An Outline of American Literature
Chapter one: Colonial Beginnings
1. Time: the early 1600s
2. Content: the English exploration and colonization of the New World
(America).
3. The southerners were slow to develop a literature of their own;
imported books from England.
4. Due to the puritans, the culture and literature developed much faster
than in the South.
5. The most interesting works of New England Puritan literature was
histories: God’s plan; the Promised Land; struggle between Christ and
Satan; also the difficult relations with the Indians.
6. “plain style”
7. The first Puritans were not very democratic. Everybody had to obey
the harsh church laws.
8. The 1690s: the great witchcraft panic. In Salem, Massachusetts,
young girls and old women were arrested and put on trial as witches
and put to death of selling their soul to the Devil.
Chapter Two: The Birth of a Nation
1. Revolution: 1775~1783: the most memorable writing was done by the
Founding Fathers who wrote the Constitution of 1789. They were
practical philosophers and their product was the political pamphlet.
2. They shared the Enlightenment belief: human intelligence (or reason)
could understand both nature and man, unlike the puritans who saw
man as a sinful failure.
3. Benjamin Franklin (1706~1790): showed the Enlightenment spirit.
His only rea book: Autobiography.
4. Thomas Paine (1737~1809): the greatest pamphlet-writer of the
American Revolution. His most important work was Common Sense
(1776): “There is something absurd in supposing a continent (America)
to be perpetually governed by an island (Britain).”
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5. Thomas Jefferson (1743~1826): Declaration of Independence,
beautifully written. He believed that man did not have to depend on
God to improve the world, and should use his own wisdom to do the
improving by himself. Humanity is naturally good.
6. Poets of the Revolution era: imitated the “neoclassical” style of the
themes of the great English writers. They wrote in couplets and
experimented with blank verse.
7. Drama developed very slowly in the English colonies, due to the
Puritans.
Chapter Three: The Rise of a National Literature
1. to express and describe the special character of the nation
2. Novels were the first popular literature of the newly independent
United States: Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe), Henry Fielding (Tom
Jones).
3. Charles Brockden Brown (1771~1810): psychology of horror, which
greatly influenced Hawthorne and Poe many years later.
4. Washington Irving (1783~1859): The Sketch Book (1819), containing
Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
5. James Cooper (1789~1851): He described such American character
types: the pioneer, the Indian, and the Yankee sailor.
6. William Cullen Bryant (1794~1878): democratic and liberal; disliked
the old neoclassical style, and agreed with the Romantic poets of
Europe (Wordsworth).
Chapter Four: An American Renaissance
1. Writers look at the western frontier for ideas for a literature about
American life.
2. In the east coast: the culture of Massachusetts and Virginia ought to be
the models of national culture.
3. The new spiritual era: the Transcendentalists. They tried to find the
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truth through feeling and intuition rather than through logic. Nature
itself was their “Bible”. Birds, clouds, trees and snow had a special
meaning for them.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803~1882
4. Emerson: Nature (1836). Man’s relationship with nature transcends
the idea of usefulness.
Henry David Thoreau, 1817~1862
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5. Thoreau, Walden (1854) / Concord / Boston: living through the visible
to the invisible, through the temporal to the eternal…
Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1804`1864
5. Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850): the adultery of Hester Prynne
and the Puritan minister, Arthur Dimmesdale. The theme: it is
useless to hide guilt in order to avoid punishment.
Herman Melville (1819~1891)
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6. Melville, theme: good against evil, God against Satan, the head
against the heart. Moby-Dick (1851): Captain Ahab and the white
whale.
Edgar Allan Poe, 1809~1849
7. Poe: the short story, literary criticism, and poetry. Tales of horror:
The Tell-Tale Heart (1843). Unity of effect is everything in short
stories. One of the inventors of the Modern detective story.
Poetry, sound: The Raven (1845):
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a
Tapping,
As of someone gently rapping – rapping at my chamber door.
Criticism: Poe wanted to help develop a national literature, and he
felt that intelligent criticism was the key. Many enemies.
Chapter Five: The Boston Brahmins (文人雅士)
1. The Boston Brahmins: a group of aristocratic Boston writers,
including Longfellow, Hawthorne, O.W. Holmes, J. G. Whittier, James
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Russell Lowell and 2 famous historians, Prescott and Motley.
2. Longfellow (1807~1882): speaking directly to the hearts of ordinary
Americans. His language is simple and easy to understand. He
prefers to express the simple dreams of average humanity.
Hiawatha: Every human heart is human,
That in even savage bosoms
There are longings, yearnings, strivings,
For the good they comprehend not
3. Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809~1894):
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Autocrat of the Breakfast Table: humorous, “Stupidity often saves a man
from going mad.” Readers enjoy laughing with Homes at people they
saw as less intelligent or cultured than themselves.
The Deacon’s Masterpiece (1858): a clever attack on Puritan Calvinism.
Calvinism (also called the Reformed tradition, the Reformed faith,
or Reformed theology): the system is best known for its doctrines of
predestination and total depravity, stressing the absolute sovereignty
of God.
4. John Greenleaf Whittier (1807~1892):
Snow-Bound (1866): values highly the warmth of family affection.
he sun that brief December day
ose cheerless over hills of gray…
nd when the second morning shone,
e looked upon a world unknown.
universe of sky and snow!
he old familiar sights of ours
ook marvellous shapes…
it with me by the homestead hearth,
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nd search the hands of memory forth
o warm them at the wood-fire’s blaze!
Chapter Six: The Civil War and the “Gilded Age”
The Civil War: 1861~1865
The Gilded Age: gold on the surface, but degeneration inside. Mark
Tawain’s novel: The Gilded Age (1873).
1. Walt Whitman (1819~1892):
Leaves of Grass: to define America, her athletic democracy.
I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer
grass, …
I am enamoured of growing out-doors,
Of men that live among cattle or taste of the ocean or
woods…
Song of Myself: “ I celebrate myself and sing myself.” “Nothing, not
God, is greater than the self is.” The “Over-Soul” “I am the poet of the
Body and I am the poet of the soul. He boldly brings sex within the area
of poetry.
Poetic form: free verse, a clear rhythm, easy to read, about democracy.
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2. Emily Dickinson (1830~1886):
She led a quiet, very private life in a big old house in Amherst. She
created a very personal and pure kind of poetry. She seldom lost sight
of the grave:
.
I heard a fly buzz when I died.
…
With blue, uncertain stumbling buzz,
Between the light and me;
And then the windows failed, and then
I could not see.
The search for faith; the possible as more important than the actual; pain
of lonely people at night.
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3. Mark Twain (1835~1910):
The Gilded Age (1873): America’s loss of its old idealism. It describes a
how a group of young people are morally destroyed by the dream of
becoming rich.
Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876): Tom and Finn are bad only because
they fight against the stupidity of the adult. They win in the end.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884): Huck learns about the evil of the
world. He decides that the slave is a man, not a “thing”. He decides to
break the law by setting Jim, the black slave, free.
General theme: the conflict between the ideals of Americans and their
desire for money.
Chapter Seven: The Era of Realism and Naturalism
Realism: 1875, true-to-life description
William Dean Howells (1837~1920): a realist, insisting that “American
novels should depict the more smiling aspects of life.” However, he
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began attacking the evils of American capitalism in 1890.
Naturalism (1890s): a term created by the French novelist, Emile Zola.
He believed that people were not really “free”. Rather, their lives,
opinions and morality were all controlled by social, economic and
psychological causes.
Stephen Crane (1871~1900): the first American naturalist.
Girl of the Street.
Maggie: A
Poem collection: War Is Kind
“These men were born to drill and die,” underscoring not only the
brutal nature of war but of a society, a world, which programs human
beings for particular malicious purposes. Crane believed that in large part
human beings’ destinies are determined by biological as well as social
determinants, and that free will plays only a small role in our lives.
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Henry James (1843~1916):
An observer of the mind: his realism is was a special kind of
psychological realism. The changing consciousness of the character is
the real story. “Stream-of-consciousness”.
The Portrait of a Lady (1881): The most important part of the novel is
where she realizes her mistake. There is great drama in his description
of her “motionlessly seeing” the mistake she has made.
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Chapter Nine: The Turning Point of American Literature
1. Starting from 1915, a period of “self-criticism” was opened. The
result was “new realism” which lasted up to the 1950s.
2. Death of “Puritanism,” included the truth of sex, sexual desire.
3. Sigmund Freud: a famous lecture series in 1919.
4. Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945): a naturalist, who ignores puritanical
moral code.
Sister Carrie (1900): accidental success and downfall due to fate; even
money and success cannot bring happiness.
5. Willa Cather (1873-1947):
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My Antonio (1918): pioneer men and women of Nebraska, the “hardships
of farm life” and the “great gift for life” (The heroine lives on, marries
and raises a large family, a happy family.)
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6. Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941):
Winesburg, Ohio (1919), a serious of short episodes of small town
characters: techniques of “modernism”: s simpler writing style, like
ordinary spoken language; more emphasis on the form of the story than
on its content; a special use of time (in which past, present and future are
mixed together, as in a dream)
Example: Alice Hindman, she ran in a rainy night, naked,
attempting to embrace another human being who happened to pass by.
She wept sadly and asked “What is the matter with me?” She finally
understood that “Many people must live and die alone, even in
Winesburg.”
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