy city were engaged in an epic battle, not just for their own survival but for the hereafter. Winthrop's group of
Congregationalist Puritans had a similar purpose. On board the ship Arbella Winthrop cautioned his listeners that "we must be knit
together in this work as one man," so that they could "find that the God of Israel is among us," making them "a praise and glory, that
men shall say of succeeding plantations: the lord make it like that of New England." The Puritans were setting up a new world colony
for the chosen people of God, as prophesied in the Bible, so that the kingdom of Israel would be theirs.
This ethnocentric world view caused the Puritans no little trouble. To set up such a colony, whether in Plymouth or in Massachusetts
Bay, those in power had to find a way to quell dissident voices. As Bradford banished Morton, so Winthrop and the magistrates
banished Roger Williams and Anne Hutchinson. Too interested (the Puritans thought) in the languages of others, like the Native
Americans who were being supplanted by the missionizing and messianic Puritans, Williams established his own community in
Providence, where Anne Hutchinson eventually landed, after she too had been exiled from Massachusetts Bay. Whatever could not
fall within the centered, mainstream ideology so precariously established was considered satanic and was not tolerated.
One way the Puritans implemented their mainstream ideology was by establishing texts that would effect their cultural ends.
Michael Wigglesworth’s Day of Doom (1662), a poem that offered in doleful but easily memorized verse a Puritan catechism,, proved
a means to the end of Puritan acculturation. The Ray Psalm Book (1640) and The New-England Primer (1683?) likewise served as
vehicles for cultural formation. All three texts offered Puritan doctrine and social lessons in linguistic forms that could be readily
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learned (and, it was hoped, practiced). The Bay Psalm Book, which took advantage of colonists' memories of popular songs and
ballads from England, proved an especially useful and adaptable means by which church dignitaries could inculcate their messages.
Although the Puritans' world was fairly inflexible, hierarchical in structure, and uncompromising, most of Renaissance culture was
similarly devised along rigidly imposed social and religious lines. And the Puritans, though they were in New England, were
conversant with that culture, as most notably evidenced by their poetry. Anne Bradstreet's poems, like Edward Taylor's and those of
the seventeenth-century wits after her, deploy devices common in European continental literature. (The nightingale Bradstreet
mentions in “Contemplations“, for instance, is merely a figure of speech; nightingales were not indigenous to New England.) Although
there was much prose, poetry, the privileged genre of the Renaissance, was written in the new world as well as in the old. Common
Renaissance poetic genres—meditations, lyrics, pastorals, sonnets—all contribute to the canon of the earliest American literature.
Yet the form of literature most often noted in early American literature was the diary. Attuned as they were to their own spiritual
quests for salvation, Puritans preoccupied themselves with their inner psychological states so as to assess the states of their souls. By
recording their experiences in diaries, they could map their journeys toward salvation. Such inward contemplation is evident in the diary
of Samuel Sewall, whose outward social success imperiously competed with the success of his inward soul. Sewall's inner turmoils, his
questioning about his motives for entering church membership and courting Katherine Winthrop, provide a record of the signal
conflicts of his time, a time when Puritanism began to wane amidst a vastly changing world.
The changing world worried Cotton Mather, who sought in vain among those of his generation for signs of the strength of Puritans of
old. Earthquakes, hailstorms, Indian attacks, witches in New England, and his own inability to get the recognition he thought he
deserved all evidenced to Mather that God was striking back at his generation for lacking the strength of their forefathers. But the evolution of his society was inevitable. More people were coming safely to the colonies, and more children were surviving to adulthood.
Increased population brought a growing economy and trade and contributed to a general breakdown of the tight social order
established by the earliest settlers.
Changes in the Puritans' lives meant change in the lives of their Native American neighbors as well. In the 1670s, when Puritans'
settlements had overtaken the most desirable portions of the Connecticut River valley and displaced the native populations to less
fertile lands, Metacomet (King Philip) struck back. But the pan-Indian alliance (of Wampanoag, Nipmuck, and Narragansett tribes)
was quickly broken by the more stable establishments of the Puritans, who subsequently ransomed captives like those in the
Rowlandson family. Like Juan Ortiz and Cabeza de Vaca (who were taken captive among Indians after a shipwreck of the Narváez
group off the Texas coast), Mary Rowlandson was forced to experience life on the other side, among those whom she had been
acculturated to consider beneath her, even to abhor. Rowlandson's Puritan captivity narrative, like that of John Williams, locates the
otherness of the Indians in the paganism of the heathen in the Old Testament. That she survived to be redeemed meant for Rowlandson
a double gain: redemption back into the Puritan community and redemption into God's hands.
The native populations in New England were not the only populations to revolt against the antagonizing encroachments of the
Europeans. Intermittent revolts had occurred against English and Dutch groups settled all along the eastern coast, from present-day
Maine to the Car-olinas. Yet the revolt that perhaps most dismayed Europeans occurred not in an English settlement in the Northeast
but in a Spanish settlement in the Southwest. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 shocked the Spanish Empire, which had assumed that its
hold on the southwestern areas would remain unquestioned by the native populations who had seemed to acquiesce to Spanish
dominion. Within a matter of days, the uprising of the Pueblo Indians left 21 missionaries and some 400 colonists dead. Viewed
historically, the revolt dealt a severe blow to the Spanish effort to colonize. It stands, according to the Smithsonian Institution's Handbook of
the North American Indian, as the most spectacular victory achieved by Indian arms within the present-day limits of the United States.
While the Puritans were attempting to forge for England a tightly focused, introspective, and concentrated community in the Northeast,
the Spanish were traversing and attaining thousands of miles of territory for Spain and the Catholic Church. Their territorial claims
would not be contested for several more years. What has become clear, however, is that both the English and Spanish, testing themselves against the environment and the native populations, created new world texts after their own images.
Carla Mulford
Pennsylvania Slate University
II. REVOLUTIONARY AGE
(The period between the Stamp Act of 1765 and 1790)
It was the time of Thomas Paine’s influential revolutionary tracts; of Thomas Jefferson´s Statute of Virginia for
Religious Freedom, Declaration of Independence, and many other writings; of The Federalist Papers in support of the
Constitution, most notably those by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison; and of the patriotic and satiric poems
by Philip Freneau and Joel Barlow.
Self-study:
Enlightenment Voices, Revolutionary Visions (open revolt against English rule, conflicting opinions about human
nature, philosophies of John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, interest in natural sciences, patriotic literature
promoting Enlightenment ideals and American independence pro-American view of B. Franklin, pamphlets, the
Declaration of Independence). In: Heath Anthology, Volume I., pp. 774 – 776.
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III. EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD
(The years 1775 – 1828 ending with the triumph of Jacksonian democracy in 1828,
signalized the emergence of a national imaginative literature)
Important events:
 the first American comedy (Royal Tyler's The Contrast, 1787);
 the earliest American novel (William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy, 1789);
 the establishment in 1815 of the first enduring American magazine, The North American Review.
Washington Irving achieved international fame with his essays and stories; Charles Brockden Brown wrote
authentic American versions of the GOTHIC NOVEL of mystery and terror; the career of James Fennimore Cooper,
the first major American novelist, was well launched; and William Cullen Bryant and Edgar Allan Poe wrote poetry
that was relatively independent of English precursors. In the year 1760 was published the first of a long series of
SLAVE NARRATIVES and autobiographies written by Black slaves who had escaped or been freed. Most of these
were published between 1830 and 1865, including Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
(1845) and Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861).
Self-study:
1. Myths, Tales and Legends (functions of myths in the society, their origins and creation, African-American oral
cu1ture, „unrealistic“ characters, descriptions of deep and disturbing psychological states and powerful social
conflicts). In: Heath Anthology, Vol. I., pp. 1214 – 1216.
2. Exploration of an American Self (basic issues to be „a person“ in democracy, self reliance, impulses of
Romanticism, conception of an American self). In: Heath Anthology, Vol. I., pp. 1450 – 1451.
IV. ROMANTIC PERIOD, sometimes known also as
the AMERICAN RENAISSANCE, or else as the AGE OF TRANSCENDENTALISM
(The span 1828-1865 from the Jacksonian era to the Civil War marks
the full coming of age of a native American literature).
The term the Age o f Transcendentalism is used after the philosophical and literary movement, centered on Ralph
Waldo Emerson, that was dominant in New England. In all major literary genres except drama, writers produced
works of an originality and excellence not exceeded in later American history.
Emerson, Henry David Thoreau and the early feminist Margaret Fuller shaped the ideas, ideals, and literary aims of
many contemporary and later American writers. It was the age not only of continuing writings by William Cullen
Bryant, Washington Irving, and James Fennimore Cooper, but also the novels and short stories of Poe,
Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the southern novelist William Gilmore Simms, of the
poetry of Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and the most innovative and
influential of all American poets, Walt Whitman; and of the beginning of distinguished American criticism in the
essays of Poe, Simms and James Russell Lowell. The tradition of African-American publications of poetry by women
was continued by Francis Ellen Watkins Harper, and the African-American novel was inaugurated by William
Wells Brown's Clotel (1853) and by Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig (1859).
Self-study:
1. Flowering of Narrative (romances about the darker side of human experience, „classic“ writers of fiction, women
writers group and their concerns expressed in so-called „domestic“ fiction – more realistic tradition, models in events
and personages drawn in British 18th century adventure novels, diversity of forms). In: Heath Anthology, Vol. I., pp.
2063 – 2065.
2. The Emergence of American Poetic Voices (the poetic mainstream constituted in American literature, „School
Room Poets“, ,,sorrow songs“, different kinds of poetry, Poe's reputation in France. Whitman's and Dickenson’s
distinctively American poetic style). In: Heath Anthology, Vol. I., pp. 2638 – 2640.
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