The First Americans

American Literature During the Colonial and Revolutionary

Periods.

1. Imagining Eden (read and summarize) Until page 53

“America is a poem in our eyes: its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it
will not wait long for metres.”

__With this title, Ralph Waldo Emerson has the desire to describe the new world
"America" with words that could work in Americans' imaginations. A new land
adorned with beauty and fertility, a dream dreamed, a perfect paradise by the period
when Europeans came.

2. Writing of the Colonial and Revolutionary Periods

Puritan narratives.

There were people who thought differently, including those Native Americans, they
used to say that the apocalypse was close when white men arrived. The African
Americans brought over against their will. and they also included some European
settlers.

There was an inclination of seeing history in providential terms which sets up

tensions and has powerful consequences, in Bradford’s book and other Puritan
narratives. Bradford´s first history book was written In 1630, which he called Of
Plymouth Plantation; it includes many tales of human error and wickedness and
might emphasize the mysterious workings of providence. This book was seen as a
search for meaning.

According to the Puritan idea of providence at work in history, every material event
that may be difficult for some people and easy for others, with which Bradford didn't
have problems.

There was a man who shared with Bradford the aim of decoding the divine
purpose, searching for the spiritual meanings behind material facts, he was
Winthrop. He wrote A Modell of Christian Charity, Written as a series of questions,
answers, and objections that reflect Winthrop’s legal training.

3. Challenges to the Puritan oligarchy.

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 4. Some colonial poetry.

The poetry of the United States began as a literary art during the colonial era.
Unsurprisingly, most of the early poetry written in the colonies and fledgling republic
used contemporary British models of poetic form, diction, and theme. However, in
the 19th century a distinctive American idiom began to emerge. By the later part of
that century, when Walt Whitman was winning an enthusiastic audience abroad,
poets from the United States had begun to take their place at the forefront of the
English-language avant-garde.

Anne Bradstreet

One of the first recorded poets of the British colonies was Anne Bradstreet (1612–
1672), who remains one of the earliest known women poets in English. Her poems
are untypically tender evocations of home and family life and of her love for her
husband. In marked contrast, Edward Taylor (1645–1729) wrote poems expounding
Puritan virtues in a highly wrought metaphysical style that can be seen as typical of
the early colonial period. This narrow focus on the Puritan ethic was,
understandably, the dominant note of most of the poetry written in the colonies
during the 17th and early 18th centuries.

Another distinctly American lyric voice of the colonial period was Phillis Wheatley, a
slave whose book Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, was published
in 1773. She was one of the best-known poets of her day, at least in the colonies,
and her poems were typical of New England culture at the time, meditating on
religious and classical ideas.

On the whole, the development of poetry in the American colonies mirrors the
development of the colonies themselves. The early poetry is dominated by the need
to preserve the integrity of the Puritan ideals that created the settlement in the first
place. As the colonists grew in confidence, the poetry they wrote increasingly
reflected their drive towards independence. This shift in subject matter was not
reflected in the mode of writing which tended to be conservative, to say the least.
This can be seen as a product of the physical remove at which American poets
operated from the centre of English-language poetic developments in London.

5. Enemies within and without.

The Puritan faith found many challenges by enemies within and without. Outside,
they had all the people the settlers had displaced. A great example of this is Mary
White Rowlandson (1637-1711) who was captured, in February 1676, by a group of
Narragansett Indians, along with her children. Those Indians captured or killed many
of her neighbors and relatives. However, after being released, she published a book
sharing her experience called The Sovereignty and Goodness of GOD, Together
With the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed: Being a Narrative of the
Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson .

Moreover, they faced enemies after the situation that took place in Salem,
Massachusetts in 1692, during the course of which 19 people were hanged, one was
pressed to death, 55 were frightened or tortured into confessions of guilt, 150 were
imprisoned, and more than 200 were named as the deserving arrest. One of them
was Cotton Mather (1662-1728), he wrote “The Wonders of the Invisible World” and
other publications during his lifetime with influential scientific and promoting
“reforming societies”. Another one who came to see them as a serious error of
judgment and morality was Samuel Sewall (1652-1730). He was one of the judges al
the trials of Salem, also he wrote a journal from 1673 to 1728, which was eventually
published as The Diary of Samuel Sewall in 1973 sharing his intimate thoughts. In
1697 he makes a public retraction of his actions as one of the Salem judges.
Moreover, he published ¨The Selling of Joseph: A Memorial¨, where he attacked
slavery as a violation of biblical precept and practice.

6. Trends towards the secular and resistance.

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7. Towards the revolution.

By the time of the American Revolution (1775–83), American writers had

ventured beyond the Puritan literary style and its religious themes and had
developed styles of writing that grew from distinctly American experiences. (The
Puritans were a group of Protestants who broke with the Church of England; they
believed that church rituals should be simplified and that people should follow strict
religious discipline.) The colonial fascination with science, nature, freedom, and
innovation came through in the writings of the Revolutionary period. The colonists
developed their own way of speaking as well, no longer copying the more formal
style of British writers.

Benjamin Franklin, who seemed to be able to do anything, produced a long stream

of political satires making fun of British policies. In his 1773 Edict by the King of
Prussia, for example, he drew parallels between the settlement of England in the fifth
century by Germans (then called Prussians) and the settlement of America. His
intention was to show how ridiculous it was for Great Britain to think that just
because she had settled America, she had the right to lay heavy taxes on her
subjects. (The British held just the opposite view.) In the Edict, the King of Prussia
makes the same trade and tax demands on the former German colonists in England
that England was making on the American colonies in the 1760s and 1770s._

8. Alternative voices of revolution.

Abigail Adams knew the serious issue of freedom and equality for women, which
was an important topic for her. She wrote a letter to her husband John Adams, telling
him, he should remember the ladies for the new laws code. the only thing she
received back were insults to put Abigail Adams down.

The Declaration of Independence announced that “All men are created equal,” that
explicitly exclude women and implicitly exclude indians and negroes. but Abigail and
others that were excluded couldn't ignore that.

The writings of those who felt excluded, ignored, or left out, were also included in
the literature of the revolutionary period. Among the leading voices of the American
Revolution, there are some who were willing to recognize the rights of women. like
Thomas Paine who spoke of the need for female quality. also did Judith Sargent
Murray, she wrote two plays, a number of poems, and other things. She also wrote
two essay series for the Massachusetts Magazine from 1792 to 1794. One essay
series, The Repository, was largely religious in theme. The other, The Gleaner,
considered a number of issues, including federalism, literary nationalism, and the
equality of the sexes.

Samson Occom was a native American who was less convinced that the
American Revolution was a good cause. He insisted that the war was the work of the
devil.

9. Writing revolution: Poetry, drama, fiction.

Jupiter Hammon (1711–1806?) and Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784) were two African
American poets that inaugurated the writing revolution. Hammon published a
broadside, Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ, With Penitential Cries, a series of
twenty-two quatrains, in 1760, and then a prose work, Address to the Negroe: In the
State of New York, in 1787. His poetry used to have the argument that black people
must reconcile themselves to the institution of slavery and his writings were towards
the white audience. We could say that Hammon and Wheatley´s poetry deferred to
white patrons and audience and subtly made a claim for dignity, even equality – that,
in short, combined Christian humility with a kind of racial pride.

On the other hand, white poets, like Philip Freneau (1752–1832), Timothy Dwight
(1752–1817), and Joel Barlow (1754–1826) set out to explore and celebrate the new
republic in verse. Freneau was probably the most accomplished, he turned his
interests in a more political and less Anglophile direction. Dwight wrote much and
variously, including some attacks on slavery in both prose and verse. However, Joel
Barlow focused his works in patriotic poems, attacking the monarchism and
imperialism of Europe.

Another important fact is that the first American novel, The Power of Sympathy
(1789) by William Hill Brown (1765–1793) was published anonymously because it
deals with a contemporary scandal of incest and suicide. Other important novels
were Charlotte Temple (1794) by Susanna Haswell Rowson (1762–1824), and The
Coquette; or, The History of Eliza Wharton (1797) by Hannah Webster Foster (1758–
1840). It is important to mention that most of these works were written with moral
purpose. The only one writer that mentions different things at this time was Charles
Brockden Brown (1771–1810), using the rights of women, sensational elements
such as murder, insanity, sexual aggression, and preternatural events with brooding
explorations of social, political, and philosophical questions.