List of terms Оглавление

Canon 3

Foundation texts 3

Yankee 3

Yankee Doodle 4

Puritanism + Manifest Destiny 4

New England 7

Frontier 7

American Adam 8

The Adamic Myth in 19Th Century American Literature 8

Captivity narratives 11

Expansion 12

Regionalism 13

Local color or regional literature is fiction and poetry that focuses on the characters, dialect, customs, topography, and other features particular to a specific region. Influenced by Southwestern and Down East humor, between the Civil War and the end of the nineteenth century this mode of writing became dominant in American literature. According to the Oxford Companion to American Literature, "In local-color literature one finds the dual influence of romanticism and realism, since the author frequently looks away from ordinary life to distant lands, strange customs, or exotic scenes, but retains through minute detail a sense of fidelity and accuracy of description". In his Cultures of Letters (1993) Richard Brodhead provides a short gloss on the genre: “It requires a setting outside the world of modern development, a zone of backwardness where locally variant folkways still prevail. Its characters are ethnologically colorful, personifications of the different humanity produced in such non-modern cultural settings. Above all, this fiction features an extensive written simulation of regional vernacular, a conspicuous effort to catch the nuances of local speech”. Josephine Donovan connects regionalist, or local color, literature to specific realistic representations. She specifies the genre as "depict[ing] authentic regional detail, including authentic dialect, authentic local characters, in real or realistic geographical settings.” 14

US Regional Writers 14

New England regional writers 14

Southern regional writers 14

Midwestern regional writers 15

Western & Others 15

Slave narrative 15

North American slave narratives 15

Transcendentalism 16

Abolitionism 18

American South 19

Wild West 19

Western 19

The Origins Of The Literary Western 19

Guilded Age 22

Tall tale 23

American tall tale 24

Yarn 25

Spirituals 26

Realism vs Naturalism 26

Reconstruction 29

Modernism 30

Lost generation 32

Southern Renaissance 33

Overview 33

The emergence of a new critical spirit 34

The Fugitives 34

The Southern Agrarians 35

Legacy 35

Beatnicks, Beat Generation 35

Romanticism 35

Early American sources 36

French Surrealism 36

Modernism 36

Influences on Western culture 36

Mass literature, pop literature 37

1960s 37

Canon

Canon, a body of writings recognized by authority. Those books of Holy Scripture which religious leaders accept as genuine are canonical, as are those works of a literary author which scholars regard as authentic. The canon of a national literature is a body of writings especially approved by critics or anthologists and deemed suitable for academic study. Canonicity is the quality of being canonical.

1. a standard, rule, or principle, or set of these, that are believed by a group of people to be right and good

2. a) list of books or pieces of music that are officially recognized as being the work of a certain writer: the Shakespearean canon

b) all the books that are recognized as being the most important pieces of literature: the literary canon