AMERICAN STUDIES
movements
• Modernism really began in America but went
to Paris to happen.
• Gertrude Stein
• 3 major periods/traditions:
– genteel
– modernist
– postmodernist
Writing strategies
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anxieties of influence
appropriations of influences
borrowing
assimilating
intertextualizing
background
• 1517 Protestant Reformation
– Protestors who wished to reform the Catholic Church
• Martin Luther’s 95 Theses
• 1532 Henry VIII, King of England creates the Anglican
Church (Church of England)
• Protestantism - in name only
• King same as Pope with appointed cardinals
• Anglican Church was Catholicism practice & rituals
• “Catholic church in disguise”
Puritanism & England
• Local Englishmen protest against the Anglican
Church
• Want to “purify” England
– Against Henry’s mild English theocracy
• Belief in Predestination
• Priesthood of the individual
Puritanism & the English colonies
• Puritans CHOSE to leave England
• not because of persecution
• needed a place to go where they could find government
support
• The New World became a Puritan Commonwealth
– charter to go to the New World
– “city on a hill”
– a beacon light for others
• Return to England
– The idea was to purify America and then return to England to save her
central issues
• The Puritans established their own religious and
moral principles known as American Puritanism.
• American Puritanism stressed:
– predestination, original sin, total depravity, and limited
atonement (or the salvation of a selected few) from God's
grace.
• puritans left Europe for America in order to establish
a theocracy in the New World.
• they built a way of life that stressed:
– hard work, thrift, piety, and sobriety.
features
• individual election and damnation
• the pursuit of God’s work
• predestination:
– God decided everything before things occurred
– original sin: “in Adam’s fall, we sinned all.”
• limited atonement:
– only the “elect” can be saved.
• personal life was emphasized as a theater for inner
drama (journals, diaries)
• seek patterns for salvation
• self-scrutiny
Puritan writings and literature
NOT an imaginative literature, but:
• history
• annals
• travel record
• scientific observation
• diary
• sermon
• meditation
• elegy
Magnalia Christi Americana
Cotton Mather 1633-1728
• Advocate of the “plaine
style” but his book
exhibits:
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elaborate imagery
prose rhythm
complex metaphor
scriptural analogy
only apparently naïve
and devoid of eloquence
Platonism and Puritanism
• Platonism
– the word is a reflection of pure idea
• Puritanism
– word and world reflect divine things, coherent
systems, and transcendental meaning
Puritan influences
• a group of good qualities – hard work, thrift,
piety, sobriety (serious and thoughtful)
influenced American literature
• it led to the everlasting myth
– All literature is based on a myth – Garden of Eden
• symbolism: distinctly American
poetry
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doggerel
verse anagrams
acrostics
riddles
epitaphs and elegies
Ann Bradstreet
“I am obnoxious to each carping tongue
Who says my hand a needle better fits,
A Poet's pen all scorn I should thus wrong;
For such despite they cast on Female wits:
If what I doe prove well, it won’t advance,
They’ll say it’s stolne, or else it was by
chance”
(1650)
Narratives
• adventure stories but still with a focus on
transcendental meaning
• the captivity narrative: sermon, moral lesson,
revelatory history, the precursor of later
sensationalist fiction and gothic tale
– the Indians were the devils
Cpt. John Smith & Pocahontas
John Smith
“What so truly suits with honor and honesty
as the discovering things unknown: erecting
towns, peopling countries, informing the
ignorant, reforming things unjust, teaching
virtue; and again to our native country a
kingdom to attend her”
( A description of New England, 1616)
The Puritan quest
• NOT to know the land but to redeem it
• the negative legacy of puritan writing and ideology of
redemption consisted of belatedness:
• they were late in acquiring what the Indians already
possessed:
– the ability to: “bathe in, to explore always more deeply, to see, to feel,
to touch… the wild beauty of the New World” (William Carlos
Williams, in his anti-puritan In the American Grain, 1925)
• the Indian qualities regarding American landscape and nature
were appropriated by later writers beginning with
transcendentalists such as Henry David Thoreau, and Walt
Whitman
criticisms
• failure to open out to experience or the
ambiguity of the symbol
• lack of inclusiveness
• dull response to the world of nature
• rigorous moralism
• Anglo-Saxonism
awakening
• Puritanism
– tradition
– unquestioning religious
dogma
– monarchy
Enlightenment
• New Thought
– rationality
– scientific inquiry
– representative
government
Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758)
• puritan preacher and
idealist
• introduced typology in
his studies of nature
and influenced a
number of writers in
the Romantic and
transcendentalist
period
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
• political man and
materialist
• a secularized puritan
• introduced the idea that
the American is a new
man
Henri de Crèvcoeur (1735-1813)
• “What then is the American, this
new man?...He is an American,
who, leaving behind him all his
ancient prejudices and manners,
receives new ones from the new
mode of life he has embraced, the
new government he obeys, and
the new rank he holds… the
American is a new man, who acts
on new principles; he must
therefore entertain new ideas,
and form new opinions”
Franklin: the New Man
• inventions: bifocals, the stove, the lightning rod, discovery of
electricity, understanding of earthquakes and ocean currents
• editor: Poor Richard’s Almanack (a farmer’s how to manual)
• negotiates the peace treaty with Britain, drafting the
declaration of independence and constitution
• 1st postmaster general
• ambassador to France
• moves with ease from resolution to humility as his aphorisms
show:
– on resolution: “resolve to perform what you ought; perform without
fail what you resolve”
– on frugality: “waste nothing”
– on industry: “lose no time; be always employed in something useful”
– on humility: “imitate Jesus and Socrates”
Legacy of Puritanism
Passed values to future generations
1. Prudence - clear thinking
– not making emotional decisions
– Biblical direction
2. Thrift
– a penny saved is a penny earned
– Ben Franklin's "waste not - want not"
3. Discipline - self discipline
– moderation
4. Hard work is rewarded
– “ idle hands are the devil's workshop”
The Enlightenment
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neo-classical era
took place from 1700-1820
was a reaction to the excesses of Puritanism
believed in the power of the mind to overcome life’s
difficulties rather than grace
• moved away formal communal based society to one
that emphasized individualism
Thinkers of the Enlightenment
• believed that the individuals should be balanced in
their life
• believed that through reason the whole universe
could be understood
• science can help answer the questions about the
universe (this is the era of Newton)
• believed that human beings relate to each other
because of shared experiences, not faith
forms of expression
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newpapers
satires
pamphlets
political poems
drama
the rise of the novel
things to look for
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inference
parallelism
personification
aphorisms (of Franklin)
Philip Freneau 1752-1832
• America was on the
doorstep of epic change
• revolution signaled the
coming of the muses
• the dawn of a golden
age of liberty
• enlightenment
• artistic deliverance
Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
• “I do not believe in the
creed professed by the
Jewish church, by the
roman church, by the
Greek church, by the
protestant church, nor
by any church that I
know of. My own mind
is my own church”
American History Timeline
• animated atlas
• colonial era and revolutionary war
• American memory timeline
The Female American
Unca Eliza Winkfield:
The Female American
• Appeared in 1767
• Published in London
• Published in America in 1790 and 1814
reviews
The Monthly Review; or Literary Journal, vol. 36 (1767) 238
• “A sort of second Robinson Crusoe; full of wonders; and well
calculated to make one sort of readers stare”
reviews
The Critical Review; or Annals of Literature vol. 23 (1767) 217
• Mrs. Unca Eliza Winkfield is a most strange adventurer, and
her memoirs seem to be calculated only for the wild Indians
to whom she is so closely allied. We could therefore have
wished, as well for her sake as our own, that this lady had
published her adventures at the Fall of Niagara, or upon the
Banks of Lake Superior, as she would then, probably, have
received the most judicious and sincere applause from her
enlightened countrymen and princely relations, and have
saved us six hours very disagreeable employment.
title page
• the narrative chronicles the adventures of
Unca Eliza Winkfield
• compiled by herself
• anonymous author
– no evidence regarding the gender of the author:
to what extent has this novel been written by a
man or a woman?
tremaine mcdowell
• The first novel to introduce “the South
American Indian into the North American
novel”
• The first “American Robinson Crusoe”
• The “first close imitation of any English
novelist done by an American hand”
(American Literature, 1929)
similarities with Crusoe
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novel of wanderlust (extraordinary adventures)
shipwreck and adventure
both protagonists are castaways on an island
both endure physical and psychological trials
both survive and prosper
both become ill but overcome illness (also by
praying)
both survey the island from atop
both experience hurricanes and an earthquake
both use the goats
both ascribe their experience to providence
differences: Eliza
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biracial
multilingual
boasts a transnational heritage
takes on several identities  evolves
obedient to her father
interprets the shipwreck as sign of undeserved fate
avoids engaging in tasks that require masculine
knowledge
differences: Crusoe
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disobeys the father
sees the shipwreck as sign of punishment
spends years fortifying his place on the island
offers elaborate descriptions of everything
that he does and invents
• kills other men
setting
• shifts between representations of paradise (home)
the unfamiliar island (place of confinement) 
familiar island (home)
• the house of her father
• the island
• the Indian mainland
• England  place of estrangement
• Exchanges:
daughterwomanprophetgodessmissionary
wife
themes
• Survival
• Dedication/Education
• Power
– related to voice: the idol is a symbol and a literal representation of the
narrator’s anonymity and power
– masking and controlling
– establishes the dominant speaking subject
– the discourse is essentialist (there is only one God, one Truth, one
Reality)
• Renunciation
• Texts
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manuscripts
Defoe’s book
The Bible
intertexts (allusions to reports, the Pocahontas myth)
context
• Colonialism:
– in the colonial discourse identities are invented
and imagined
• Christianity (SPG)
– romantic primitivism
narrative structure/style/tone
• 1st person narrative
• 3 parts
• dialogue within dialogue (final pages)
– incoherence
– a reflection of Unca’s self-sustained authority
– breakups
• uses the idol to create a dramatic scene
• the tone is melodramatic
• silence
The Female American follows in the
footsteps of Robinson Crusoe, yet
makes its own imprints