American Literature Mrs. Jestice

English 3

August 23

“In 1492 . . . Columbus sailed the ocean blue,” financed by King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCpTIn66Nd0

ROMEO AND JULIET

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2ClSABkDp8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRdxUFDoQe0

The United Kingdom

New World Settlers

American Folklore

Davy Crockett

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txcRQedoEyY

Puritans—1620’s

American values and character shaped by the moral,

ethical, and religious convictions of the Puritans, who

arrived in 1620 and by 1640, 20,000 Puritans had

arrived.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2eMkth8FWno

andhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k

3jt5ibfRzw

LAWS OF NEW ENGLANDRELIGIOUS EXTREMISMWE INHERITED—WORK ETHIC, DEMAND FOR JUSTICE, DESIRE FOR EQUALITY

Strict adherence to the Bible

Heaven and Hell

Bland clothing

Puritan Feudalism?

WITCH HUNTS . . .

American Literary Timeline

From 1750 to 1865

Classicism (Age of Reason)

American Romanticism

Early Romanticism 1800-1840

Historical setting: • Nationalism – the struggle, long after

independence, to establish the US as a “real” country.

• Economically, struggled for independence

• Industrial Revolution – cities and factories

• Manifest Destiny – westward expansion meant more land for farming, more roads, canals, and attempts at better communication.

• Divisions – country was so big, communication still poor, so many political factions developed

• In 1837, President Jackson warned that internal divisions were the greatest threat facing America.

(Have things changed today…?)

Writers and philosophers emphasized…

• Intuition and imagination – not reason --to be freed from conventional thinking--inner life & one’s irrational mind were explored --be able to see the inner, infinite reality of Nature and Man

• Potential for social and spiritual development –YET still valued individual over society.

• Nature as a way to recover natural/moral virtues that are corrupted by society

• Humanitarian concern for “common man”

Writers emphasized…

• Nature – beautiful, strange, mysterious, in constant change

• The past – as a result of AND to create more nationalism – wanting to create a unique American tradition/folklore (Irving, Cooper)

• Inner world of human nature – to find emotional truths (Bryant, Cooper) or examine the irrationality of the human mind (Poe)

Authors and styles include…

Edgar Allan Poe

– short stories,

essays

James Fenimore Cooper –novels

Washington Irving –legends, folktales, short stories

William Cullen Bryant –poetry

Major events include…

1803 – Louisiana Purchase

1804-1806 – Lewis & Clark explore new land

1812-1814 – second war with England

1823 – Monroe Doctrine (US would oppose any

European expansion in the Western Hemisphere)

1825 – Erie Canal opens in New York

1828 – construction begins on B&O Railroad

1836 – Morris invents the telegraph

American Romanticism

1820-1865

National Optimism

• Rapid expansion of US population

• Agricultural advancement

• Industrial advancement

• Frontier

• Technological advancements

•Completion of the Erie Canal•Vulcanization of rubber•First railroads•Reaping machine•The Revolver•Telegraph lines•Drilling of the first oil wells

Issues Undermining Nat’l Optimism

1. SECTIONALISM

– North vs. South

• Economic security/superiority

• Slavery expansion

• Political leadership

– Created compromises of 1820, 1833, and 1850

American Renaissance (a.k.a. Late Romanticism)

1840-1860

Historical setting:• Extreme growth – spread across continent,

population doubled, industrialization, widespread poverty, little education

• Nationalism and optimism

• Slavery issue began to dominate – anti-slavery poets Lowell, Whittier, Thoreau.

Reform efforts• Establish unions, utopian communities

• Adult education (through speakers, libraries, museums, newspapers, etc.) and tax-supported public education in all states by 1860

• Women’s Rights Movement:--Before: women couldn’t vote, make legal decisions, wife beating was legal almost every state--Increased public schools = increased job opportunities for women = other job opportunities--Women became very involved in all reform efforts--National right to vote in 1920, but Colorado allowed it in 1898.

2. CIVIL WAR (N); WAR between the STATES (S)

– South left devastated

– Five billion dollars spent

– 600,000 men dead

– Constitutional questions of secession and slavery settled, but left “grim wounds of bitterness and hatred” that are still healing.

3. CULTURAL PROVINCIALISM

– To do more with lit. than politics

– No international copyright laws• Works from Europe pirated by

American publishing companies

• American writers received little critical or monetary encouragement to develop their talent.

– Limited perspective and expectations of American readers.

– Was American writing to be universal and comparable to the great works of Europe?

• Broader view that wound up prevailing

• (Thank goodness!)

• Aided by the achievement of Romantic writers

European Romanticism?

• Early 1800’s-1850

• Fueled by desire for independence

• Shelley, Keats, Lord Byron

• Jane Austen

American Romanticism

• Roots in Europe

• In the U.S., it ran from 1820-1865

• Of all the literary and philosophical movements, this one has probably most affected the perception of people’s relationships to others and to God.

Romance: Less formal version of epic

Noble character on a series of adventures

Pastoral setting

Love interest and the idealization of women

Roots in medieval France

Resurrected and recreated in Britain starting around 1798

Carried across the water to America

Characteristics of American Literary Romanticism

1. INDIVIDUALISM

– Popularized by the frontier tradition

– Jacksonian democracy

– Abolitionism

Rejection of the Puritan belief in total depravity:Based on the teachings of John Locke and J.J. Rouseau

People were naturally benevolent Mind was a tabula rosa at birth Corrupted by institutions that

sought to dehumanize individualsPeople worth highlighting are those

closest to Nature

Rousseau’s “noble savage” British poets’ pastoral people as main

characters

2. IMAGINATION

– Reaction against the earlier age’s emphasis on Reason

– Abandonment of literary tradition in favor of experimentation

– “Organicism”: every idea held within it an inherent structure

3. EMOTION

– Feeling is now considered superior to rationality as the mode of perceiving and experiencing reality

– Intuition leads one to truth

– Truth/reality are now highly subjective

4. NATURE

– The means of knowing Truth

• God reveals himself solely through Nature

• Nature becomes a moral teacher

– The actual subject matter of the Romantics

Edenic and untouched by Adam’s

fall

A retreat for men U.S. lit. full of lavish descriptions of Nature U.S. lit. different in the sense of wild

Nature vs. Europe’s cultivated Nature

Literature• A huge amount, of a high quality

• Nationalistic, but became universal too

• Two main different ideas in philosophy/ writing at this time:

and

Transcendentalism

• Form of idealism

• Term originated with Immanuel Kant

• People should “transcend” or rise above the lower animistic impulses of life and move from the rational to the spiritual

• Truth, in other words, is not discovered through the 5 senses

• Human soul is part of the Oversoul or universal spirit, which it returns to at a person’s death

• This Oversoul/ Life Force is part of everyone

• Oversoul can be found anywhere, so pilgrimages are not necessary

• Ultimately a pantheistic set of religious ideas

• Nature has spiritual manifestations, so God can be found in Nature

• Death is never to be feared, for once we die, we merely pass to the Oversoul

• Emphasis placed on the here and now

American Authors

1.WASHINGTON IRVING(1783-1859)

– Not so much fiction as “sketches”

– Distinctly American settings and characters

– The History of New York• Narrator: Diedrich Knickerbocker

• “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”

THE KNICKERBOCKERS

2. JAMES FENIMORE COOPER(1789-1851)

Not a very accurate portrayal of the French-Indian War

Not a very accurate picture of Native-Americans

Praised more for what he attempted than what he actually wrote.

NEW ENGLAND

SCHOOL

1. Henry Wadsworth

Longfellow

2. Oliver Wendell Holmes

3. John Greenleaf Whittier

4. James Russell Lowell

Popularized romantic ideas.

Minor influences, though

heavily anthologized

Emerson and Thoreau

• Believed universal truths lie beyond what we can know with our senses. --senses – we know the natural world--reason – use this knowledge to create new things--intuition – transcends the natural world – our souls relate to a world beyond the physical.

• God, humanity, and all of nature share a universal soul.

• Optimistic – nature is basically good, therefore man is basically good.

• Emphasis on the individual – everyone can experience God, try to understand the inner self (irrational mind) through reflection.

• Even people who disagreed with “Transcendentalism” found new self-awareness by relating to their inner selves and the natural world.

TRANSCENDENTAL OPTIMISTS

RALPH WALDO EMERSON (1803-1882)

Famous for poetry, Nature and “Self-Reliance”Lived off his wife’s estate after she died of TBInfluenced heavily by the British Romantic poetsSpokesman for transcendentalism who was very optimistic about humans’ benevolent natureSpent much of his life in Concord, MassLectured and made the rounds as a proponent of transcendentalism

TRANSCENDENTAL OPTIMISTS

HENRY DAVID THOREAU(1817-1862)

Probably best known for Civil DisobediencePracticed his own preachingInfluenced future leaders

• Walden• I went to the woods because I

wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear, nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life . . ."

• WALT WHITMAN(1819-1892)

• Leaves of Grass

• “Song of Myself”

• “O Captain, My Captain”

• Poetry is almost stream-of-consciousness

• Poetry very sexually frank for its day

• Free verse

EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-1849)

In his short stories and poetry applied universal standards of literary criticism. Developed the American short story; brevity concept.

TRANSCENDETAL

PESSIMISTS

Hawthorne and Melville

• Saw in nature and mankind things that contradicted “transcendentalism” ideas--man is NOT godlike--evil DOES exist

• Somewhat pessimistic:--mix of good and evil in even the loftiest goals--always a gap between desires and results--humanity is an “uneven balance” --search for “usable truth” – knowledge of human limitations

NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE(1804-1864)

The Scarlet Letter: universal problem of guilt set against American-Puritan values

HERMAN MELVILLE: Moby Dick

(1819-1891) Universal theme of

evil with the

vehicle of the

whaling industry

And a few other random authors…

• Brahmins – socially high-caste, intellectual poets who weren’t affected by Transcendentalist ideas. --The “establishment” – distinguished, good taste poetry. --Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell

• Emily Dickinson – didn’t influence Transcendentalism because she didn’t write for public consumption. But her poems DO show influence of Transcendental thought.

Major events include…

1838 – establishment of the underground railroad

1846-48 – Mexican War1848 – Gold Rush1858 – Pony Express1859 – first oil well1860 – South Carolina secedes from the

Union