Modern English Literature

LECTURE 4

Printout 4

US LITERATURE TIMELINE

US Literature Periodization 1. Colonial Literature (1608-1775) 2. The Revolutionary Period (1775-1787) 3. Literature of a Young Nation (1788-1830)		4. The Era of Expansion (1831-1870) 5. The Age of Realism (1871-1913) 6. The World Wars and Depression (1914-1945) 7. Literature since 1945
Native American Literature: Navajo; Acoma; Ojibwa; Hopil Cheyenne [Mababozho; Maheo; Coot; Coyote] Words borrowed from Indian languages: canoe, tobacco, potato, moccasin, moose, persimmon, raccoon, tomahawk, totem	1. A Chippewa poem-song: A loon I thought it was But it was My love’s splashing oar.		2. A Modoc vision song: I The song I walk here.

I. Colonial and Pre-Revolutionary Period (1608 to 1776)

- Virginia: John Smith (1580--1631) "A True Relation of . . . Virginia . . . " (1608); "The Generall Historie of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles" (1624) [Pocahontas

- New England: William Bradford "Of Plimoth Plantation"

Being thus passed the vast ocean, and a sea of troubles… they had now no friends to welcome them nor inns to entertain or refresh their weatherbeaten bodies; no houses or much less towns to repair to, to seek for succor… savage barbarians… were readier to fill their sides with arrows than otherwise. And for the reason it was winter, and they that know the winters of that country, know them to be sharp and violent, and subject to cruel and fierce storms… all stand upon them with a weatherbeaten face, and the whole country, full of woods and thickets, represents a wild and savage hue.

Cotton and Increase Mathers 'Magnalia Christi Americana' (Christ's Great Achievements in America, the Ecclesiastical History of New England from Its First Planting in the New Year 1620, unto the Year of our Lord 1698)

Jonathan Edwards “Freedom of Will” from 'Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God'.

God should let you go, you would immediately sink, and sinfully descend, and plunge into the bottomless gulf… The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked… he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the bottomless gulf.

- Michael Wigglesworth "The Day of Doom" (1662)

- Bay Psalm Book (1595–1661))

Anne Bradstreet The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) To My Dear and Loving Husband If ever two were one, then surely we. If ever man were loved by wife, then thee; If ever wife was happy in a man, Compare with me ye woman if you can. I prize thy love more than whole mines of gold Or all the riches that the East doth hold. My love is such that rivers cannot quench, Nor ought but love from thee, give recompense. Thy love is such I can no way repay, The heavens reward thee manifold, I pray. Then While we live, in love let’s so persevere That when we live no more, we may live ever.

Edward Taylor 'Upon What Base" Upon what base was fixed the lathe wherein He turned this globe and rigolled it so trim? Who blew the bellows of His furnace vast? Or held the mold wherein the world was cast? Who laid its cornerstone? On whose command? Where stand the pillars upon which it stands? Who laced and filleted the earth so fine With rivers like green ribbons smaragdine? Who made the seas its selvage and its locks Like a quilt ball within a silver box? Who spread its canopy? Or curtains spun? Who in this bowling alley bowled the sun?

- Afro-American writers

– Lucy Terry "Bar’s Fight, August 28, 1746,"

– Phillis Wheatley Poems on Various Subjects: Religious and Moral (1773)

II. Literature of the revolutionary period (1775-1787)

Prose: the Federalist, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, Ch. Brown, Olaudah Equiano

Poetry: Philip Freneau

- Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790) Poor Richard’s Almanack; Autobiography

b. Early to bed, early to rise, makes the man healthy, wealthy and wise – God helps them who help themselves – One today is worth two tomorrow

– Three may keep a secret if two of them are dead – Fish and visitors smell in three days – A little neglect may breed great Mischief…

– Keep your eyes wide open before marriage, half shut afterwards. (Poor Richard's Almanack)

– Remember, that time is money. (`Advice to Young Tradesman)

– There never was a good war, or a bad peace. (Letter to Quincey 11 Sept 1783)

– We must indeed all hang together, or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.

(Remark to John Hancock, at Signing of the Declaration of Independence 4 July 1776)

- Thomas Paine (1737-1809) "Common Sense"; "The American Crisis"

- Thomas Jefferson "Declaration of Independence"

- Philip Freneau (1752-1832) "The Indian Burying Ground," "The Wild Honey Suckle," "On a Honey Bee"

- William Hill Brown "The Power of Sympathy" (1789)

- Charles Brockden Brown

- Oladuah Equiano (Gustavus Vassa) (1745-1797) "Life of the African" (1789)

III. Literature of a young nation (1788-1830):

Prose: - Washington Irving (1783-1859) The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent,(Rip Van Winkle; The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1819-1820))

- James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) The Leather-Stocking Tales (The Deerslayer (1841); The Last of the Mohicans (1826); The Pathfinder (1840); The Pioneers (1823); The Prairie (1827)); Natty Bumppo

Poetry: - William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) Thanatopsis (1917); To a Waterfowl (1818)

Prose and Poetry: - Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) The Raven (1845); Ligeia; The Fall of the House of Usher; William Willson. The Murder in the Rue Morgue (1841); The Gold Bug (1843)

- Ambrose Bierce (1842--1914?), The Fiend's Delight; Cobwebs from an Empty Skull (1874); "The Devil's Dictionary" (1906)

Noise: A stench in the ear ... The chief product and authenticating sign of civilization. Devil's Dictionary

Patience: A minor form of despair, disguised as a virtue. Devil's Dictionary

IV. Era of expansion and transcendentalism (1831-1870)

Transcendentalists: R.W. Emerson; H.D. Thoreau; George Ripley; Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott.

- Emerson Ralph Waldo (1803-1882) Self-Reliance (1841); Nature (1836)

– Hitch your wagon to a star. Society and Solitude, `Civilization”

- Thoreau Henry David (1817-1862) Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854)

From Walden I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what is not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

– It takes two to speak the truth, - one to speak, and another to hear. Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

– Simplify, simplify. Walden, `Where I Lived, and What I Lived For

– The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Walden, `Economy”

• Hawthorne Nathaniel (1804-1864) The Scarlet Letter 1850 (Hester Prynne, Roger Chillingworth, Arthur Dimmesdale)

• Herman Melville (1819-1891 'Typee' (1846), 'Omoo' (1847), 'Moby-Dick' (1851)

– New England Brahmins: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) The Song of Hiawatha (1855)

- James Russell Lowell (1819 – 1891); Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809 – 1894)

– Walt Whitman (1819-1892) Leaves of Grass (1855 – 1882); Song of Myself

- Harriet Beecher-Stowe (1811-1896) Uncle Tom's Cabin, or Life Among the Lowly (1851-1852)