7.Abolitionist literature (Harriet Beecher Stowe “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”)

Abolitionism (from "abolish") was a political movement in late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that sought to end the practice of slavery and the worldwide slave trade. Its chief impetus came from Protestantism, as most abolitionists, especially in Great Britain and America, were men and women of profound Christian faith who took their convictions from the Gospel that all people are equal before God. It is, however, a cause for reflection that many people of religious conviction supported slavery, arguing that the Scriptures elevate some over others.

The truth, self-evident, that all men are created equal, apparent to the framers of the U.S. Constitution, has not always been so self-evident for many humans throughout history, for whom slavery was a fact of life. The belief that some people are naturally “masters,” others “slaves” can be found in Aristotle (384–328 B.C.E.), who wrote, “it is manifest that by nature some are free and others slaves and that service as a slave is for the latter the both beneficial and just” (Simpson, 1997:13).

By the late nineteenth century the abolitionist movement had largely succeeded in its goals. The Slavery Convention of 1926, the United Nations Universal Declaration on Human Rights (1945) and the Convention on the Abolition of Slavery, the Slave Trade and Institutions and Practices Similar to Slavery (1957) establish slavery as a crime in international law and recognize that slavery contravenes basic human rights.

The worldwide movement against slavery (still not entirely eliminated) can be seen as a coming of age for humanity. Theologically informed understandings of human life regard all people as of equal value in God's sight and as equally recipients of God's love. The anti-slavery movement can be understood as a necessary step towards realizing a single world, in which no one is enslaved or treated as less than equal due to their skin color, gender, ethnicity, creed, or economic means.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, American novelist and short-story writer, is famous for one of the most powerful anti-slavery novels ever written, her Uncle Tom's Cabin.

The story tells some of the horror of slave’s life.Uncle Tom's Cabin is dominated by a single theme: the evil and immorality of slavery.^[30] While Stowe weaves other subthemes throughout her text, such as the moral authority of motherhood and the redeeming possibilities offered by Christianity,^[4] she emphasizes the connections between these and the horrors of slavery. Stowe sometimes changed the story's voice so she could give a "homily" on the destructive nature of slavery^[31] (such as when a white woman on the steamboat carrying Tom further south states, "The most dreadful part of slavery, to my mind, is its outrages of feelings and affections—the separating of families, for example.").^[32] One way Stowe showed the evil of slavery^[24] was how this "peculiar institution" forcibly separated families from each other.^[33] Because Stowe saw motherhood as the "ethical and structural model for all of American life"^[34] and also believed that only women had the moral authority to save^[35] the United States from the demon of slavery, another major theme of Uncle Tom's Cabin is the moral power and sanctity of women. Through characters like Eliza, who escapes from slavery to save her young son (and eventually reunites her entire family), or Eva, who is seen as the "ideal Christian",^[36] Stowe shows how she believed women could save those around them from even the worst injustices. While later critics have noted that Stowe's female characters are often domestic clichés instead of realistic women,^[37] Stowe's novel "reaffirmed the importance of women's influence" and helped pave the way for the women's rights movement in the following decades.^[38]

Stowe's puritanical religious beliefs show up in the novel's final, over-arching theme – the exploration of the nature of Christianity^[4] and how she feels Christian theology is fundamentally incompatible with slavery.^[39] This theme is most evident when Tom urges St. Clare to "look away to Jesus" after the death of St. Clare's beloved daughter Eva. After Tom dies, George Shelby eulogizes Tom by saying, "What a thing it is to be a Christian."^[40] Because Christian themes play such a large role in Uncle Tom's Cabin—and because of Stowe's frequent use of direct authorial interjections on religion and faith—the novel often takes the "form of a sermon."^[41]

8.The general characteristics of the American Enlightenment. W. Irving “Rip Van Winkle

The American Enlightenment is the intellectual thriving period in America in the mid-to-late 18th century, especially as it relates to American Revolution on the one hand and the European Enlightenment on the other. Influenced by the scientific revolution of the 17th century and the humanist period during the Renaissance, the Enlightenment took scientific reasoning and applied it to human nature, society and religion. The Enlightenment was a movement created by the use of new scientific and political ideas in Europe. People began to use reason to create laws concerning things such as nature and behavior of humans. This reason was applied to other aspects of society such as education, the government and economics, and religion. The Enlightenment was also known as the Age of Reason and it reached its height in the mid-1700’s. In both England and France the major cause of the Enlightenment was the power of the government. Many people disliked the way the government was run in the countries of Europe. There were many changing political ideas. The old idea was that the king was sent by god to be a ruler, known as the divine right. A new idea then came about that the government should be ruled by the permission of what the governed people said, similar to our modern democracy. Main Ideas of the American Enlightenment

The Enlightenment caused a shift in the cultural and social attitudes of the people, bringing in some new and radical ideas.

Republicanism:The doctrine of republicanism asserts a system of a government that is elected by the people of the nation. The roots of this ideology go back to ancient Greece, when the concept of a democratic government was examined by philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle. Individual Liberty:“Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness” developed as the motto of this era, which forms the cornerstone of the U.S. Constitution today. Since the colonies had very few individual rights, they declared certain fundamental rights that they deemed “inalienable.” Democracy:The colonies had no say in the formation of the government, and had no representation in the law-making process. Consequently, they were attracted to the idea of democracy, where the government is “of the people, by the people, for the people,” as Lincoln later expressed in his Gettysburg Address. Religious Tolerance:Much impetus for the ideas of religious tolerance came from the rule of King George II, who was a staunch Catholic and did not allow freedom of religion to Protestants in New England. Voltaire was among the first to denounce Christianity and other organized religions as mere ploys to support monarchy. What emerged was Deism, which was more or less a new religion that considered reason its foundation. In Deism, there is no interference by a deity, and man controls his own destiny. These ideas stirred the masses into action, as the people dreamed of carving their own futures. Adopted by the Founding Fathers, Enlightenment ideals became the vision for modern-day America, where these ideologies are deeply rooted in the nation.

9.Transcendentalism: R. W. Emerson “Self Reliance”; H. D. Thoreau “Walden”, H. Melville.

This article is about Transcendentalism in nineteenth-century America. For other uses, see transcendence.

Transcendentalism was a group of new ideas in literature,religion, culture, and philosophy that emerged in New England in the early to middle 19th century. It is sometimes called American Transcendentalism to distinguish it from other uses of the word transcendental.  Transcendentalism began as a protest against the general state of culture and society at the time, and in particular, the state of intellectualism at Harvard and the doctrine of theUnitarian church which was taught at Harvard Divinity School. Among Transcendentalists' core beliefs was an ideal spiritualstate that 'transcends' the physical and empirical and is only realized through the individual's intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established religions. Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first, then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays – Essays: First Series and Essays: Second Series, published respectively in 1841 and 1844 – represent the core of his thinking, and include such well-known essays as Self-Reliance, The Over-Soul, Circles, The Poet and Experience. Together with Nature, these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period.Emerson wrote on a number of subjects, never espousing fixed philosophical tenets, but developing certain ideas such as individuality,freedom, the ability for humankind to realize almost anything, and the relationship between the soul and the surrounding worldSelf-Reliance is an essay written by American Transcendentalist philosopher and essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson. It contains the most thorough statement of one of Emerson's recurrent themes, the need for each individual to avoid conformity and false consistency, and follow his or her own instincts and ideas

Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister,development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist.^[1] He is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state. Henry Thoreau's Walden is one of the most influential books in early American literature. It recounts the author's experiences living in a small house in the woods around Walden Pond in Massachusetts in the 1840s. Walden is neither a novel nor a true autobiography, but a social critique of the Western World, with each chapter heralding some aspect of humanity that needed to be either renounced or praised. The work is part personal declaration of independence, social experiment, voyage of spiritual discovery, satire, and manual for self reliance.^[2] Published in 1854, it details Thoreau's experiences over the course of two years in a cabin he built near Walden Pond, amidst woodland owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, near Concord, Massachusetts.

By immersing himself in nature, Thoreau hoped to gain a more objective understanding of society through personal introspection. Simple living and self-sufficiency were Thoreau's other goals, and the whole project was inspired by transcendentalist philosophy, a central theme of the American Romantic Period. As Thoreau made clear in his book, his cabin was not in wilderness but at the edge of town, about two miles (3 km) from his family home.

Herman Melville (August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and poet. He is best known for his novel Moby-Dick. His first three books gained much contemporary attention (the first, Typee, becoming a bestseller), and after a fast-blooming literary success in the late 1840s, his popularity declined precipitously in the mid-1850s and never recovered during his lifetime. When he died in 1891, he was almost completely forgotten. It was not until the "Melville Revival" in the early 20th century that his work won recognition, especially Moby-Dick, which was hailed as one of the literary masterpieces of both American and world literature. He was the first writer to have his works collected and published by the Library of America. Most of Melville's novels were published first in the United Kingdom and then in the U.S. Sometimes the editions contain substantial differences with Melville acceding to his different publishers' requirements for different audiences.

Moby-Dick; or, The Whale has become Melville's most famous work and is often considered one of the greatest literary works of all time. It was dedicated to Melville's friend Nathaniel Hawthorne.^[13] It did not, however, make Melville rich. The book never sold its initial printing of 3,000 copies in his lifetime, and total earnings from the American edition amounted to just $556.37 from his publisher, Harper & Brothers. Melville also wrote Billy Budd, White-Jacket, Israel Potter, Redburn, Typee, Omoo, Pierre, The Confidence-Man and many short stories, including "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street" and "Benito Cereno," and works of various genres.Melville is less well known as a poet and did not publish poetry until later in life. After the Civil War, he published Battle Pieces and Aspects of the War, which did not sell well; of the Harper & Bros. printing of 1200 copies, only 525 had been sold ten years later.^[20]Again tending to outrun the tastes of his readers, Melville's epic length verse-narrative Clarel, about a student's pilgrimage to the Holy Land, was also quite obscure, even in his own time. Among the longest single poems in American literature, Clarel, published in 1876, had an initial printing of only 350 copies. The critic Lewis Mumford found a copy of the poem in the New York Public Library in 1925 "with its pages uncut"—in other words, it had sat there unread for 50 years.^[21]His poetry is not as highly critically esteemed as his fiction, although some critics place him as the first modernist poet in the United States; others would assert that his work more strongly suggest what today would be a postmodern view.^[22] A leading champion of Melville's claims as a great American poet was the poet and novelist Robert Penn Warren, who issued a selection of Melville's poetry prefaced by an admiring and acute critical essay. According to Melville scholar Elizabeth Renker "a sea change in the reception of the poems is incipient."^[23] In reference to the poem Clarel, poetry critic Helen Vendler remarked: "What it cost Melville to write this poem makes us pause, reading it. Alone, it is enough to win him, as a poet, what he called 'the belated funeral flower of fame'".