филология (Бакалавриат)

1. The roots of the national American literature.

In the 18^th cent. England became surpreme ruler of the NorthAmerican continent. In the 18^th cent. America gain the1st prominent writers. The lit-re of the US didn’t begin as an independent lit-re. the early colonists were Englishmen. They brought with them their own lang-ge, books, way of thinking.For nearly 200 years after the 1s settlements in America the majority of the works read there were written by English authors. The hard struggle with the native Indians didn’t allow the 1^st colonists to create their own lit-re. he lit-re of this period consists of historical or religious journals, letters, peehes, sermons. Among the most religious writer was Cotton Mather. His work was named ‘Magnalia Chtisty Americana’ 1702. This is a two volume ecclesiastical history of new England. The other main concern of prose writers was to describe the history and geographic. A counts of the 1^st pioneers and their activities took the form of the news, journals, letters, practical handbooks, ordinary letters. They provide an interesting picture of a colonial life. The 1^st English writer in America was Capitan John Smith “The general history of Vorginia”, essay “What is the America”.

The group of poets “Connecticut Wits” ( John Trumbull, Timothy Dwith, David Humphreys, Joel Barlow). They exhibited a desire for a new national lit-re which was free of the European verse models. Many American prose writers abandoned religious concern and took to politics. In an age of scientific rationalism, new ideas became popular and liberty. The most prominent figures of this century are: Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin.

2. Early colonial writing: religious literature (Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards), historical writings (John Smith, William Bradford). Colonial poetry (Anne Bradstreet, Edward Taylor).

Colonial American literature is writing that emerged from the original U.S. colonies during the period from 1607 to the late 1700s. It was largely influenced by British writers, and was created to inform people about colonial life, religious disputes and settlement issues. Many of the characteristics of Colonial American literature can be found in the poems, journals, letters, narratives, histories and teaching materials written by settlers, religious figures and historical icons of the period. Colonial American literature includes the writings of Cotton Mather, Jonathan Edwards, William Bradford, John Smith Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor. Colonial American literature is characterized by the narrative, which was used extensively during this period. Most of the literary works of this genre are composed of letters, journals, biographies and memoirs. Religion is also another characteristic of Colonial American literature and can be found mostly in Puritan writings. 

Cotton Mather (1663-1728) No account of New England colonial literature would be complete without mentioning Cotton Mather, the master pedant. The third in the four-generation Mather dynasty of Massachusetts Bay, he wrote at length of New England in over 500 books and pamphlets. Mather's 1702 Magnalia Christi Americana (Ecclesiastical History of New England), his most ambitious work, exhaustively chronicles the settlement of New England through a series of biographies. The huge book presents the holy Puritan errand into the wilderness to establish God s kingdom; its structure is a narrative progression of representative American "Saints' Lives. Jonathan Edwards was born in Connecticut, the only son of a religious family of eleven children. A very precocious child, he was educated at home by his minister father and strong-minded mother. He entered Yale at the age of 13, during which time he underwent the experience of religious conversation. He was determined "never to lose one moment of time, but to improve it in the most profitable way."Appointed assistant minister to his grandfather, he later became chief minister to the congregation, a position he held for 20 years. His last position was the President of Princeton, but he died unexpectedly from a smallpox inoculation two months after the appointment.Edwards believed in the inward communication of the soul with God. He dedicated himself to God on Jan. 12, 1723, going to converse with God in a solitary place more often. He believed that God is immanent and man can regenerate.Edwards had a metaphorical mode of perception, i.e., a symbolic way of looking at things. He believed that God created the world out of Himself by diffusing Himself into time and space. Therefore, everything is an image or shadow of the divine.Edwards was the last medieval man as a relic of Puritanism and also the first modern American for his knowledge of the new science lighted by Newton. He remains one of the most penetrating minds ever produced in America. Edwards is well known for his many books, The End For Which God Created the World, The Life of David Brainerd, which served to inspire thousands of missionaries throughout the 19th century, and Religious Affections, which many Reformed Evangelicals still read today. John Smith Admiral of New England was an English soldier, explorer, and author. He was played a important part in the establishment of the first permanent English settlement in North America. He was a leader of the Virginia Colony (based at Jamestown) between September 1608 and August 1609, and led an exploration along the rivers of Virginia and the Chesapeake Bay. Smith's books and maps are extremely important in the further colonization of the New World. (A True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Note as Happened in Virginia (1608) (A Map of Virginia (1612),The Proceedings of the English Colony in Virginia (1612),A Description of New England (1616),New England's Trials (1620, 1622),The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles (1624),An Accidence, or the Pathway to Experience Necessary for all Young Seamen (1626),A Sea Grammar (1627) – the first sailors' word book in EnglishThe True Travels, Adventures and Observations of Captain John Smith (1630),Advertisements for the Unexperienced Planters of New England, or Anywhere (1631)) William Bradford was elected governor of Plymouth in the Massachusetts Bay Colony shortly after the Separatists landed. He was a deeply pious, self-educated man who had learned several languages, His participation in the migration to Holland and the Mayflower voyage to Plymouth, and his duties as governor, made him ideally suited to be the first historian of his colony. His history, Of Plymouth Plantation (1651), is a clear and compelling account of the colony's beginning. Anne Bradstreet (c. 1612-1672)  The first published book of poems by an American was also the first American book to be published by a woman -- Anne Bradstreet. It is not surprising that the book was published in England, given the lack of printing presses in the early years of the first American colonies. Born and educated in England, Anne Bradstreet was the daughter of an earl's estate manager. She emigrated with her family when she was 18. Her husband eventually became governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which later grew into the great city of Boston. She preferred her long, religious poems on conventional subjects such as the seasons, but contemporary readers most enjoy the witty poems on subjects from daily life and her warm and loving poems to her husband and children. To My Dear and Loving Husband, Before the Birth of One of Her Children She was inspired by English metaphysical poetry, and her book The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) shows the influence of Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, and other English poets as well. Edward Taylor (c. 1644-1729) Like Anne Bradstreet, and, in fact, all of New England's first writers, the intense, brilliant poet and minister Edward Taylor was born in England. The son of a yeoman farmer -- an independent farmer who owned his own land -- Taylor was a teacher who sailed to New England in 1668 rather than take an oath of loyalty to the Church of England. He studied at Harvard College, and, like most Harvard-trained ministers, he knew Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. A selfless and pious man, Taylor acted as a missionary to the settlers when he accepted his lifelong job as a minister in the frontier town of Westfield, Massachusetts, 160 kilometers into the thickly forested, wild interior. Taylor was the best-educated man in the area, and he put his knowledge to use, working as the town minister, doctor, and civic leader.Modest, pious, and hard-working, Taylor never published his poetry, which was discovered only in the 1930s. He would, no doubt, have seen his work's discovery as divine providence; today's readers should be grateful to have his poems -- the finest examples of 17th-century poetry in North America.Taylor wrote a variety of verse: funeral elegies, lyrics, a medieval "debate," and a 500-page Metrical History of Christianity (mainly a history of martyrs). His best works, according to modern critics, are the series of short Preparatory Meditations.