Transcript Slide 1

History of American Literature
Native American Experience
No written tradition.
History, legends, and
myths were passed
on by Oral Tradition.
Guess what happened…
To Native American stories and traditional
lore?
You guessed it…
Much of the history and tradition was lost
when the Europeans came.
Christopher Columbus, John Smith, William
Bradford and others are some of the
earliest voices in what we come to know
as American Literature.
Pilgrim Fathers: settling in 1600’s
After the explorers, another kind of American
founding narrative.
The Bible, especially Genesis and Exodus, shape
the Puritan’s vision of the New World.
Puritan Tradition
• Daily struggle with sin
• Bible would help them through torments of
human weakness.
• A plain, straightforward style of writing was
highly prized.
The Crucible
The Crucible was set in
the Puritan era and
Arthur Miller – in
addition to
commenting on
McCarthyism – also
used the play to
criticize parts of our
Puritan heritage.
“Man of Adamant”
Nathaniel Hawthorne
used this short story
to criticize the rigid,
unforgiving religion he
associated with his
Puritan ancestors.
Remember Edward’s scary
sermon?
Jonathan Edwards
“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”
Edwards wanted to make Puritanism vibrant
for the 18th century and to re-establish its
main doctrines on sound philosophical
basis.
Emotional power of his sermons helped
spark the Great Awakening (late 1730’s)
Revolutionary Years
Discourse before the 1776 Revolution called
forth the language of politics rooted in
ancient Greek and Roman states.
Americans again ask themselves:
This is a second birth for Americans, as they
wonder…
What is the meaning of
the country we are
forming in America?
Thomas Jefferson
“The Declaration of
Independence”:
• Major act of brain
power!
• Faith in the power of
pubic speech to
govern sensible men
of good will.
Thomas Paine
• “Common Sense” 1776 – gives reasons
for separation from Britain.
• “The American Crisis” 1776-1783. Series
of 16 pamphlets which spoke directly to
current military situation.
Romanticism: Europe late 18th c.
Romanticism in Europe
From Europe came Romanticism, a literary
movement that emphasized:
• heightened interest in nature
• emphasis on the individual's expression of
emotion and imagination
• departure from the attitudes and forms of
classicism
• rebellion against established social rules
and conventions.
American Naissance/
Transcendentalism
America begins to come to maturity in art
and culture with the fabulous five:
Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville and
Whitman.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
• His book Nature published in 1836 is seen
as the start of Transcendentalism and a
uniquely American literary style
Changing view of Nature
• The Puritans saw nature as wicked and
threatening, a place where the devil might
live.
• For Transcendentalists, nature was not a
force to be dominated, but something to
speak to one’s soul.
Thoreau--Walden or Life in the Woods
During Thoreau’s stay at Walden Pond, his
observations of nature and his thoughts,
become an important Transcendentalist
text.
American Gothic
-- Dark Transcendentalists
Edgar Allen Poe, Hawthorne and Melville
are also influenced by Romanticism and
Transcendentalism, but they have a darker
outlook on life.
Edgar Allen Poe
Remember “The Black
Cat”?
Poe’s imagination is
decadent with no
suggestion of God or
a moral world.
American Gothic
Poe and Hawthorne
used gothic elements
such as grotesque
characters, bizarre
situations and violent
events in their fiction.
Literature of the Civil War
Personal experience was central in the
literature of the time.
• Slave narratives
• Diaries and letters of the war
Abolitionist Voices
Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass,
1845, powerful and
deeply felt reversal of
the conventional
images of slave
existence and
sensibility.
Civil War and aftermath
1855-1870
• Novelists such as Twain had little direct
participation in the war.
• The upheaval forced language to new
Realism.
• Old eloquence = New plain speaking
Regionalism/Realism
Regionalism: escape from East Coast
domination.
Sentimentalized American past that was
fading.
Gave voice to new aspects of American life:
immigrants, Blacks, experiences of
women.
Mark Twain
Gift of humor and moral skepticism in
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885).
Naturalism
1870-1910
• Old standards of genteel morality have no
place.
• Our world is determined by man’s biology,
evolutionary process, and the impersonal
machine-like operations of society.
Jack London: “To Build a Fire”
This story of brutal survival is an example of
naturalism.
The Jazz Age—1920’s
Following WWI, some
Americans just
wanted to have a
good time. The
Roaring Twenties
embodied new
freedoms, new
fashion and attitudes.
The Great Gatsby
shows this era.
Harlem Renaissance
Flourishing in 1920’s
Great Migration—Harlem
Renaissance
Millions of black farmers and sharecropprs
moved to the urban North in search of
economic and social freedom.
Harlem in New York City became a cultural
center of African-American life.
African-American Literary
Movement
Langston Hughes
Zora Neale Hurston
Modernism: 1910-1940’s
Literature’s response to the rapidly changing
industrialized world.
If you had lived from1860 to 1940, you
would have seen a whole new world
developed.
Features of Modernism
Modernists:
• Rejected traditional subject matter and
themes.
• Instead of heroes, often focused on
alienated individuals
• Emotions replaced with understatement
and irony.
Ernest Hemingway
Ernest Hemingway is considered a
modernist writer. Perhaps you read The
Old Man and the Sea?
Contemporary Literature
1940 to present
Concerns include:
• Focus on equal rights
• Question on what makes an American in
an increasingly diverse culture
• What is the American Dream
A Raisin in the Sun
Lorraine Hansberry’s
play is an example of
both the importance
of drama and the
focus on civil rights.
I Can’t Believe that it’s finally over!
Here’s a really nice present for listening…