American Literature Rebecca O Connor Castillero U.S. History Theme 1: The Colonial Period, Beginnings to 1790 The Spanish, Portuguese, and French preceded the English in colonization of the New World, but whereas the Spanish came for gold and the French for furs, the English came to settle the land. This difference accounted for the hostility between English colonists and Native Americans and also for the English colonies becoming the first in the New World to achieve independence. For the first 100 years, the English colonists were confined to the seacoast from Maine to Florida; the westward movement to the Pacific waited until the late eighteenth century. The delay meant time to put down deep roots, and in New England to develop a mode system of public education and began the literary arts. Their culture shaped the new nation. 1. Puritanism 2. John Smith 3. William Bradford and John Winthrop 4. Thomas Morton 5. Cotton Mather 6. Samuel Sewall 7. William Byrd 8. Jonathan Edwards 9. Puritan poetry 10. St. Jean de Crevecoeur 11. Benjamin Franklin 12. William Bartram 13. Phillis Wheatley Theme 2: The New Republic, 1790-1820 The Age of Reason (about 1680-1800) was an intellectual revolution founded on the work of mathematician-physicist Isaac Newton and philosopher John Locke. Newton s mathematical model of a machine-like cosmos governed by the laws of a rational God became the basis for an optimistic faith in the power of Reason over human affairs. Locke argued that all knowledge came through the senses. This theory led to the idea that all men are created equal, since inequalities can arise only after birth from differences in sense experiences. Locke further argued that man in a natural state, acting in harmony with God s rational laws, agreed to self-government through a Social Contract aimed at protecting the rights and property of each individual. Having surrendered some of his freedom in return for this security,
natural man was therefore entitled to overthrow a government that did now fulfill the contract. Upon this widely accepted idea, the American colonists based their right to revolution. 14. Thomas Paine 15. Thomas Jefferson 16. The Federalist: Alexander Hamilton and James Madison Theme 3: The Flowering of American Romanticism, 1820-1865 American literary Romanticism derives mainly from the English Romantic poets, particularly Coleridge and Wordsworth, and from German Romantic philosophy. Jonathan Edwards, in A Divine and Supernatural Light and Images and Shadows of Divine Things is a native source. 17. Washington Irving 18. James Fenimore Cooper 19. William Cullen Bryant 20. Transcendentalism 21. Ralph Waldo Emerson 22. Margaret Fuller 23. Nathaniel Hawthorne 24. Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Holmes 25. Edgar Allan Poe 26. Henry David Thoreau 27. Herman Melville 28. Walt Whitman 29. Harriet Beecher Stowe 30. Frederick Douglass 31. Humor of the frontier Theme 4: The Continental Nation, 1865-1900 The Civil War transformed the distinct regions into a nation dominated by Northern business and finance. New laws encouraged industry on a large scale. The growth of cities followed New York, with a population of 3 million, was the second largest in the world and such cities came to dominate American life. The rapid growth of railroads made the entire nation accessible. The intensified awareness of regional differences and geographical extent was met by regional writers and local colorists. The ideas of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer undermined the super naturalistic basis of American morality. Realism and, later, naturalism were literary modes well suited to interpret a materialistic society. Against these modes, writers and readers who demanded that literature advance ideal values fought a long, ultimately losing, battle.
32. Regional writing and local color 33. Mark Twain 34. Emily Dickinson 35. American literary realism 36. William Dean Howells 37. Henry James 38. American literary naturalism 39. Frank Norris 40. Stephen Crane 41. Jack London 42. Native American writers Theme 5: The Progressive Era, 1900-1920 The period from the 1890s to beyond the end of World War I was filled with enthusiasm for a wide variety of social and economic reforms. Most of the writers who wrote with sincere conviction were social critics. However, criticism did not always find a welcoming audience, and many authors found it difficult to publish what they wrote. To live, they turned to other occupations. Consequently, with notable exceptions like Edith Wharton, they spent years as part-time writers. Their work on farms, in law offices, in journalism, commerce, and construction interfered with development of their technique and made self-cultivation difficult. On the other hand, their direct involvement in workday America gave their writing a new spaciousness, rawness, sense of loneliness, and authenticity. 43. Edgar Lee Masters 44. Edwin Arlington Robinson 45. Robert Frost 46. Carl Sandburg 47. Edith Wharton 48. Willa Cather 49. Theodore Dreiser 50. Sherwood Anderson Theme 6: American Literature in the Mainstream of Western Culture, 1920-1945 After World War I, military, political, and business forces created a reactionary climate hostile to new social and artistic ideas. Many young writers left America for Europe, where they found freedom to scrutinize the values of their country more critically than had the older writers who were left behind. They also discovered new standards of craftsmanship and new techniques originated by an older generation of artists and thinkers-the French symoliste poets along with Yeats and Pound; novelists Proust, Joyce, and Gertrude Stein; cubism, post-impressionism, and data in the visual arts; and the
concepts of Freud and Einstein. But if their technical refinement was European, their subject matter was American, presented in American terms without timidity, shocking the genteel. 51. Modernism 52. Gertrude Stein 53. Ezra Pound 54. H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) 55. T.S. Eliot 56. Eugene O Neill 57. Wallace Stevens 58. William Carlos Williams 59. Marianne Moore 60. Zora Neale Hurston 61. E.E. Cummings 62. John Dos Passos 63. F. Scott Fitzergald 64. William Faulkner 65. Ernest Hemingway 66. Hart Crane 67. Thomas Wolfe 68. Langston Hughes 69. John Steinbeck 70. Richard Wright 71. Eudora Welty 72. Ralph Ellison 73. Saul Bellow 74. Tennessee Williams 75. Arthur Miller 76. James Baldwin 77. Flannery O Connor 78. John Barth 79. John Updike 80. Thomas Pynchon 81. Alice Walker 82. Theodore Roethke 83. Elizabeth Bishop 84. Robert Lowell 85. Gwendolyn Brooks 86. Richard Wilbur 87. James Dickey 88. Beat poets: Allan Ginsberg and Gary Snyder 89. John Ashbery 90. Anne Sexton
91. Adrienne Rich 92. Sylvia Plath Theme 7: Cultural Diversity in American Literature, 1945-1980