A Brief History of American Literature: Periods, Movements, and Authors

A Brief History of American Literature

The Early National Period (1775-1828)

• it is marked by the formation of the United States and the establishment of American literary traditions
• notable writer: Washington Irving
• key themes: national identity, politics, individualism and the Romantic Movement

American Renaissance (1828-1865)

The Romantic Period in America and the Age of Transcendentalism belong together and happened simultaneously.

America during 1800

• marks the rise of American literary identity: themes of democracy, nature, individualism and social justice (feminism, slavery, social climbing, ... )
• key literary movements: Romanticism, Transcendentalism, American Gothic and Abolitionist Literature

Making a Nation

• American Independence 1776
• 8 founding fathers: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Samuel Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and John Jay -> point of contention
• expansion of the USA thanks to the expansion of the railroad and of the manufacturing industry, greater opportunities for publication and increase of literacy

WESTWARD EXPANSION (1803)

American Frontier Literature & The Frontier Myth

• romanticized and idealized in literature and art, evolving into a powerful cultural myth
• idea of a boundary at the edge of civilization during expansion
• from the 17th to 20th centuries as Europeans Americans colonized North America

Manifest Destiny

It was the belief in 19th century America that it was the Nation's fate, almost a divine right, to expand across the North American continent, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. It drove westward expansion, where settlers moved into territories like Texas, Oregon and California, often at the expense of native American lands and lives. It was all about growth and opportunity, but it also led to conflict, displacement and war, like with Mexico, as the USA pushed its borders outward.

It can also be defined as the supposed inevitability of the continued territorial expansion of the boundaries of the United States westward to the Pacific and beyond.

ROMANTICISM (1800-1850)

It was a movement focused on emotion, nature and the individual's experience over reason.

• key themes: nature, supernatural (like God) and individualism
• authors: Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, ...

Washington Irving (1783-1859)

He is one of the first American writers to achieve, due to advantage of the greater opportunities for publication.

• The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent (1819) contains two small masterpieces that initiated the great tradition of American short story
• A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty (1809) by Diedrich Knickerbocker -> Irving's pen name, initiated the term "knickerbocker"

Rip Van Winkle (1819)

Rip Van Winkle (1819) is a short story published in Irving's The Sketchbook.

The lazy, hen-pecked hero of the story ventures into the Catskill Mountains of New York State to discover they're some little men in Dutch costume bowling at ninepins. Taking many draughts of some strange beverage they have brewed, he falls into a deep sleep. When he returns to his village, after waking up, heeventually realizes that twenty years have passed, the Revolution has been gone, and that, "instead of being a subject of his Majesty George the Third, he was now a free citizen of the United States". The news takes a long time to sink in; and, at first, when he is surrounded in his someplace by people whom he doesn't recognize and who don't recognize him, he begins to doubt his own identity.

James Fenimore Cooper (1879-1851)

He grew up in a western frontier settlement called Cooperstown, in New York, which his father had established after the Revolutionary War. He started writing only in his thirties, before he served at sea and got married, then he settled as a country gentleman in New York State.

He is one of the first authors who was able to live off his writings and he is considered both the creator of the myth of the American West and the founding father of the American historical novel, exploring the conflicts of American society in a time of profound change.

He helped to develop and populate such widely diverse literary forms as the sea novel, the novel of manners, political satire and allegory, and the dynastic novel in which several generations American social practices and principles are subjected to rigorous dramatic analysis

The Leatherstocking Tales

The Leatherstocking Tales is a series of five novels:

• The Deerslayer
• The Last of the Mohicans (1826) -> presents Bumppo, here called Hawkeye, in his maturity and is set in 1757 during the Seven Years' War between the French and the British
• The Pathfinder
• The Pioneers (1823) -> breakthrough
• The Prairie

TRASCENDENTALISM

It is a 19th century movement of writers and philosophers in New England who were loosely bound together by adherence to an idealistic system of thought based on a belief in the essential unity of all creation, the innate goodness of humanity, and the supremacy of insight over logic and experience for the revelation of the deepest truth.

It advocated a liberal, self-responsible and nature-oriented lifestyle -> intellectual independence

The city of Concord was the headquarters of the Transcendental Club, composed by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

The city was incorporated as the first inland settlement in Massachusetts; as the scene of the first battle of the War for Independence, it is considered the birthplace of the nation, where the "shot heard around the world" for liberty and self government was fired.

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

He studied at Harvard and became a pastor, like his father. When his wife died at the age of 19, he began a journey through Europe. In 1835 he settled in Concord and became friends with other transcendentalists; he began to lecture regularly on the lyceum circuit, to spread his ideas as well as to make a living. He was against slavery (abolitionist).

Nature (1836)

He advocated his belief that people should live in a simple way and in harmony with nature, he saw nature as the true source of divine revelation.

The more important service to the soul offered by nature was aesthetic, intellectual and moral: the universe is the externalization of the soul.

The American Scholar (1837)

The American Scholar (1837) -> speech given in Harvard College in Cambridge, Massachusetts

• we are all fragments of a greater creature which is mankind itself
• the scholar's education consists of three influences: nature, the most important influence on the mind, the past, manifest in books, and action and its relation to experience
• for the first time in US history, the American people have adopted a visionary philosophical framework to escape the pressure and create a new, distinct American identity- summary: an essay calling for Americans intellectual independence
• themes: self-reliance and intellectual independence
• importance: a defining statement of American cultural independence

Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

He was born and passed away in Concord, he attended Harvard and he was an abolitionist, against slavery.

His literary style interweaves close observation of nature, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity and attention to practical detail.

Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854)

It is a memoir that reflects on the author's two years living in solitude in a cabin by a lake, so a reflection on simple living in natural surroundings.

• themes: simplicity, self-reliance and nature
• reflection on water -> "as I sit by my window and see the clouds reflected in the meadow, I think it is important to have water, because it multiplies the heavens"

Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

He was born a quaker; he was a poet, an essayist and journalist, also he worked in hospitals during the Civil War. He incorporated both Transcendentalism and Realism in his writings and he is often called the father of free verse.

Leaves of Grass (1855)

Leaves of Grass (1855) -> poem Song of Myself (1855)

It was described by some as obscene for its overt sensuality, while other artists and media adapted it.

• themes: individualism, celebration of America and nature

Margaret Fuller (1810-1850)

She is the editor of transcendentalist journal The Dial, she draws its inspiration from the Emersion and Transcendentalist belief in self-reliance and self-emancipation. She was in favor of intellectual freedom and had a feminist ideal.

DARK ROMANTICISM

• characteristics: emphasis on nature, the irrational; dualism, life and death; gothic elements, the grotesque
• themes: human fallibility, self-destruction, judgement, punishment and psychological effects

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) -> "I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity"

He lived-off his writing but struggled financially, he wrote short stories and poems (To Helen, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, Annabel Lee) and the predominant themes were macabre, grotesque, gothic and dark.

He was the founding father of Southern myth, although he was actually born in Boston and hardly ever used southern settings in his fiction or his poetry.

A number of diseases have been proposed as possible causes of his death, including diabetes, heart disease, epilepsy and tuberculosis; one of the most intriguing possibilities, suggested by a doctor at the University of Maryland, is that he may have died from rabies.

He is considered to be part of the dark romanticism genre, which is said to be a literary reaction to transcendentalism, which Poe strongly criticized.

The Fall of the House of Usher (1839)

Is set in an anonymous landscape, or rather dreamscape, but it has all the elements that were later to characterize Southern Gothic: a great house and family falling into decay and ruin, a feverish, introspective hero half in love with death, a pale, ethereal heroine who seems and then is more dead than alive, rumors of incest and guilt and, above all, the sense that the past haunts the present and that there is evil in the world and it is strong.