As a new nation and culture developed in the “land of opportunity” west of the Atlantic, the personalities and characteristics of those who inhabited it changed as well. While the “self-made” American grew to become an archetype of the developing society, this revolution of culture was also reflected in the unique literary style that distinguished American literature; the quintessentially American character of success by personal merit and unyielding adherence to principles both religious and secular was evident in the great writings of the time. As the origins of Americans were varied, so too was their writing style, creating the great variety characteristic of the complex American voice. Also, the growing voice of women in literature was especially strong in America.

The Early Years--Exploration Accounts

• 17th/18th centuries--early accounts and writings of the New World

  • many included literary and anecdotal techniques, exaggeration, omission, etc. to increase their glory and promote their discoveries--idealized and romanticized

  • evident self-pride in writings about wonders of the new land that they had explored

  • 18th century - romanticism of Elizabethan accounts gave way to more sober and factual accounts

  • interior exploration produced frontier chronicles such as John Filson’s 1784 account of the history of exploration in Kentucky, containing the Daniel Boone story

• Recurring motifs in early American writing

  • “new Eden,” cultivation of a wilderness paradise or promised land

  • land of riches and opportunity

  • white men were God’s chosen people, other races devils or savages

  • affirmation of faith through trials and sufferings in the wilderness

  • the common man can become wealthy through his own merits, self-made man

  • the self-reliant, independent hero

  • freedom/rebellion against authority

• Examples

  • Richard Hakluyt - compiled, translated, edited exploration accounts into Virginia Richly Valued (1609)

  • John Smith - wrote many books about his explorations, life in Virginia, Jamestown - The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles

The City on a Hill--Puritanism in Literature

• Puritanism dominated intellectual/political life of New England from 17th to early 18th centuries, greatly influenced the literary style of America

• Contrast to Middle and Southern style (many of whose writers were wealthy landowners), in which practicality and economic concerns often superseded the religious

• Motifs and principles of Puritan literature

  • typological, Biblical view of history

  • colonial Puritans seen as “visible saints” whose lives reflected the patterns of Old Testament characters and events

  • New Englanders have a covenant with God to serve as an example to all in return for their providential success in the struggle for survival; writing combines the divine promise with the threat of failure

  • John Winthrop - “...we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.” (1630 sermon)

  • sense of decline from original state of spiritual purity and rectitude

  • Michael Wigglesworth - apocalyptic poem “Day of Doom”

  • “No hiding place can from his Face, / sinners at all conceal, / Whose flaming Eyes hid things doth 'spy, / and darkest things reveal.”

• Varied works, both religious and secular, prose and poetry, written and oral

• not exclusively theological--Puritan colonists were literate and well-educated

• wrote biographies, scientific tracts, diaries, poetry

• most held aesthetic refinement subordinate to religious instruction, especially in poetry--moral lessons, Biblical allusions

• Thomas Hooker--the “meat” (the underlying message and significance) is important rather than the “sauce” (literary devices, fluency, etc.) of literary expression

Poets and poetry

• Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672)

  • one of the most important women in literature--an example of the strength and independence of women in America

  • “The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America” - the first volume of poems by an English colonist

  • wrote from personal experience--linked the Bible to everyday events

  • portrayed the tension between Puritan doctrine and the realities of New England life

  • “Here Follow Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House, July 10, 1666” - “...Farewell, my pelf, farewell my store. / The world no longer let me love, / My hope and treasure lies above.” - internal struggle between sorrow at loss of her possessions and spiritual principles

• Edward Taylor (1642-1729)

  • Massachusetts minister; poems discovered and published in 1939

  • poems complicated and deeply spiritual

  • example: “Upon a Spider Catching a Fly” - “But mighty, gracious Lord / Communicate / Thy grace to break the cord, afford / Us glory’s gate / And state.” - metaphor of the Devil casting a spider’s snare and God releasing believers from the web

• Phyllis Wheatley (1753-1784)

  • originally an African slave, educated in the classics by the Boston family who purchased her as a child

  • poems show the triumph of merit and talent over adverse circumstances

  • doesn’t protest her subordinate state; only one line refers to racial discrimination: “Some view our sable race with scornful eye...”

Puritan prose

• sermon the most popular format (recalling sinners to Christ)--shows influence of the church

• consistent structure beginning with scriptural citation and commentary, then applying it to daily life

• plain style with concrete, powerful sensory imagery

• Cotton Mather

  • religious man as well as scientist, prolific writer - more than 450 works

  • Magnalia Christi Americana - history of “Christ’s Great Works in America” - shows individual histories embodying collective mission and “God’s plan”

• Jonathan Edwards

  • Puritan preacher famous for his moving sermons

  • lowers the barrier between the fleshly and spiritual worlds which most other preachers had emphasized

  • delivered powerful, eloquent sermons that appealed to his audience’s emotions

  • “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (1741) connects spiritual ideas and physical sensations, contradicts earlier insistence on “spirit over flesh”

  • new interest in human experience and perception

  • led to the evangelical preaching of the Great Awakening which ignored the earlier emphasis on logic of the earlier Puritan sermons

• in the 18th century, theology became increasingly diverse, and its influence on literature decreased

The Age of Rationalism--American Character Revealed through Literature

• 1730s and 1740s, rationalism and logic began to supersede religion in American literature--principles of science rather than religion (though the Great Awakening was also arising)

• Discovering God through nature and science

• Deism also emerged among prominent authors of the pre- and Revolutionary period

• Literature reflected the developing American character

  • Traits such as independence, self-reliance, pragmatism and versatility evident in writing

  • Emphasis on “rags to riches” stories, achieving success from humble beginnings by one’s own merit

• Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

  • the practical, versatile, witty Renaissance Man of pre-revolutionary America, the quintessential American

  • works include Poor Richard’s Almanack, a collection of pithy sayings and down-to-earth practical advice (though often culled from other sources)

  • wrote an autobiography detailing his rise from poor printer’s son to famous diplomat, thinker, writer and a host of other accomplishments

  • self-mockery and wit as well as writing style is typically American

• Thomas Paine (1737-1809)

  • persuasive essay-writer, used techniques of sound logic and good sense (as well as some rhetoric) to urge his fellow Americans to revolutionary action against Great Britain

  • radical patriot strongly in favor of independence and unwillingness to surrender

  • wrote Common Sense, The Rights of Man (1791) and The American Crisis, pro-Revolutionary pamphlets

  • “These are the times that try men’s souls...he whose heart is firm, and whose conscience approves his conduct, will pursue his principles unto death.” (The American Crisis, no. 1)

• Patrick Henry (1736-1799)

  • fiery orator, like Paine used persuasive techniques and rhetoric (as opposed to cool logic) to urge revolution

  • influenced by Jonathan Edwards’ style of preaching

  • great emphasis on independence and resistance

  • one of his most famous speeches is that to the Virginia Convention in 1775 - “Give me liberty, or give me death!”

• Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)

  • eloquent, idealistic writer and philosopher, wrote many prose works including Notes on the State of Virginia and A Summary View of the Rights of British America

  • also wrote an autobiography detailing the proceedings of the Revolution

  • most famous for the Declaration of Independence: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights...that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

• Framers of the Constitution (1787)

  • met at a convention in Philadelphia, originally to revise the Articles of Confederation, but ended up developing a wholly new document

  • Constitution lays out a new and different federal system of government, unifying the nation more strongly

  • one of the most important members of this group was James Madison of Virginia

  • Preamble states the purpose of the Constitution clearly: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Study Questions:

1. How does the emerging distinctive style of early American literature reflect the traits considered to be essentially American, and how is this style unique?

2. How do the lives and principles of prominent authors of the time show these American characteristics?

American Literature: 1789-1877

The diverse and prolific field of literature in America was influenced by several movements from the end of the Revolution to the Civil War and Reconstruction. The first, Romanticism, emphasized nature, imaginative emotion and the power of the individual. The effort to develop a distinctive American voice produced works rich in the unique characteristics of regional culture, language and custom; the trait known as regionalism was always evident. Another movement which sprang up, transcendentalism, was founded on a mystic philosophy of union with nature and the universal mind in order to achieve “oneness.” Finally, in the years after the Civil War, the realism movement embodied the growing reaction against emotion-centered and ostensibly sentimental Romanticism.

The Triumph of Imagination - Romanticism

Edgar Allen Poe	Washington Irving	Walt Whitman	Herman Melville
	Frederick Douglass

• Romantic authors placed more value on intuition, imagination, emotion, etc. than reason and logic
• Shift from conservative to liberal views, almost a sort of “Protestant Revolution” in the arts
• A conscious departure from the deistic and rationalistic perspective of earlier writing, altering the “Great Chain of Being” (Age of Reason concept with a fixed divinely ordained hierarchy in the universe)
• Motifs in Romantic writing
  • nonconformity, fighting against old views
  • power of the imagination
  • nature has power to restore the human spirit, quashed by rationalism and commercialism - spirituality and beauty in nature emphasized
  • emphasis on the nobility of the individual and the common man
    the “noble savage,” innocent of the corrupting influence of society and deeply connected with nature - also the innocence of the child
  • subjective view of the individual
  • Evoking the past of America, cultural legends, folklore, etc.
• Began with Philip Freneau’s “pre-Romantic” verse, continued through the 19th century to Walt Whitman and his poetry
• Washington Irving
  • one of the first notable writers of fiction in the Romantic movement
  • wrote under the pen name of Diedrich Knickerbocker
  • tongue-in-cheek account of the history of Manhattan - the Knickerbocker History
  • retold folktales and legends - the Catskill Mountain reagon featured in “Rip Van Winkle” (in which a man yearns to be free of his confining domestic existence) and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
• James Fenimore Cooper
  • also a writer of fiction
  • idea of the “noble savage” very prominent in his works
  • first Romantic American hero - Natty Bumppo in the “Leather-Stocking Tales” - “a being who finds the impress of the Deity in all the works of nature, without any of the blots produced by the expedients, and passion, and mistakes of man.” (Cooper, 1850 preface to the revised Tales)
  • Bumppo turns from savage wilderness as well as corrupt civilization, moving westward to seek freedom and a more innocent world
  • “God made the country but Man made the town”
  • The Last of the Mohicans - noble savages Chingachgook and Uncas are virtuous because of their contact with nature
• William Cullen Bryant and Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • disciples of English Romantic poet William Wordsworth
  • Bryant - “Thanatopsis,” “Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood,” “A Forest Hymn” - divinity of, contemplation of and healing through nature
  • Emerson - founded and gave lectures on the principles of Transcendentalism, friend of Henry David Thoreau (see Transcendentalism section)
• Fireside Poets - William Cullen Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (due to their homey and familiar verse)
• mostly confined to New England and the northeast coastal area, but there were instances in the South
  • Henry Timrod and Sidney Lanier - wrote nature poems like Lanier’s The Symphony, reacting against modern commercialism, turning to nature to regenerate the human soul
• Dark side of Romanticism - Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe
  • Hawthorne - The Scarlet Letter, “Ethan Brand,” “Young Goodman Brown” - wrote about evil in the world and the nature of sin (echoes of Puritanism)
  • Melville - Moby-Dick, Billy Budd, Bartleby the Scrivener - examination of sin and human nature similar to Hawthorne’s Puritan-influenced writing
  • Poe - horror stories and poems such as “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Raven” (as well as lesser-known humorous tales) - inclined to the supernatural, things strange and outside the conventional world - Keats-like pursuit of ideal beauty often linked with the morbid and grotesque (“Ligeia,” “The Fall of the House of Usher”)
• Others - James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes
• Walt Whitman
  • last and perhaps greatest American Romantic poet
  • Leaves of Grass (nine editions published between 1855 and 1892) - celebration of the common man and the beauty of nature, subjective portrayal of the individual, idealism
• As nation approached Civil War, bitter regional division over such issues as slavery
  • Frederick Douglass (a black man and former slave) spoke out, wrote Narrative of the Life of a Slave describing his situation
  • Harriet Beecher Stowe - Uncle Tom’s Cabin revealed the atrocities committed on plantations and the hardships suffered by slaves
  • William Lloyd Garrison - launched journalistic antislavery effort with his newspaper The Liberator beginning January 1, 1831 - founded the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833
• After Civil War, industrialization of society led America from romanticism to realism

The Universal Mind - Transcendentalism

Henry Thoreau	Waldo Emerson

• Also “American transcendentalism or “New England transcendentalism”
• Social and intellectual movement begun in the 1830s, identified with Ralph Waldo Emerson and his friends and followers
• Merged Republican values with romanticism and nature mysticism
• Some linked it to philosophies of Immanuel Kant and Thomas Carlyle
• Emerson’s definition of Transcendentalism - “Idealism as it appears in 1842” (The Transcendentalist) - influenced by Unitarianism, European-based rhetorical training of Edward Everett, innovations in modern science
• Emerson’s idea of the “Over-Soul” or Universal Mind
• Typical Transcendentalist
  • Harvard-educated Unitarian minister
  • affected by social upheaval
  • from wealthy families, grew up with republican ideals together with Federalism and some remnants of Calvinism
  • rebelled against structured social hierarchy, paramount reason and order
• Response to empiricism and rationalism - “The young men were born with knives in their brain, a tendency to introversion, self-dissection, anatomizing of motives.” (Emerson)
• Transcendentalism offered a “new consciousness”
• Significant source - works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge
  • Aids to Reflection (1829) - distinction between Reason and Understanding (derived from Kant)
  • “Understanding” represents rationalism, “Reason” ideals and religious beliefs - allowed the transcendentalists to reject empirical philosophy like that of John Locke
• Realignment with Puritan ancestors (such as Jonathan Edwards in his sermon “Divine and Supernatural Light” - existence of a transcendent sixth “sense of the heart by which one can know the reality of God)
• Some were strongly antislavery (including Thoreau)
• Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody - women’s rights
• Henry David Thoreau
  • disciple of Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • rebel, fervent Transcendentalist
  • Civil Disobedience (1849) - extolling the primacy of the individual over government - “That government is best which governs not at all”
  • Walden - description of his hermit-like sojourn in a house he built himself beside Walden Pond
  • also Slavery in Massachussetts, John Brown, Walking
• Others - Amos Bronson Alcott, Orestes Augustus Bronson, George Ripley, Mark Twain (see below)

The American Voice - Regionalism

• Efforts to establish national literature led to detailed portrayals and examinations of language and society in the various geographic regions of America
• James Fenimore Cooper’s Leather-Stocking Tales included culture of the West - inventing a national mythology
• Mark Twain depicted the Mississippi River area dialect and society in such works as Huckleberry Finn - see below
• Regionalist authors restricted to expertise in the region in which they specialized, rather than representing the nation as a whole
• Fugitive slave narrative - Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, though dealing with larger themes, depicted language and custom - later Stowe would concentrate more on the New England region
• Other regionalist authors - Edward Eggleston, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin, Hamlin Garland, Brett Harte
  

• During the Reconstruction period, American literature began a shift away from the idealism of the Romantic style
• Characteristics of realism
  • emphasized true representation of the actual experience and the consequences of everyday life
  • detailed characterization - giving attention to character’s development when faced with complicated ethical dilemmas
  • avoided symmetry, balance, contrived plots
  • unlike romanticism, didn’t use idealized settings and social situations
• Drew support from pragmatist writers - Charles S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey - meaning and value in life are only significant when accompanied by a recognition of the ultimate consequences and usefulness
• Enhanced by scientific innovations such as the invention of the telephone (1876) and the growth of the automobile
• The Romantic hero (Natty Bumppo, Twain’s Huckleberry Finn) gives way to figures more appropriate to industrialized society (Howells’s Silas Lapham, James’s Christopher Newman - The American)
• William Dean Howells
  • described basic tenets of realism in Criticism and Fiction
  • wanted fiction to “cease to lie about life,” “forbear to preach pride and revenge, folly and insanity, egotism and prejudice”
  • writing should use “the language of unaffected people everywhere”
• Henry James - father of “psychological realism” with works such as The Ambassadors and Portrait of a Lady - Austenian “novel of manners” altered to provide insights into social nuances and the psychology of his characters

Study Question: How does the transition from Romanticism to Realism reflect changes in the society and culture of 19th-century America?