American Literature

1
American Literature
Lecture Two
030533/4/5, 19th Sep. 2006
2

• Part ONE. Early American and Colonial Period to
  1765

3
1. Introduction

• Instead of beginning with folk tales and songs
  the American literature began with abstractions
  and proceeded from philosophy to fiction because
  there were no written literature among the more
  than 500 different Indian languages and tribal
  cultures that existed in North America before the
  first Europeans arrived there and set up the
  first colony Jamestown in about 1607.
• American writing began with the work of English
  adventurers and colonists in the New World
  chiefly for the benefit of readers in the mother
  country. Some of these early works reached the
  level of literature, as in the robust and perhaps
  truthful account of his adventures by Captain
  John Smith and the sober, tendentious
  journalistic histories of John Winthrop and
  William Bradford in New England. From the
  beginning, however, the literature of New England
  was also directed to the edification and
  instruction of the colonists themselves, intended
  to direct them in the ways of the godly.

Rather rude
4

• Therefore the writing in this period was
  essentially two kinds (1) practical
  matter-of-fact accounts of farming, hunting,
  travel, etc. designed to inform people at home
  what life was like in the new world, and, often,
  to induce their immigration (2) highly
  theoretical, generally polemical, discussions of
  religious questions.
• Furthermore, the influential Protestant work
  ethic, reinforced by the practical necessities of
  a hard pioneer life, inhibited the development of
  any reading matter designed simply for
  leisure-time entertainment.

• It is the belief that work itself is good in
  addition to what it achieves that time saved by
  efficiency or good fortune should not be spent in
  leisure but in doing further work that idleness
  is always immoral and likely to lead to even
  worse sin since the devil finds work for idle
  hands to do. This belief later developed into
  the American philosophic idea Puritanism.

5

• The first work published in the Puritan colonies
  was the Bay Psalm Book (1640), and the whole
  effort of the divines who wrote furiously to set
  forth their views was to defend and promote
  visions of the religious state. They set forth
  their visionsin effect the first formulation of
  the concept of national destinyin a series of
  impassioned histories and jeremiads from Edward
  Johnsons Wonder-Working Providence (1654) to
  Cotton Mathers epic Magnalia Christi Americana
  (1702).
• Even Puritan poetry was offered uniformly to the
  service of God. Michael Wigglesworths Day of
  Doom (1662) was uncompromisingly theological, and
  Anne Bradstreets poems, issued as The Tenth Muse
  Lately Sprung Up in America (1650), were
  reflective of her own piety. The best of the
  Puritan poets, Edward Taylor, whose work was not
  published until two centuries after his death,
  wrote metaphysical verse,

????????????
???????
????????
6

• Sermons and tracts poured forth until austere
  Calvinism found its last utterance in the words
  of Jonathan Edwards. In the other colonies
  writing was usually more mundane and on the whole
  less notable, though the journal of the Quaker
  John Woolman is highly esteemed, and some critics
  maintain that the best writing of the colonial
  period is found in the witty and urbane
  observations of William Byrd, a gentleman planter
  of Westover, Virginia.

7
2. The Main Features of this period

• American literature grew out of humble origins.
  Diaries, histories, journals, letters,
  commonplace books, travel books, sermons, in
  short, personal literature in its various forms,
  occupy a major position in the literature of the
  early colonial period.
• In content these early writings served either God
  or colonial expansion or both. In form, if there
  was any form at all, English literary traditions
  were faithfully imitated and transplanted.
• The Puritanism formed in this period was one of
  the most enduring shaping influences in American
  thought and American literature.

8
3. Puritanism

• Simply speaking, American Puritanism just refers
  to the spirit and ideal of puritans who settled
  in the North American continent in the early part
  of the seventeenth century because of religious
  persecutions. In content it means scrupulous
  moral rigor, especially hostility to social
  pleasures and indulgences, that is
  strictness,sternness and austerity in conduct and
  religion.
• With time passing it became a dominant factor in
  American life, one of the most enduring shaping
  influences in American thought and American
  Literature. To some extent it is a state of mind,
  a part of the national cultural atmosphere that
  the American breathes, rather than a set of
  tenets.
• Actually it is a code of values, a philosophy of
  life and a point of view in American minds, also
  a two-faceted tradition of religious idealism and
  level-headed common sense.

9
Part two. The period of Enlightenment and the
Independence War (1765 -1800)
10
I. Introduction

• The 18th-century American enlightenment as a
  movement marked by an emphasis on rationality
  rather than tradition, scientific inquiry instead
  of unquestioning religious dogma, and
  representative government in place of monarchy.
• Enlightenment thinkers and writers, such as
  Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine, were devoted
  to the ideals of justice, liberty, and equality
  as the natural rights of man.
• In these period with the exception of outstanding
  political writing, such as Common sense,
  Declaration of Independence, The Federalist
  Papers and so on, few works of note appeared.
  Even if there appeared poetry and fiction, they
  were full of imitativeness and vague
  universality. So most Americans were painfully
  aware of their excessive dependence on English
  literary models. The search for a native
  literature became a national obsession.

11

• Despite these we should pay attention to several
  points in this period
• William Hill Brown (1765-1793) published the
  first American novel The Power of Sympathy in
  1789.
• Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) was the first
  American author to attempt to live from his
  writing. He developed the genre of American
  Gothic.
• The Dictionary edited by Noah Webster (1758-1843)
  based the American lexicography. Updated
  Websters dictionaries are still standard today.
• Philip Freneaus (1752-1832) was known as "the
  poet of the American Revolution". His major
  themes are death, nature, transition, and the
  human in nature. All of these themes become
  important in 19th century writing. All the
  while...in romanticizing the wonders of nature in
  his writings...he searched for an American idiom
  in verse.

12
II. Benjamin Franklin1706 - 1790(An
Extraordinary Life and An Electric Mind)
13
1. His Life

• Born the tenth of fifteen children in a poor
  candle and soap makers family, he had to leave
  school before he was eleven.
• At twelve he was apprenticed to an older brother,
  James, a printer in Boston.
• As a voracious reader he managed to make up for
  the deficiency by his own effort and began at 16
  to publish essays under the pseudonym, Silence
  Dogood, essays commenting on social life in
  Boston.
• When he was 17 he ran away to Philadelphia to
  make his own fortune marking the beginning of a
  long success story of an archetypal kind.

14

• He set himself up as an independent printer and
  publisher, found the Junto Club and subscription
  library, issued the immensely popular Poor
  Richards Almanac.
• Retired around forty-two, he did what was to him
  a great happiness read, make scientific
  experiments and do good to his fellowmen. He
  helped to find the Pennsylvania Hospital, an
  academy which led to the University of
  Pennsylvania, and the American Philosophical
  Society.
• At the same time he did a lot of famous
  experiments and invented many things such as
  volunteer fire departments, effective street
  lighting, the Franklin Stove, bifocal glasses,
  efficient heating devices, lightning-rod and so
  on.

15

• Beginning his public career in the early fifties,
  he became a member of the Pennsylvania Assembly,
  the Deputy Postmaster-General for the colonies,
  and for some eighteen years served as
  representative of the colonies in London.
• During the War of Independence, he was made a
  delegate to the Continental Congress and a member
  of the committee to write the Declaration of
  Independence. One of the makers of the new
  nation, he was instrumental in bringing France
  into an alliance with America against England,
  and played a decisive role at the Constitutional
  Convention.

16
2. Major Works

• Poor Richards Almanac
• Maxims(??,??) and axioms(??,??)
• Lost time is never found again.
• A penny saved is a penny earned.
• God help them that help themselves.
• Fish and visitors stink in three days.
• Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man
  healthy, wealthy, and wise.
• Ale in, truth out.
• Eat not to dullness. Drink not to elevation.
• Diligence is the Mother of Good Luck.
• One Today is worth two tomorrow.
• Industry pays debts. Despair encreaseth them.

17

• Autobiography
• It is perhaps the first real post-revolutionary
  American writing as well as the first real
  autobiography in English.
• It gives us the simple yet immensely fascinating
  record of a man rising to wealth and fame from a
  state of poverty and obscurity into which he was
  born, the faithful account of the colorful career
  of Americas first self-made man.
• First of all, it is a puritan document. The most
  famous section describes his scientific scheme of
  self-examination and self-improvement.
• It is also an eloquent elucidation of the fact
  that Franklin was spokesman for the new order of
  eighteenth century enlightenment, and that he
  represented in America all its ideas, that man is
  basically good and free, by nature endowed by God
  with certain inalienable rights of liberty and
  the pursuit of happiness.
• It is the pattern of Puritan simplicity,
  directness, and concision. The plainness of its
  style, the homeliness of imagery, the simplicity
  of diction, syntax and expression are some of the
  salient features we cannot mistake.

18
3. Evaluation

• He was a rare genius in human history. Nature
  seemed particularly lavish and happy when he was
  shaped. Everything seems to meet in this one man,
  mind and will, talent and art, strength and ease,
  wit and grace, and he became almost everything a
  printer, postmaster, citizen, almanac maker,
  essayist, scientist, inventor, orator, statesman,
  philosopher, political economist, ambassador,
  musician and parlor man.
• He was the first great self-made man in America,
  a poor democrat born in an aristocratic age that
  his fine example helped to liberalize.

19

• Politically he brought the colonial era to a
  close. For quite some time he was regarded as the
  father of all Yankees, even more than Washington
  was. He was the only American to sign the four
  documents that created the United States the
  declaration of Independence, the treaty of
  alliance with France, the treaty of peace with
  England, and the constitution.
• Scientifically, as the symbol of America in the
  Age of Enlightenment, he invented a lot of useful
  implements. His research on electricity, his
  famous experiment with his kite line and many
  others made him the preeminent scientist of his
  day.
• Literally, he really opened the story of American
  literature. D. H. Lawrance agreed that Franklin
  was everything but a poet. In the Scottish
  philosopher David Humes eyes he was Americas
  first great man of letters.