找出不同类的一项American Literature Prose

2021年1月21日发(作者：嘲笑)
American Literature: Prose
I

INTRODUCTION

American Literature: Prose, fiction and nonfiction of the American colonies and the
United States, written in the English language from about 1600 to the present. This
literature captures America’s quest to under
stand and define itself. From the
beginning America was unique in the diversity of its inhabitants; over time they
arrived from all parts of the world. Although English quickly became the language of
America, regional and ethnic dialects have enlivened and
enriched the country’s
literature almost from the start. Today American prose encompasses a variety of
traditions and voices that share a common context: the geographical region now
known as the United States. Native American literatures, which were largely oral at
the time of colonial settlement, stand apart as a separate tradition that is itself strong
and varied.
For its first 200 years American prose reflected the settlement and growth of the
American colonies, largely through histories, religious writings, and expedition and
travel narratives. Biography also played an important role, especially in America’s
search for native heroes. Fiction appeared only after the colonies gained
independence, when the clamor for a uniquely American literature brought forth
novels based on events in America’s past. With a flowering of prose in the mid
-1800s,
the young nation found its own voice. By then fiction had become the dominant
literary genre in America. In the 20th century, American literature took its place on
the world stage and began to exert influence on other literatures. For a discussion of
American drama or poetry,
see
American Literature: Drama and American Literature:
Poetry.
II

BEGINNINGS: THE 1500S AND 1600S

When European explorers first saw North America, Native American cultures had rich,
established literatures. Legends, folktales, and other forms of literature were
preserved in oral form and passed down from one generation to the next through
ceremonies and other community gatherings, as well as within family groups and
other informal settings. Much of this literature disappeared with the destruction of
Native American cultures that followed white settlement of the continent. Among the
richest set of Native American stories that survive are creation myths, descriptions of
the beginnings of the universe and the world and of the origin of humankind. In
Native American cultures, these myths served purposes similar to those served in
Judeo-Christian cultures by the stories in the biblical book of Genesis. The creation
myths of Native American cultures share with the Genesis accounts a concern with
relationships among the divine, the human, and the world of animals and plants; the
reasons behind those relationships; and the saga of the universe before the advent of
humanity.
Long before settlers arrived in America, explorers reported on their voyages to the
continent. Through the 1600s American literature grew from exploration narratives
to include histories of settlement
—
both natural histories of the land and social
histories of the people. Religious writings expressed the values and beliefs of
American colonists.
A

Exploration Narratives

The earliest literature about America consists of impressions of America recorded by
European explorers after they returned home. Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci
provided some of the earliest European descriptions of the American continent in
letters and maps from an expedition in 1499 and 1500; these had appeared in print
by 1505. In 1507 German geographer and cartographer Martin Waldseemü
ller
published
Cosmographiae introductio,
a collection of documents that included letters
written by Italian-Spanish navigator Christopher Columbus to his sponsors, King
Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. Such texts were circulated among explorers
and high-ranking political officials who made decisions about funding further
expeditions.
The first works published in English about America also recorded discoveries and
solicited support for new voyages. Before 1600 Sir Walter Raleigh, Richard Hakluyt,
Thomas Harriot, and John White had published accounts of discoveries. Although
Raleigh's narratives focused on the land now called Venezuela, he became a key
figure in the history of the British in North America when he founded the first English
colony in America, the Roanoke Colony, in 1585 under the sponsorship of Queen
Elizabeth I, on an island off the coast of what is now North Carolina.
In support of Raleigh, Thomas Harriot wrote
A Brief and True Report of the New
Found Land of Virginia
(1588), primarily to encourage the queen's continued support
of the Roanoke Colony, whose first settlement had just failed. Harriot's text included
descriptions of the native population as well as observations of plant and animal life
near the colony. Richard Hakluyt never traveled to America, but his writing was
instrumental in encouraging the queen to invest more money in voyages of
exploration. He collected diaries, letters, ships’ logs, and commercial reports, mostly
from his English compatriots but also from Portuguese, Spanish, and French voyages.
Hakluyt published these writings in
Diverse Voyages Touching the Discovery of
America
(1582) and
Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques, and Discoveries of
the English Nation
(1589-1590). In these compilations, Hakluyt made grand
statements about British imperialism and for the first time claimed America as
properly belonging to England.

A later compilation by Hakluyt included
The Fifth Voyage of M. John White into the
West Indies and Parts of America called Virginia, in the Year 1590
(1593), which had
been written by John White. White’s work centered on a great mystery. He had led a
group of colonists who founded a second colony on Roanoke Island, and after the
birth of the first British child in the A
mericas, White’s granddaughter Virginia Dare, he
returned to England. Upon his return to Roanoke, all signs of the colony were gone.
The fate of the colony remains a mystery to this day.
B

Histories

The writings of Captain John Smith, an explorer whose travels took him up and down
the eastern seaboard of America, represent a shift from exploration narrative toward
early history. Exploration narratives typically record the thrills and terrors of
encountering the unknown, and early histories of America also capture this sense of
novelty. Early histories, however, were written primarily by settlers rather than by
explorers. They generally sought religious explanations
—chiefly God’s will—
for the
dangers and challenges of colonial life. Although Smith still wrote to gain funding for
further voyages, he had begun to record his observations as a historian in
A
Description of New England
(1616).

William Bradford, the first governor of the Plymouth Colony, wrote his
History of
Plymouth Plantation
from 1630 to 1647, although it was not published until 1856.
Earlier accounts published in England
—
Good News from New England
(1624) by
Edward Winslow and
Mourt's Relation
(1622) by an unknown author
—
provided
extensive source material for Bradford when he recalled the earliest years of his
colony. John Winthrop, who served as governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony
from 1630 to 1649, kept extensive journals that were published nearly 200 years
later as
History of New England from 1630 to 1649
(1825-1826). Another important
historian of early America was Thomas Morton, whose
New English Canaan

(1634-1635) used humor in portraying what he considered to be the overbearing and
intolerant qualities of the Puritans.
C

Religious Writings

Histories of early America, especially in New England, were filled with references to
the Bible and to God's will. All events could be explained from this religious
perspective: Storms and sicknesses might represent God's wrath; a bountiful harvest
might signify God's blessing. Given the Puritans’
sense of a direct relationship with
God, it is not surprising that sermons and other religious writings dominated
literature in America in the 1600s. John Cotton, Thomas Hooker, Roger Williams, and
John Winthrop were among the most prominent theologians in the first generation of
settlers. They were followed by the Mather family
—
Richard Mather, his son Increase
Mather, and Increase's son Cotton Mather
—
in the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Religious writings recorded strenuous debates about church doctrine, such as the
role of free-
will and good works in an individual’s salvation, although certain issues
discussed by the theologians went beyond religion. Williams’s
A Key into the
Language of America
(1643), for example, was remarkable for its efforts to
understand America's indigenous peoples.

Other contact between natives and settlers was less friendly. Increase Mather wrote
a history of the first sustained conflict between Native Americans and colonial settlers,
known as King Philip's War (after a Wampanoag chief, Metacomet, whom the
colonists called Philip). In
A Brief History of the War with the Indians in New England

(1676), Mather urged his community to reform so that God would not subject them
to more trials of that sort.
Mather was also instrumental in bringing to press
The Sovereignty and Goodness of
God … A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mary Rowlandson
(1682). This
work is a firsthand account by a colonist who was taken captive by Narragansett
Indians during King Philip’s War. It presents
a dramatic tale of suffering and of
Rowlandson's efforts to make sense of that suffering. Her story became the model for
a new genre of early American literature: captivity narratives. Such accounts became
staples of American prose and eventually provided material for American fiction.
While still religious in tone and purpose, captivity narratives emphasized the
experiences of individuals rather than the progress of nations. They also incorporated
many of the fundamentals of fiction, making use of sympathetic characters, dramatic
action and setting, and vividly portrayed sources of evil in stereotypic renditions of
Indian savagery.
The Salem witch trials of 1692 constituted another dark period in early American
history, as accusations of witchcraft in a Massachusetts town resulted in the
execution of 14 women and 6 men. Cotton Mather’s
Memorable Providences, Relating
to Witchcraft and Possessions
(1689), although written before the Salem trials,
indicated a growing interest in the occult on the part of relig
ious leaders. Mather’s
The Wonders of the Invisible World
(1693) documented the events of the witch trials.
Robert Calef's
More Wonders of the Invisible World
(1700) offered a biting response
to Mather and the hysteria of religious leaders involved in the Salem witch- hunt. As
a result of his interest in witchcraft and of Calef's scathing accusations, Cotton Mather
tends to be remembered as a witch-hunter, although his own writings suggest a
relatively moderate stance on the subject.
III

TOWARD INDEPENDENCE: THE 1700S

During the 1700s, American prose underwent tremendous changes in form, theme,
and purpose as the colonies moved toward declaring their independence from Great
Britain. As the century began, prose remained primarily religious in its endeavors to
make sense of what still seemed a decidedly new world. As the century wore on,
political thought
—
especially regarding the relationship between the colonies and the
mother country
—
increasingly occupied American writers.
A

Religious Writings

American religious
writing in the 1700s reached a height of drama in “Sinners in the
Hands of an Angry God” (1741), the best
-known sermon by clergyman Jonathan
Edwards. The strength of this appeal to religious fear left his congregation in tears. A
powerful orator, Edwards led a revival movement known as the Great Awakening to
revitalize religious practice in the colonies. Edwards's ideas were a complicated mix,
shaped not only by his study and love of the Puritans but also by 17th- and
18th-century European philosophy. Some of Edwards's best religious works were
also philosophical investigations. In
A Careful and Strict Enquiry into … Notions of …
Freedom of Will …
(1754), Edwards argues that human actions are predetermined by
God, thus negating the notion of free will.
Cotton Mather remained an important literary figure in the 18th century. His
Magnalia Christi Americana
(The Great Works of Christ in America, 1702) is an epic
history of New England that celebrates the founding generation of Puritans. Like his
earlier works, it is profoundly religious; however, its size, scope, and interest in the
human side of the Puritan founders marked a new achievement in American literary
history. Mather's prolific career included writings on science and medicine as well as
theology and history. His
Sentiments on the Small Pox Inoculated
(1721) was
instrumental in introducing the smallpox vaccine to New England.

As Mather's career indicates, the scope of American prose began to broaden after
1700. In
The Negro Christianized
(1706), Mather also became one of the first
Americans to address issues of race by arguing that Africans should receive Christian
education and be allowed to join the church. Slavery had been introduced to the
American colonies in the early 17th century. By the early 18th century, antislavery
sentiments were rising. In 1700 New England judge Samuel Sewall published a
strong antislavery tract,
The Selling of Joseph,
which drew on both legal and biblical
references.

B

Travel Narratives

A new genre, the travel narrative, would become especially influential late in the
1700s. One of the first was written by a schoolteacher, Sarah Kemble Knight.
The
Journal of Madam Knight,
written in 1704 although not published until 1825, gives a
lively account of her journey through hostile Indian territory. Knight was less
interested in religious explanations for her experience than Rowlandson had been
some 20 years earlier, and more concerned with conveying the actual dangers of her
day-to-day existence. Her journal is one of a long line of travel narratives that
includes
Travels Through the Interior Parts of North America
(1778) by Jonathan
Carver and
Travels Through North and South Carolina …
(1791) by William Bartram.
Travel stories often blended observations on nature and landscape with tales of
personal courage and achievement.

A book similar to the travel journal in its descriptions of experiences in a new land
was
Letters from an American Farmer
(1782) by French writer Michel Guillaume Jean
de Crè
vecoeur. This work also anticipated American fiction, particularly in the
creation of its distinctive first-person narrator, Farmer James. Written toward the end
of the American Revolution,
Letters from an American Farmer
was an interesting
effort to describe and define what it meant to be an American.

C

Journalism

The first successful American newspaper, the
Boston News-Letter,
was founded in
1704; it was joined by the
Boston Gazette
in 1719. At a time when newspaper
journalism was concerned primarily with reporting political events, the
New-England
Courant,
started by James Franklin in 1721, became the first newspaper to include
literary entertainment. Franklin’s younger brother Benjamin Franklin published
humorous social commentary in the
Courant
under the pen name and persona of
Silence Dogood, the widow of a minister. Magazines also appeared for the first time
in the colonies during the mid-1700s. Before 1800 magazines were concerned
primarily with measuring America’s developing culture against the British model.

During the 1700s Boston and Philadelphia became centers of publishing in addition
to being political and commercial hubs. Benjamin Franklin was a key figure in
establishing a vibrant intellectual community in Philadelphia. In 1727 he and a group
of friends established a
men’s reading club in Philadelphia called the Junto. Members
shared printed works and discussed topics of the day. Such reading and discussion
clubs became an important part of American literary culture, particularly at colleges,
but Franklin’s was especi
ally influential because it evolved into a prototype for the
lending library. By 1729 Franklin had started his own printing house and was editing
and publishing a newspaper, the
Pennsylvania Gazette
. In the 1740s his press
released the first novel published in America,
Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded
by British
author Samuel Richardson.

Women organized literary circles in the 1750s and 1760s. These groups, known as
salons, resembled men’s reading clubs. They also encouraged members to compose
their own work, mainly poetry.

D

Political Writing

By the mid-1700s American prose was first and foremost political. Many
18th-century thinkers believed in the ability of reason to control human destiny and
improve the human condition, an enormous change from the belief in predestination
that characterized the 17th century. As a result, the 18th century was known as the
Age of Enlightenment. In the American colonies Enlightenment thought was
expressed chiefly through political discourse. American thinkers asserted a growing
belief in the supremacy of reason over church doctrine; they also emphasized the
importance of the individual and freedom over and above established authorities and
institutions. America's great Enlightenment writers
—
Franklin, Thomas Paine, and
Thomas Jefferson
—
also played major roles in the American Revolution.
Franklin began his literary career as a publisher but made his greatest contribution
to American literature as a writer. In his writing Franklin advocated hard work as the
key to success. His views come across clearly in the maxims, proverbs, and
homespun wisdom that filled his
Poor Richard's Almanack,
which was published
annually from 1733 to 1758 under the pen name Richard Saunders. Franklin’s
almanac sayings were collected in
The Way to Wealth
(1757) in the form of a speech
by a character named Father Abraham. It is one of Franklin’s great statements on the
self-made man. Like much of Franklin's writing, the work reached an enormous
audience through translations into European languages. Franklin
’s
Autobiography
was

first published in full in 1868, 78 years after his death; it is considered an
American classic

because of its portrait of Franklin and American life during his time.
Thomas Paine became a leading figure in the cause of American independence with
the pamphlet
Common Sense
(1776). This enormously popular political document
asserted that the American colonies received no advantage from Great Britain and
that every consideration of common sense called for them to establish an
independent republican government. Written in a straightforward style using the
language of the common person,
Common Sense
was published six months before
the Declaration of Independence was adopted. At that point, most colonists still
believed that their grievances with Great Britain could be settled peaceably. Paine
profoundly shook this belief, insisting that there was no turning back and making his
readers feel that each person had the power and responsibility to participate in the
cause of revolution.
Although it lacked the searing rhetoric of
Common Sense
, the Declaration of
Independence was a crucial achievement in both politics and American prose. It was
structured in the form of an assertion that was then proven through specific
examples. The declaration was written by a committee made up of Franklin, Jefferson,
John Adams, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston, though Jefferson was
ultimately responsible for most of the phrasing. The declaration and the Constitution
of the United States (1787) were key statements of American freedom, but as
collaborative documents they necessitated compromises to satisfy all of their authors.
One of the most significant compromises was the absence of any mention of slavery.
Slavery was antithetical to the ideals of the American Revolution, but for the sake of
unity with the Southern colonies, whose economy was rooted in slavery, no protest
was made against it as a social evil.
A final flurry of political writing at the close of the century arose from the debate over
ratification of the Constitution. Federalists supported the strong central government
outlined in the Constitution, while an anti-Federalist faction opposed it. A series of
essays supporting ratification was published in 1787 and 1788 and circulated in
pamphlets. The essays, later published as
The Federalist
, were written by James
Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay.

E

Voices Outside the Mainstream

While the debate on individual rights and government powers went on, some whose
rights were not under debate spoke up. From 1774 to 1783 Abigail Adams conducted
an extensive correspondence with her husband, John Adams, while they were
separated during the Revolution and its aftermath. These letters, which were
published as
Familiar Letters of John Adams and His Wife, Abigail
(1876), describe in
detail everyday life in the young nation. Remarkably, in letters written during the
drafting of the Declaration of Independence, she asked that women's rights and
status be considered as part of this statement of human rights. Her requests were not
radical by today's standards, but they constituted bold steps for her day. Judith
Sargent Murray, a Boston writer, vigorously argued against the notion that women
were not equipped for work in the public sphere. Her essay “On the Equ
ality of the
Sexes” was published in 1790 in the
Massachusetts Magazine
.

Slave narratives recorded another side of life in America.
The Interesting Narrative of
the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself

(1789) was one of the first autobiographical narratives by a slave, beginning with his
childhood in Africa. The slave narrative gained strength during the 19th century as
slavery became a prominent topic of political discussion. Equiano's title alone made a
significant statement: With it he reclaimed his African identity (Olaudah Equiano) and
subordinated the slave name (Gustavus Vassa) he was given by his captors.

Conversion to Christianity provided a focus for several early American
autobiographies, including Equiano's and the first-known Native American
autobiography in English. “A Short Narrative of My Life” was written in 1768 by
Samson Occum, a member of the Mohegan tribe who became a Presbyterian minister;
it was not published in its entirety until 1982.

F

The First American Fiction

American fiction became established only after the American Revolution.
The Power
of Sympathy
(1789), a tragic love story by William Hill Brown, is generally considered
the first American novel. Charles Brockden Brown is among the best-remembered
novelists of the period. His
Wieland; or, The Transformation
(1798) is a cleverly
plotted horror story that emphasizes dark, supernatural visions. Other notable novels
of the time include Susanna Rowson's
Charlotte Temple
(1791), a tragic romance
that involves a young woman’s journey from England to the colonies during the
Revolution; Gilbert Imlay's
The Emigrants
(1793), the story of an English family
whose life improves in America; and Hannah Foster's
The Coquette
(1797), a novel in
the form of letters.

IV

NATIONHOOD: THE 1800S

In the early 1800s America faced a difficult challenge: how to create its own culture.
The religious and political writers of the 17th and 18th centuries offered some
guidance. Cotton Mather, for example, had argued for the uniqueness of America's
mission. But none of those writers could satisfy the growing American appetite for
prose fiction focused on American issues and grown from American imaginations.
Calls for an American literature began during the Revolution and became more
frequent and urgent as independence was assured.
Over the course of the 19th century the country progressed from an agricultural
economy concentrated on the Eastern seaboard to an industrialized nation that
spanned the continent. With the dramatic changes in the nation came dramatic
changes in its literature. When the century opened, only a handful of novels had been
written, but by mid-century American fiction rivaled the best in the world. Biography
and history remained strong; religious writing, on the other hand, had substantially
declined in importance.
A

Manifestations of Nationhood

Among the first manifestations of nationhood was the recognition that America had
its own language and that American English differed from British English. Pioneering
lexicographer Noah Webster led a call for uniquely American traditions in language
and literature, and he undertook the massive project of developing an American
dictionary. He had already advocated changes in American spellings of English words
in such writings as
Dissertations on the English Language
(1789). Webster published
his first dictionary in 1806. The first edition of his major work,
American Dictionary of
the English Language,
came out in 1828. What made this work radical was his
insistence on defining words based not only on traditional English usage but also on
American variations in usage, called Americanisms, and his inclusion of at least 5000
new words not previously recognized by English dictionaries.

A
1
History

Gaining independence also provided the United States with a history of its own.
Samuel Miller’s
A Brief Retrospect of the Eighteenth Century
(1803) and Mercy Otis
Warren’s
History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution

(1805) were both substantial histories of 18th-century America, including the
Revolution. Many of the histories of America from the early and mid-1800s achieved
additional drama through their authors’ interpretations of the growing greatness of
the nation. Foremost among these patriotic and romantic histories was the
monumental ten- volume
History of the United States
(1834-1876) by George
Bancroft, who is often called the father of American history.


A
2
Early Fiction: Irving

Local histories, like general histories, were also of interest in the early part of the
century.
History of New York
(1809), by Washington Irving but ostensibly written by
Irving's famous comic creation, the Dutch American scholar Diedrich Knickerbocker,
offered a surprising twist on standard local history. A satire on the exaggeration and
earnestness often found in local histories, this work seemed to reflect America's
desire to break away from established forms of writing and to engage more fully in
the world of imaginative literature.
Literary magazines proliferated in the early 1800s, bearing witness in yet another
way to a public appetite for fiction.
Port Folio
was founded in Philadelphia in 1801 and
discussed both politics and literature. From 1807 to 1808 Irving and James Kirke
Paulding published the literary magazine
Salmagundi; or, The Whim-Whams and
Opinions of Launcelot Langstaff, Esq., and Others,
which was devoted to satirical
writings.
Through his satires, sketches, and short stories, Irving was one of the most
influential American authors of the
first half of the 19th century. Among Irving’s
best-
known legends is “Rip Van Winkle,” in which a man from New York’s Catskill
Mountains falls asleep before the beginning of the Revolution and wakes up after it is
over to find his world happily transforme
d. In “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” an
awkward and naive schoolteacher named Ichabod Crane is driven from his small New
York town by a faked headless horseman. First published in
The Sketch Book of
Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.
(1819-1820), this story and others like it provided American
legends and helped shape an American folklore.

A
3
Westward Expansion

Travel narratives became increasingly popular, especially as the country expanded
westward. With the Louisiana Purchase, the United States took possession of a vast,
unmapped territory. Early accounts of expeditions made in the name of future
national expansion include
Account of Expeditions to the Sources of the Mississippi
and Through the Western Parts of Louisiana
(1810) by explorer Zebulon Pike, and
History of the Expedition Under the Command of Captains Lewis and Clark to the
Sources of the Missouri
(1814). The latter work, which emphasizes the idea of the
explorer as hero, was compiled by diplomat Nicholas Biddle from the notes of the
expedition.

America’
s westward expansion also generated a sizable collection of political prose,
especially in light of
manifest destiny
—a belief that the country’s territorial expansion
was not only inevitable but also divinely ordained. The term
manifest destiny
was
coined by writer John Louis O'Sullivan in
annexation of Texas and appeared in the July-August 1845 issue of
United States
Magazine and Democratic Review
. Other articles in that issue acknowledged that as
the United States expanded, Native American cultures were being lost.

With westward expansion came displacement of Native Americans. From the early
1800s on, anguished speeches were presented by Native American leaders who faced
a bleak future. Tenskwatawa, a Shawnee prophet, delivered one such speech to the
Iroquois nation in 1806. Other speeches addressed to American officials in
Washington, D.C., pointed to the destruction of Native American cultures as the
United States expanded.

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, an ethnologist and geologist, preserved a great deal of
information about Native Americans in the Great Lakes region. He married a Native
American, immersed himself in Native American cultures, and studied several tribal
languages. From the 1820s to the 1850s Schoolcraft wrote at length on Native
Americans. Although his writings gave a white man’s views of native peoples, they
preserved many materials, including a collection of Ojibwa and Ottawa legends and
myths in
Algic Researches

(1839). One of Schoolcraft’s most i
mportant works was
the monumental study
Historical and Statistical Information Respecting the History,
Condition, and Prospects of the Indian Tribes of the United States
(6 volumes,
1851-1857), which later writers used as source material about Native Americans.

A
4
Biography

Biography and
autobiography served the new nation’s sense of its history and its
need for heroes in the 1800s. In some cases these genres worked explicitly, as did
some histories, to develop a mythic stature for American heroes, and biography
began to merge with legend. Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett were favorite figures
for legendary biography. Boone was introduced to audiences by John Filson's history,
The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke,
in 1784. His character was
further developed by Timothy Flint, whose
Biographical Memoir of Daniel Boone

(1833) portrayed Boone as a hero similar to the fictional character Natty Bumppo,
created by James Fenimore Cooper.
Narrative of the Life of David Crockett
(1834),
attributed to Crockett, mythologized another early frontier hero.
The Native American experience also began to be told in autobiography. William
Apes was the first Native American to produce extensive writings in English. In
A Son
of the Forest
(1829) he described his conversion to Christianity and his participation
in the War of 1812 between the United States and Britain.

The greatest development in 19th-century American biography was the slave
narrative. The tensions produced by slavery in America had already become apparent
by the Revolution, but they heightened considerably in the 1800s, right up until the
American Civil War (1861-1865). Frederick Douglass created a masterpiece of the
genre with
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
(1845), a
work that he revised and enlarged several times for later editions. While describing
his life as a slave and his struggle toward freedom, Douglass emphasized the primary
role that literacy played in opening opportunities for African Americans. He
represented his ability to write his own story as the ultimate act of a free man. Harriet
Jacobs offered a different but no less horrifying portrayal of the evils of slavery in
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
(1861). In the book, Jacobs told of the sexual
abuse experienced by young female slaves. Prior to the Civil War, former slaves who
wished to tell their stories found access to publishers through connections with white
abolitionists. Douglass's text included a preface, written by abolitionist William Lloyd
Garrison, that encouraged the reader to trust the author. Another important work
about the situation of black Americans was
The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and
Destiny of the Colored People of the United States
(1852) by Martin Robison Delany.
In this work Delany argued for a separatist state for blacks; some historians now
consider him to be the first black nationalist.
B

American Romanticism

During the late 1700s and early 1800s, romanticism was the dominant literary mode
in Europe. In reaction to the Enlightenment and its emphasis on reason, romanticism
stressed emotion, the imagination, and subjectivity of approach. Until about 1870
romanticism influenced the major forms of American prose: transcendentalist
writings, historical fiction, and sentimental fiction.


B
1
Transcendentalism

In New England, an intellectual movement known as transcendentalism developed
as an American version of romanticism. The movement began among an influential
set of authors based in Concord, Massachusetts, and was led by Ralph Waldo
Emerson. Like romanticism, transcendentalism rejected both 18th-century
rationalism and established religion, which for the transcendentalists meant the
Puritan tradition in particular. Instead, the transcendentalists celebrated the power
of the human imagination to commune with the universe and transcend the
limitations of the material world. The transcendentalists found their chief source of
inspiration in nature. Emerson’s essay
Nature
(1836) was the first major document of
the transcendental school and stated the ideas that were to remain central to it. His
other key transcendentalist works include
The American Scholar
(1837), a volume in
which he addressed the intellectual’s duty to culture, and
-Reliance
essay in wh
ich he asserted the importance of being true to one’s own nature.

Henry David Thoreau,
a friend and protégé of Emerson’s, put transcendentalist ideas
into action.
Walden; or, Life in the Woods
(1854) is his journal of a two-year
experiment in living as simply and self-reliantly as possible in a small hut that he built
on the shores of Walden Pond, near Concord. His essay
a statement against government coercion that records his short stay in jail after he
refused to pay a tax in support of the Mexican War (1846-1848). In this essay
Thoreau asserted that each individual indirectly supported the wrongs of a
nation
—
for example, slavery or war
—
simply by paying taxes and voting for
government representatives. To express disapproval of government policies, he
advocated passive resistance, or nonviolent protest through noncompliance.
Other influential transcendentalists included educator and philosopher Bronson
Alcott, whose interests centered on education reform, and social reformer Margaret
Fuller, whose
Woman in the Nineteenth Century
(1845) was a major early work of
American feminism. Along with Emerson and critic and reformer George Ripley, Fuller
founded
The Dial
in 1840. This periodical was dedicated to publishing the verse and
philosophical writings of the transcendentalists.

B
2
Historical Fiction: Cooper
, Hawthorne, and Others

The self-confidence and nationalism of the newly created United States of America
energized fiction as well as nonfiction. Historical fiction took off first, influenced by Sir
Walter Scott, an enormously popular British writer who established the genre.
Historical fiction was an expression of romanticism in its probings of human nature
and emotions and its romanticizing of the American past and the American frontier.
The first generations of Puritans in New England, the Salem witchcraft trials, white
conflicts with Native Americans, and the American Revolution provided popular
subjects for American historical fiction. One of the earliest examples of the genre was
Samuel Woodworth's
The Champions of Freedom
(1816). James Fenimore Cooper
was the first American master of the form, however.

In Cooper's first published novel,
Precaution
(1820), he consciously imitated British
fiction of the time, especially the novels of Jane Austen. With
The Spy
(1821),
however, Cooper began his career as a specifically American novelist. This best-seller
is set in New York during the American Revolution and has as its main character a spy
working for General George Washington.
The Pioneers
(1823) is one of a series of five
novels called the
Leather-Stocking Tales
. Over the course of the
Leather- Stocking

Tales,
Cooper developed one of America's first fictional heroes, the white
frontiersman Natty Bumppo. In the tales, Bumppo bridges Native American and
white cultures through his friendships, while articulating the consequences of further
white settlement for Native Americans. Staking a claim for the importance of
American history and landscape as an imaginative resource, Cooper continued to
write until his death in 1851, profoundly influencing the direction of American prose.
Another author who contributed to American historical fiction before mid-century was
Lydia Maria Child. Her novel
Hobomok
(1824) focuses on the relationship between a
white woman and a Native American man.

New England writer Nathaniel Hawthorne was also a master of historical fiction.
Influenced to some extent by transcendentalism, Hawthorne’s views of the
movement were mixed. His novel
The Blithedale Romance
(1852) is loosely based on
a transcendentalist experiment in communal living at Brook Farm. Still, Hawthorne’s
work, with its deep ethical concern about sin, punishment, and atonement, is less
optimistic than most transcendental writing. Hawthorne was a descendant of one of
the judges at the Salem witch trials, and he set many of his works in Puritan New
England and during early crises in American history.
The Scarlet Letter
(1850), a
story of rebellion within an emotionally constricted Puritan society, is an undisputed
masterpiece in its powerful psychological insights.
Mosses from an Old Manse
(1846)
collects some of his best short stories and sketches, including “Roger Malvin’s Burial”
and “Young Goodman Brown.”

The first African American to publish a novel was William Wells Brown, who
combined historical fiction, national legend, and the increasingly divisive subject of
race. His novel
Clotel
(1853) is the fictional account of a child born to Thomas
Jefferson and a slave. It was intended to point out the distance between American
ideals of liberty and the actual living conditions of American slaves, who also were
sons and daughters of that promised liberty. Harriet E. Wilson was the first African
American woman to publish a novel.
Our Nig
(1859) focuses on the injustices faced
by free blacks in the North, a topic not readily acknowledged at the time.

B
3
Good and Evil: Melville and Poe

Herman Melville
became a close friend of Hawthorne’s after Melville moved to
Massachusetts in 1850. Melville, who was born in New York City, worked on a number
of ships after his father's financial ruin and death and based several novels on his
voyages.
Redburn
(1849) was inspired by his first voyage as a cabin boy on a ship to
Liverpool, England, and
White-Jacket
(1850) by his last voyage. He also worked on
several whaling ships and witnessed the violence of life at sea. These tales of exotic
travel adventures brought Melville early success. Ironically, Melville's popularity
dropped after the publication of the book now considered a masterpiece of American
fiction,
Moby Dick
(1851). Far removed from his earlier travel narratives,
Moby Dick

was dedicated to Hawthorne, and like Hawthorne's work was darkly metaphysical,
symbolic, and complex. The story of the captain of a whaling boat, Ahab, and his
relentless hunt for one whale,
Moby Dick
is also about the mysterious forces of the
universe that overwhelm the individual who seeks to confront and struggle against
them. Written in a powerful and varied narrative style, the book includes a
magnificent sermon delivered before the ship’s sailing, soliloquies by the ships’
mates, and passages of a technical nature, such as a chapter about whales.
While transcendentalism was fundamentally optimistic, celebrating human creativity
and the beauty of nature, Hawthorne and Melville demonstrated that asking
questions about the nature of the universe could lead to answers illuminating the
darker side of life. In the depths of the imagination, they saw hints of unfathomable
evil rather than rays of divine light. Edgar Allan Poe was another writer who inverted
transcendentalist promises. In his disturbing prose and poetry, Poe explored the
nature of humanity and frightened readers with what he found. His tales are
obsessed with death, madness, and violence.
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque

(1840) ranks among the triumphs of romantic horror. Poe also invented the detective
story with such works as “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) and “The Purloined
Letter” (1844). In Poe’s longest story, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” (1838),
a sea journey to the South Pole suggests other, more primal journeys
—
to the center
of the mind, to the source of all evil, and toward an all-encompassing void.

B
4
Sentimental Fiction: Stowe

The sentimental novel is a major form of American fiction that grew out of the
responses of white writers to the abuses of slavery. The most famous and historically
most significant work of American sentimental fiction is
Uncle Tom's Cabin
(1851) by
Harriet Beecher Stowe. Sentimental fiction aimed to arouse pity for the oppressed
and offered a natural form for novelists writing about the evils of slavery. In Stowe's
novel and in novels that followed in this tradition, pity for the oppressed did not
necessitate revolutionary change but rather called for an outpouring of Christian love.
Sentimental fiction elicited this “Christian” sympathy from Northern white women in
particular by demonstrating how the slave system violated the most basic bonds of
humanity, such as that between mother and child.
Some sentimental fiction focused on gender by showing the dangers faced by young
women, who might be driven to compromise their morals as a result of extreme
poverty or the loss of their family and subsequent loss of social position. One such
novel was Susan Warner's
The Wide, Wide World
(1850).
C

The Civil War and After

President Abraham Lincoln is credited with having humorously described Stowe as

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

was powerful as propaganda and expressed the deep antislavery feelings of the North.
Lincoln himself was among the greatest American orators of the 19th century and can
be included in the roster of significant American writers because of the measured
succinctness of his prose. Moved to despair by the tragic conflict of the Civil War
(1861-1865), he turned American oratory away from the ornate rhetoric of
statesman Daniel Webster to the inspirational simplicity of his 1863 Gettysburg
Address and his second inaugural address in 1865. Few other American public figures
have equaled Lincoln's command of forceful, precise, and inspiring prose.

Two movements became increasingly important in American fiction after the Civil
War: regionalism and realism. As the country expanded in area and population,
regional differences became more apparent and of greater interest, especially to
people in the established cultural centers of the East. Increasing urbanization and the
expansion of the railroads had made more of the country accessible. Regional
literature would do the same. Realism emerged as a literary movement in Europe in
the 1850s. In reaction to romanticism, it emphasized the everyday and through
detailed description re-created specific locations, incidents, and social classes. Like
regionalism, it reveled in the particular.

C
1
Regionalism

Post-Civil War America was large and diverse enough to sense its own local
differences. With increasing urbanization and more accessible transportation, small,
rural communities became a subject of literary interest. As early as 1820 America
had developed a taste for fiction with specific, localized settings and topics. Toward
mid-century, regional voices had emerged from newly settled territories in the South
and to the west of the Appalachian Mountains. In many of these works local dialects,
sayings, and spellings were used for humorous effect. Among the successful
publications of early regionalists were
Georgia Scenes
(1835) by Augustus Baldwin