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Literatures of the USA

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UNIT 1: Introduction: What is

“American” Literature?
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1. What is “American” literature?

“American” literature → dissonance with the concept “literatures of the US”. In order to
define this term, first, we have to understand what has traditionally been understood as
‘American’. After the colonization, American natives and their legacy have been forgotten.
The conception about the US as a whole continent and not a country has also surged as a
consequence of the colonization. We must also take into account that all these changes have
also affected language.

We, as scholars, must rethink the notion we have about what is American and what is not.
We should ask ourselves questions ike:

- When is something considered literature, and how is this category culturally and
historically dependent?
- American literature / Literature of the USA: Whose voices? Whose silences? How has
the canon of American / US literature changed and why?

Then, we should ask ourselves, what is an “American”?

“We’re American […] We came as settlers and turned the year back to zero. History starts from
us now.”

“We’re all Americans now. Americans ignore their past. It’s a dirty genocidal history […] They
had to kill the Indians to enjoy this place fully. To make it their own, to start from zero […] To
be comfortable as an American you have to forget. The world has never been empty but we
can pretend it was. And who wants to know about these things? That this rather banal place
we live in was founded on genocide not too long ago.”

Important notions in these quotes:

1. American Dream.
2. National identity (needs of a nation).
3. The idea of the US as a virgin space (colonizers fought against nature, not against other
cultures): colonizers ignore history and produce another story during the colonial era.
4. Past is ignored and forgotten (colonizers were also immigrants but to be comfortable
as an American, you have to forget; you need to ignore that you live in a land based
on violence.)
“En Estados Unidos nacieron en una independencia prácticamente sin historia, lo único que
habían hecho era matar a cuatro indios. Aparte de eso, fue muy fácil”: quote that erases the
history of violence. The idea of the US as a nation emerging in a clean state, which was the
land they discovered. You ignore that this land was already discovered by those who were
there and erasing the violence of conquest.

America’s tragic paradox: “the extraodinary cruelty, greed, and willful obliteration on which
the land of the free was founded”: Idea of obliteration (forgetting on purpose) --> America’s
tragic paradox...

Literature that became the norm and entered the canon of the American literature in its
“beginnings” is the one written by those forgetting colonisation on purpose (ides of
obliteration --> “they forgot to tell us about certain things”).

1.1. The literary canon

The term canon comes from religion --> the first canon was religious. Religious texts were the
only important texts. The canonical works were the ones in that hierarchy. The literary cannon
has been long upheld as an exclusive list where the best classics are celebrated forever. To be
considered part of the canon, a book needs to be considered essential. The canon doesn’t
take the form of a specific list until high schools, universities, critics... determine their own
canons. It is in the end subjective and determined by a select few.

- The earliest canonizers in the U.S were the professional educators who planned the
curricula for the first American literature classes. Many were clergymen and most of
the books chosen were written by white men. Our idea of the canon needs to be
updated and expanded.
- 1970s: eruption of Cultural Studies, Feminism, Gender Studies, Postcolonial Studies...
division between high and popular culture started to be questioned. The cannon
expanded. The canon also affects to the general understanding that literature needs
to be written. Literature is considered as a tradition that cannot be performed, only
written and read.

2. American literature before and during the colonial

and revolutionary periods: Beginnings to 1820

2.1. Native American Oral Traditions and Literature

Native American peoples need to be considered. They were not exclusively living in the US.
They were occupying different territories in America. There were different tribes. We
homogenize them because they are our other. They had very strong oral traditions but they
were not using or recording this into written words. They had texts in their own languages,
but we don’t know much about them because the records were destroyed by colonizers.

During this era there was a will to justify colonization. Literature was used to justify this: if
you destroy it, you can still represent them as the savages that need to be civilized. The roots
of all literature are in the oral arts. That is wh we cannot erase the literature that were already
present there.

→ Diversity of languages, social structures, religious and mythological beliefs

→ Circumscribed use of written records (systematically destroyed by European
conquerors): i.e. Aztecs’ written texts in their own language (mostly destroyed by the
Spanish).
→ “Literature” > Latin littera (“letter”) = linked to alphabetic writing BUT --> roots of all
literature in the oral arts.
→ Genres that were common in the repertoires of many North American Indigenous
societies before 1820:
o Creation stories: e.g. The Iroquois Creation Stoy, “The World on the Turtle’s
Back”. Present in modern creations of Af-Am and Native American writers.
o Trickster tales: e.g. The Winnebago Trickster Cycle-
o Oratory: formal speeches of Native leaders.
o Songs.

2.2. Early colonial literature: ample linguistic

range
Enormous variety of languages spoken and written in North American settlements (French,
Dutch, Spanish, Scandinavian, Portuguese, Gaelic, German, African languages, and, of course,
Native American languages).

Eventually, political events would make English a useful lingua franca for the colonies at large
and, in time, the literary medium of choice.

Most of the earliest surviving writings about the Americas: early narratives of “discovery”:
e.g. Columbus’ “Letter of Discovery” (1493). They were writing these texts to show this “New”
World that they had “discovered” to show that it was a world of opportunities for those who
want a better life. To show this as a natural landscape in which they can explore, enjoy and
depicting the “enemy” as savages who needed them to be civilized. Most of this literature of
the early colonial period is propagandist. It coincided with the development of the printing
press. It worked as a mechanism or strategy for colonization.

New England colonies are usually regarded as central source of early American literature, but:

- First North-American settlements were established elsewhere (Florida, New Mexico,

New Netherland).
 - First permanent English settlement in North America: Jamestown colony, in Virginia
(1607) – not Boston (1630): JOHN SMITH’s writings about Virginia’s Chesapeake region
crucial to understand English-language literature of North-America: he contributed to
the propagandism. He became an economic saviour of the tobacco industry -->
interracial union with Pocahontas and the stop of the Powhatan War. Story of
Pocahontas being turned into a sort of civilized savage by Smith. A good savage. Figure
of the savage accepting superiority.

2.3. Writing of the colonial period

Puritan narratives gave expression to the dominant European version of early settlement in
the “New World”:

→ Myth of Eden = European settlers faced not with another culture as with NATURE, not
really encountering a possible future but returning to an imagined PAST.

Literary New England: (God’s) providence, decoding divine purpose, special mission. Nature
could give them the clues to understand divine messages. The key issue is how they
confronted this nature. Not encountering the future but going back and trying to return to an
imagined past. God wanted them as the chosen ones to purify Christianity and going back to
the pure beginning that was lost.

o William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation (c. 1630): account of the arrival of

the Pilgrim Fathers (Mayflower) and the founding of the Plymouth plantation
(1620), chronicle of events and search for meaning to fulfill their “civilizing
mission” (chosen ones).
o John Winthrop’s A Modell of Christian Charity (1630): lay sermon aboard the
Arbella, about the society they were to build (Massachusetts Bay Colony),
written as a series of questions, answers and objections and reflecting a sense
of mission and utopia: a “city upon a hill”.

Puritans were not very enthusiastic about poetry. Anne Bradstreet was the first British North
American writer to publish a volume of poetry, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America.
Another celebrated volume published posthumously, Several Poems Compiled with Great
Variety of Wit and Learning.

2.4. Challenges from within and without

Native Americans considered the primary external “enemy” to Puritan faith and power:

→ Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of GOD, Together With the
Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and
Restauration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682)
 o Inaugurates a peculiarly American literary genre – the captivity narrative –
establishing its popularity and its form:
▪ vivid descriptions of suffering combined with a moral framework.
▪ Native Americans = “Pagans”, “ravenous beasts”, “Wolves”, “Black
creatures”.
▪ Christians sustained by their faith, “the wonderful mercy of God”, and
saved by “remarkable passages of providence”.

Representation of Native Americans as “heathens” and cruel savages helped to create a

discourse aimed at justifying their removal from their lands (Indian Removal Act 1830).

→ The Salem witchcraft crisis (1692) illustrates Puritan fears of enemies “within”: social,
political, economic and religious transformations and crises of colonial identity and
authority explained as the result of a conspiracy and the presence of the “devil” in
Massachusetts --> 19 people hanged (14 women, 5 men), 1 pressed to death, 55
frightened or tortured into confessions of guilt, 150 imprisoned, and more than 200
named as deserving arrest.

(Repeatedly in history, we invent enemies to improve our situation, because it will serve our
best interests. There was a sense of “purging” then, enemy insiders need to be discovered
and eliminated for the community to “recover”).

2.5. Enlightenment ideas

Early 18th c.: “modern era” embracing the “power of the human mind”: reason, common
sense, science and philosophy (rather than religion), the (ordinary) individual (rather than
God), use and profit, individual and social progress. It had a big impact in the US.

→ New interest in ordinary individuals led to developments in literature: English novel

taking a modern shape. In the colonies, we have non-fiction (Franklin).

Mid-/late 18th c: reaction against the ideas of the Enlightenment, religious revival > The
“Great Awakening”

2.6. Toward the Revolution

“In short America is the Land of Labour, and by no means what the English call
Lubberland, and the French Pays de Cocagne, where the streets are said to be pav’d
with half-peck Loaves, the Houses til’d with Pancakes, and where the Fowls fly about
ready roasted, crying, Come eat me!” (Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography) 1771-90.

Rise to prosperity and success as a scientist, politician, and philanthropist. His life as
exemplary and typical as a proof that “anyone can make it in America” with hard work and
“moral perfection” --> Myth of the self-made man as hero. One of the first formulation of the
“American Dream”.
 → Other essays showed a less “virtuous” America, but his faith in the “land of
opportunity” remained intact: he denounced violence against Native Americans, slave
trade, he was against British imperialism...

“What then is the American, this new man?” “New man, who acts upon new principles;
he must therefore entertain new ideas, and form new opinions” “A mixture of English,
Scotch, Irish, French, Dutch, Germans, and Swedes” (“here individuals of all nations are
melted into a new race of men.”) Letters from an American Farmer (1782), Crèvecoeur.

Idealized vision of America as a place where Europeans could liberate themselves from the
constraints of the “Old World” --> myth of Eden & “land of opportunity” --> self-reliant
individual / “industrious farmer”. BUT limits to this liberating potential:

→ “The frontier” as a contact / conflict zone: “state of war”.

→ Plantation-based societies of the Southern colonies, and horrors inflicted on enslaved African
Americans.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life,
Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are
instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –
” (Jefferson, 1776) Declaration of Independence

“I long to hear that you have declared an independency […] and by the way in the new
Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would
Remember the Ladies.” “We are determined to foment a Rebellion and will not hold
ourselves bound by any Laws in which we have no voice, or Representation.” Abigail
Adams’ correspondence with John Adams --> consistently raising the issue of freedom
and equality for women.

In the Declaration of Independence, women were excluded (“all men were created equal”,
exclusively white males). Then Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention (1848) happened and
“A Declaration of Sentiments” was drafted by Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

“When I looked round the ship too and saw […] a multitude of black people of every
description chained together, everyone of their countenances expressing dejection and
sorrow, I no longer doubted of my fate; and quite overpowered with horror and
anguish, I fell motionless on the deck and fainted. When I recovered a little I found
some black people about me […] I asked them if we were not to be eaten by those white
men with horrible looks, red faces, and loose hair.” The Interesting Narrative of
Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, written by Himslef (1789),

→ Two-volume autobiography or witness narrative. It is unclear the exact genre of this.

→ Established the form of the slave narrative: central to the anti-slavery cause.
 → Strong, perdurable influence on (African-) American writing. The most famous slave
narrative was the one of Frederick Douglass, but Equiano set the precedent. The form
he used continues to be the one used by more contemporary authors.

UNIT 2: Early 19th Century American Literature:

1820 - 1865
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1. American Literary Nationalism and the 1820s

Cultural Impact of the War of 1812

→ British troops burn the Capitol and White House: Americans feel vulnerable.
→ Andrew Jackson triumphs at the Battle of New Orleans --> myth of the republican
hero. New American figure:
o Anti-aristocratic, antimonarchical person from an obscure background
incarnating the strengths and virtues of the nation.
o Embodying the capacities of ordinary people.
o Incarnation of the democratic spirit of the age.
o Recurrent appearance in literature.
Also, cultural nationalism. Development of a culture that is different from British one.

→ “The paper war”: transatlantic exchange between British and American journalists
over the value of American literature.
→ Call to produce “a literature of our own”. “The proudest freedom to which a nation can
aspire . . . is found in complete emancipation from literary thralldom”
→ Lack of an international copyright law made it more profitable for US publishers to
reprint British books than publish new American ones; reprints of British books
shipped throughout the U.S. by improved technologies in river and rail transportation
o “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?”
→ Expanded market for periodicals, first American authors to take its place among their
British counterparts in the early 20s.
Barely American literature but it was a demand for literature still.

→ British literature in the 19th century: The novel became very popular among the
readers. Romantic and Victorian literature, Gothic literature. This was imported. This
influenced the American writers of that time.
There was a shared belief among the major writers of the time that the US did have distinct
materials with which to develop a distinctive (though not separate) national literature.

→ Special emphasis on the importance of the natural landscape for the development of
national character.
Emphasis on the natural landscape as something American. American landscape as the space
for the spiritual growth of the nation, where God’s spirit could be apprehended.
Cultural nationalism did not mean uncritical patriotism > spirit of reform. Literature being
critical with society and wanting to improve it.

2. Antebellum period (1812-1861)

Making the new nation: political but also cultural nationalism, finding the best way to
articulate the Republic > spirit of reform.
Preoccupations of the time and reform movements that inspired American writers:
- Temperance: abolition of alcohol: production, drinking it...
- Women’s rights: debate over women’s access to the public sphere. Novel at the
beginning was not something prestigious. It was associated to women, and it was a
popular genre.
- Abolitionist movement: against slavery. Affected writers in general.
- Native American rights: westward expansion of the nation. Indian Removal Act (1830)
--> Native Americans forced to move west, gradually confined to smaller and smaller
reservations.
Sojourner Truth: Ain’t I A Woman? One of the most famous women’s rights and abolitionist
speech for that time.

Strong correlation between women’s rights and women writers. One of the professions that
women could have: writers. Authors of that time (20s): not valued. They were compared to
British authors.
The period between 1820-1865 was established by 20th century scholars as the heart and soul
of American literature. Until then, American literature wasn’t generally taught in American
universities, or taught in subordinate relation to English literature. Establishment of the
canon. First great American authors (Matthiessen’s American Renaissance)
- Ralph Waldo Emerson.
- Nathaniel Hawthorne.
- Herman Melville.
- Henry David Thoreau.
- Walt Whitman.

3. An American Renaissance?
Idea of a Renaissance (weird because there hasn’t been golden years before).
Scholarly texts established a number of critical commonplaces about American literature that
defined literary study for decades:
 1. American literature is first and foremost a national tradition, defined principally by its
relationship to U.S. political and cultural nationalism;
2. The focus of American literary history is a handful of great authors who were, more
often than not, middle-class white men who were (also very often) neither the most
popular nor the most prolific writers of the period, nor the only “great” authors of the
period.
Matthiessen’s five-man canon of writes has been revised to include:

1. An earlier “renaissance” in the 1820s: blossoming of American literature after the war
of 1812, focused on creating a national culture (literature, art, etc. also gaining
independence from European culture and literature.
2. Women: one remarkable feature of the time is how many of the bestsellers were
written by women.
3. Minority writers.

3.1. American literary nationalism

1820s: early flowering of American letters preceding Matthiessen’s “American Renaissance”
on the 1850s.
During the 1820s (rather than the 1850s) that critics of the time agreed that the United States
had produced writers worthy of a great nation and agreed as well on their identity:
Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, James Fenimore Cooper, Catharine Maria
Sedgwick.

4. Writing the emerging nation: Washington Irving

First American writer to achieve an international literary reputation. First American able to
support himself solely through writing. “Founding father” of “American” literature. Wealthy
background, youngest of 11 children. Good education. Read English literature and travelled a
lot to Europe.
4.1. Beginnings of his literary career
He was supposed to become a lawyer, he studied law.
- First wrote satirical essays.
- The Salmagundi papers. Coined the word Gotham to refer to New York City. satirical
periodical essays concerned with New York society.
- First major work that made him really popular: A history of New York from the
Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty. People wrote historical texts
because there weren’t a lot of documents at that time. Considered the first important
work of comic literature written by an American. Design only for entertainment, no
 moral lessons --> mutes the brutality of colonial history to present a gentle comic
narrative.

4.2. Europe 1815 - 1831

He wanted to do business. He went to Liverpool, England. Then he met Sir Walter Scott. This
meeting influenced him a lot. After that influence wrote The Sketch-book of Geoffrey Crayon,
Gent --> Collection of essays and sketches enormously successful both in England and the
USA: innovative blurring of the line between personal essay and fiction, use of satire.
Considered one of the “inventors” of the modern short story. He created two of the most
popular and enduring figures in American culture: Rip Van Winkle and Sleepy Hollow’s
Ichbod Crane -->

1. Stories inspired by German folklore because of his visit to Europe but adapted it to the
American setting.
2. He still used a gentle satire and comic tone. Together with perfectly serious
reflections on complex themes (social and cultural transformation taking place in
America in that time).
Late 1820s: Irving had gained a reputation throughout Europe and America.

4.3. Irving’s Contributions and Influence

American Short Story: He set a standard of what American Short Story should be. He made
short fiction popular: sketches and tales became the literary fashion in America.

→ He was the first prominent writer to stirp the prose tale of its moral and didactic
elements and to make of it a literary form for entertainment, use of humor and gentle
satire.
→ He added definite locality, actual American scenery and people. Not much attention
was paid to form (lacking agile dialogue...) and plot seemed unessential for Irving.
→ General “softness”: focusing on the bright side of things ) people.
→ He introduced Romanticism and the Gothic mode into American writing:
o Imagination vs. Rationality.
o Ghost stories and the supernatural (gothic imagery).
o Central role of nature and landscape. Very abandoned landscape, idea of
abandoned lands, importance of nature... importance of landscape for
romantics but in the American landscape.
o Interest in transformation and nostalgia for the past.
o Interest in the individual and wariness of modern civilization.

4.4. “Rip van Winkle”

Set in the Dutch culture of Pre-Revolutionary War in New York State: the hero ventures into
the Catskill mountains near the Hudson river (Irving’s typical setting) where he drinks a
strange beverage with some men in Dutch costume, falls into deep sleep and when he wakes
up 20 years later
“instead of being a subject of his Majesty George the Third, he was now a free citizen
of the United States.”
“I’m not myself – I’m somebody else,” he complains; “I’m changed, and I can’t tell
what’s my name, or who I am!

→ Rip, the eternal boy-man, never grows up to accept adult responsibilities: compelling
character type in American fiction.
→ Quieter, slower colonial world vs. bustle of the new democratizing political culture.
→ Disorienting nature of social transformation, but despite obvious superficial
differences:
o Not very much has changed.
o The changes are not necessarily improvements.

4.5. Sleepy Hollow

Framing Device: metanarrative. Folktale. Teacher. Why is he a teacher?
Figure of the headless rider.

- Comes from European myths: takes a folkloric element of European myths and mixes
it with a Hessian soldier (the rider). Mixes both figures: European tradition and
American history. History set after the American Revolutionary War.
- Fact – fiction history: mixing fiction and facts. American history.

Irony, narrator making fun of Ichabor.

Food. Lots of food. Food related to wealth. He sees the animals of the farm and describes
them as food and this is related to wealth. He describes way more the farm, the animals...
than the girl.
- Crane: his surname. It is a bird.

He’s wealthy, long, thin... like a crane. Even though he eats, he never gains weight. He is
greedy. He wants to get the farm. He wants to sell it.
It is a character that is not self-aware. He thinks he is very good at seducing... what he does
to entertain the women is to read … on stones. He thinks that he is very successful... irony.
The narrator laughs of him.
Depict this character that is not self-aware... the narrator mocks him. Very ironic.
Ridiculous character.
Bran Bones and Crane: work as opposites.
Crane: represents the present, the city... idea of advancement.
Bones: nostalgia for the past, the supernatural, the countryside...

Sleepy hollow: does not change, stuck in the past. Idea of imagination, it feels like a dream,
an imagined story.
Reflection about changes. There is no morality about whether the past is better than the
present or otherwise. It is about creating a literary history for America.

Pumpkin: mocking Crane.

5. The Romantic Imagination and Gothic Fantasy

Opposition to the classical and neoclassical ideas and ideals of the Enlightenment. Focus on:

→ The individual (not society).

→ Freedom and liberation of the self (not order).
→ Nature (not urban life).
→ Imagination and intuition (not intellectualism).
→ The emotional and spontaneous (not rational).
→ Interest in the past; mystery and the supernatural...

Utilitarism is trying to achieve well-being of most people. Everything that is useful to achieve,
as many people as possible being contented. Romanticism was a response to all this.
Response to reason, to industrialization... criticism of an overreliance reason. Need for
imagination, use of imagination.
The sublime. Nature. Power of nature as something dangerous. Sense of immensity, looking
and experiencing certain things, observing an overwhelming nature that can help you to
transcend.
Romanticism: from romans. A way of coming back, the past. Romantics tied with the middle-
ages, Roman empire... they are optimists who see “the good” (without evil), but there can
also be a negative side to all this (Gothic --> not totally pessimistic but more realistic).

5.1. Gothic
Gothic: negative term during the Enlightenment, as an opposed to classic, the Renaissance.
Gothic was first established in Europe. One of the first novels: Castle of Walpole. But it became
popular with Ann Radcliffe’s literary works.

They were interested in the supernatural, monsters, shadows, dreaming / nightmares... they
were trying to explore.
Enlightenment: human beings are naturally good, reason, improving society... Romantics and
Gothic: maybe humans are not that good, maybe human nature is lost.
Gothic literature: purpose

Exploring fears. Terror vs. Horror. Two different experiences that are linked with fear. Terror
is much more suggestive, plays more with the imagination, psycho... Horror: you freeze, more
disgusting, grotesque, cruder representation if the macabre...
Gothic conventions: castles, thunderstorms, fog, forest, spirits, ghosts, vampires, wind,
darkness, graveyards, death, murder, gloom, ruins...
Figures of speech:
- Metonymy: recurrent in Gothic literature. Suggests mystery, danger, or the
supernatural. Evokes its characteristic atmospgeres and moods: gloom and terror.
Sybtype of metaphor: something is used to stand for something else: wind, rain,
footsteps approaching, characters trapped in a room, doors suddenly slamming,
crazed laughter... these all suggest mystery, danger, or the supernatural.

5.1. Transcendentalism and Dark Romanticism

The American response to British Romanticism accelerated in two directions. One of them
was Transcendentalism, the other “Dark Romanticism” (Gothic)
1. Individuals are good in nature (without evil) // Individuals are equally capable of evil
and good.
2. Answers in the past, which is nice and good // good and evil in the past, present and
future.
3. Optimists // not completely pessimistic, but realistic.

At the center of the Transcendental movement was Ralph Waldo Emerson, who expressed
admiration for romantic values in his book Nature and his essay “Self Reliance”. Emerson
praised five tenets:
“intuition is more trustworthy than reason, expressing deeply felt experience is more
valuable than elaborating universal principles, the individual is at the centre of life and
God is at centre of the individual, nature is an array of physical symbols from which
knowledge of the supernatural can be intuited and we should aspire to the Ideal, to
changing what is to what ought to be.”
Dark Romanticism --> response to Transcendentalism: positives or nature.
Transcendentalism is the American response to the Enlightenment; intuition should be more
valued... the good is found in the past, how people used to live in the past. Poe, Hawthorne
and Melville did not accept Emerson’s optimistic vision of the world and did not believe in the
Transcendentalist optimistic view of humanity.
 → Due to its delving into the “dark” side of the individual, and at the same time its strong
relationship with Romanticism, their writing was described as Dark Romanticism.
→ Dark Romantics emphasize human fallibility and predisposition towards sin and self-
destruction.

Gothic writing takes Dark Romanticism a step further: the supernatural and the macabre,
personal torment and madness > TERROR.

→ Conventions of the genre: American Gothic writers did not have spooky old castles,
monasteries and legends like their European counterparts, but they adapted all main
conflicts, settings, motifs and narrative situations.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
Participated in the American Transcendental movement movement for a time, then his work
became anti-transcendental in nature.

→ Troubled by his ancestors' participation in the Salem witch trials: sin and guilt.
→ Dark Romantics rebelled against the Puritans: came to the country to escape
persecution, but imposed their own religion and societal rules (government) on
others, judging those who did not conform.
Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850): themes of imposed judgement and punishment for
those who commit sin > alienation and self-destruction. Hawthorne examined the human
heart and soul (≠ Poe, who looks at the mind for its dysfunction), and explored morality =>
“there is evil lurking in every human heart”

→ Less pessimistic of Dark Romantics: “the truth of the human heart” usually prevails.

Herman Melville
Moby-Dick: one of the most recognized novels in the genre of Dark Romanticism. Themes of
human ambition, defiance of God, judgment, guilt, sin, the human soul, madness... highly
symbolic text. Figurative exploration of the author’s tortured quest to come to terms with
God + the Pequod as “ship of the state”.

EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809 - 1849)

He was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He was adopted and married his cousin Virginia
Clemm who died of tuberculosis.
The man and the myth: Poe’s reputation
His work generated strong responses: critics either loved his work, or they hated it. Shortly
after his death, his literary rival Rufus Griswold published a memoir on Poe:

→ established the view of Poe as a gifted, but socially unaccepted (and unacceptable)
writer: a drunken, madman of no morals.
 → Tainted his reputation in America for many years.

Today, Poe is recognized as a master of poetry, a superb writer of short stories, and a
profound explorer of the torments of the human soul and mind, as well as one of the first
and major American literary critics and theoretician.
Characteristics of his works

1. Settings featuring dark, medieval castles or decaying ancient states.

2. Characters that are insane (male) or beautiful and dead/dying (female).
3. Plots that include murder, live burials, physical and mental torture, retribution from
beyond the grave...

Poe and his time

Search for a new vision of the individual. Poe is not that interested in ethics but aesthetics.
Poetry: to put the reader in as direct contact with beauty as language would permit: “beauty
is the sole legitimate province of the poem”.
Short Fiction = Terror. The construction of terror is very related to creating a specific effect
with words. With words you help the reader to imagine something terrifying. intensity and
heightened consciousness, elevated state of perception. Greatest possible effect on his
readers.

Poe: writer and critic

- “Analytical method” as a writer and critic
Careful attention to form and style vs. earlier writers and critics’ concern with morality and
the utilitarian value of literature = “art for art’s sale” / “the herest of didactism”
His theory of literary creation is noted for two central points:

1. All the short stories should be read in one sitting. Every word must contribute to its
purpose. This is how the “unity of effect” is achieved on the reader.
2. The production of this effect should be the result of rational deliberation on the part
of the author (the consequence of a perfecred use of form and style)
Poe’s short fiction

1. His stories were Gothic because they had terror as their “thesis”: a terror that was not
of the conventional kind, it was a terror “of the soul.”
2. Two cardinal rules for the short story form: 1/ short enough to read in one sitting; 2/
every word must contribute to its purpose > by mastering these two rules the writer
achieves “the unity of effect”.
3. Symbolic, almost allegorical method: resisting simple interpretations or clear moral
messages.
4. They often hint to the supernatural but the true “darkness” his fiction explores is the
human mind and its propensity for self-destruction.
 5. Pioneering use of unreliable narrators that turns readers into active participants
(misinterpretation? Lying?)

Gothic literature and the myth of the South: Southern Gothic

Myth of the South: preoccupied with place and confinement rather than space and
movement, obsessed with the guilt and burden of the past, mental instability, decay, ruins,
sense that, at their best, human beings are radically limited and, at their worst, tortured,
grotesque, or evil.
Poe (1809–1849) now regarded as the initiator of the Southern myth, although born in
Boston and hardly ever using Southern settings in his fiction or his poetry, BUT:

→ Southern self-consciousness: “I am a Virginian, at least I call myself one, for I have

resided all my life, until within the last few days, in Richmond.”
→ “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) presents all the elements that were later to
characterize “Southern Gothic”: a great house and family falling into decay and ruin;
feverish, self-absorbed hero; a pale, ethereal heroine; obsession with death (almost
erotic attraction and simultaneous revulsion and terror); feeling of guilt – and, above
all, * the past haunts the present and there is evil in the world and it is strong.

Southern Gothic: after the real horrors of the Civil War, the Gothic tradition lost its popularity:
realism becomes the preferred literary style. During the 20th century, it made a comeback in
the American South.

UNIT 3: 19th Century Poetic Voices

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During the 19th century there was the coexistence of transcendentalism and Dark Romanticism
(and the Gothic). From this period, Whitman and Dickinson are considered to invent American
poetry.

1. Emily Dickinson
Dickinson as a Dark Romantic and (US) Gothic poet:

1. Asking difficult questions about God, (life and) death, humanity, nature, gender, truth…
2. “Tell all the truth but tell it slant – ”: Indirection and ambiguity as ruling trope in
Dickinson’s poetry.
3. Individuality over the constraints of tradition: conflicts with authorities (religious,
familial, literary).

She was born in Massachusetts in 1830 to a intellectual and socially prominent family, who
descended from New England Puritans. She received a classical education, a better formal
education than most of her contemporaries. She spent most of her time reading widely and
writing poetry. She wrote aprox. 1800 poems and published fewer than a dozen during her
lifetime. Selections of her poems were published after her death.

1.1. Dickinson’s poetry: themes

1. Nature: mostly celebration and joy, close attention to detail, but neither one with
humanity nor a carrier of divine messages.
2. Self: “a prisonhouse, from which it was … impossible to escape” (Gray, 213); “elusive,
illusory nature of reality, and the radical restraints placed on the self and its
perceptions” (215)
3. Love: profound and intense in its sense of ecstasy (also sexual ecstasy) but in its pain
too (loneliness, anxiety, repression); ambiguous take on marriage that is often (subtly)
criticized, especially as it regards gender roles.
4. Religion: recurrent religious imagery, tension between faith and doubt (limits to what
one can know: boundaries of human consciousness), unconventional treatment of
religion at the time.
5. Death: ambiguity, oscillation between fear and desire; sometimes life might be more
painful and thus sometimes more dreaded, but death can also be cold and vulgar in
opposition to the vibrancy of life; often ironic take on her culture’s fetishizing of death
(also on its expectations of life and afterlife).

1.2. Dickinson’s poetry: style

1. Experimental poetry. Challenged formal poetic conventions such as meter and
rhyme, disruptive use of rhythm: often uses the standard hymn or ballad stanza, but
then further subverts conventions by lengthening or shortening lines, omitting
rhymes, changing rhythm.
2. Profuse use of “slant” rhymes: what seems to be but not quite…
3. Syntax: short lines, omission of prepositions, conjunctions, articles (compression).
4. Use of the dash, rather than conventional punctuation, and to indicate missing words,
emphasize, link or separate words or ideas…: no meaning? pause? indeterminacy?
open-endedness?
5. Choice of words and symbolism (also allegory): ambiguity, multiple possible
meanings, lack of closure.
6. Paradox and contradiction.
7. No clear moral or ethical messages.

2. Transcendentalism: Ralph Waldo Emerson

2.1. Transcendentalism
Supreme importance of the individual, superiority of intuition to intellect, and presence of a
spiritual power in both nature and the individual human being.
Rejected institutional forms of religion in favor of his belief that “God incarnates himself in
man.”
Nature was a manifestation of the spirit. There was a pervasive spiritual presence – the Over-
Soul- from which all things emanate.
Each individual was at once a singular self, an utterly unrepeatable, unique being and an
integral part of the entire rhythm and pulse of nature.
2.2. Emerson
He travelled Europe and was influenced by the European Romantics.
Nature (1836). Talked about how nature should be our guide and moral teacher. Emerson
belief in individuality led naturally to a commitment to democratic equality. “Life is our
dictionary”: everyone can be a gatherer of knowledge. He thought that there was no one who
was writing real American texts.
He was unwilling to seriously contemplate the existence of evil, something which was
criticised by other writers.

→ Pivotal importance of the poet in any culture: poets as “liberating gods” as they could
devise an accurate language. This explains why, in his essay on “The Poet,” Emerson
said that he waited with impatience for a truly American poet. For him, poets were
crucial to the language and moral life of society; an American poet was needed to
enable Americans to speak truly of themselves and their culture.

→ Poetry had to be as “free, peremptory, and clear” as its subject and creator, it had to
dramatize the liberated self. The stylistic result is something often close to free verse.
As poet, Emerson does accept the preliminary discipline of a particular rhyme and
rhythm scheme, but he never lets that scheme inhibit his patterns of speech and
thought. He allows himself to vary lines and meters at will; irregularity and disruption
are permitted, as long as the basic sense of rhythmic speech is retained.

3. Transcendentalism: Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau: Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854)
Transcendentalists: didn’t like the imposition of rules... wanted to experience and learn new
things through nature.

Thoreau wanted to know how it felt to live and see truly: to experience that knowledge in the
body, the senses, as well as understand it in the mind. He also wanted the reader to go with
him on what he called his excursions into nature, and into himself. He does not simply
instruct, as Emerson does, he makes us share the experience.

4. Transcendentalism: Margaret Fuller

Journalist, editor, critic, reviewer, translator, poet... first editor of the Transcendentalist
journal: The Dial + Women’s rights activist: Woman in the Nineteenth Century:

5. Transcendentalism: Walt Whitman

Considered to be the American poet. Born on Long Island in 1819 to a working-class Quaker
family. Left school at 11 and worked for newspapers in Brooklyn and Manhattan until he was
16. At 17 he returned to Long Island and worked as a teacher. At 21 he moved back to New
York City, working for various newspapers and beginning to consider a career as a writer.

→ Working class background: much different perspective on life than Harvard educated
Emerson or Thoreau.
→ Quaker background: poet of democracy that celebrated the divine potential of the
individual.
Leaves of Grass: no single book did more to transform US poetry than this one.

- Bold rejection of poetic norms and forms (e.g., free verse)

- Self-consciously American diction.
- A unique poetic persona at once a representative of his nation and a distinct,
idiosyncratic individual.
Preface to Leaves of Grass (1855) + poem.

Whitman included a portrait to identify himself as the author of the book where his
appearance was of a working-class outlaw. For its era, it was shocking: Readers were used to
formal portraits of authors, usually in frock coats and ties. Very often they were posed at
reading tables with books spread open before them or holding a thick volume in their hands.
The rebellious, open-collared pose presented here was designed to stand in stark contrast

UNIT 4: Turn-of-the-century
portraits of reality: Realism and Naturalism
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1. Literature and the civil war

This was the largest crisis the nation had faced. It marked the fracturing of its unity, the
moment of greatest change in its history. Yet none of the major writers of its generation
came close to it, in either language or actual experience.
But wars are often followed by a major burst of creativity, reflecting the war experience …
There was important literary expression, especially in verse, while perhaps the greatest novel
about the immediacy of the battlefield did not appear for thirty years, from a writer born six
years after the conflict ended … Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
The twenty-five years between the end of the [civil] war and the 1890s, when the frontier
officially closed, were the period of the most profound changes America [sic] had yet seen.
1. Increasing urbanization and industrialization (Industrial Age): aggressive capitalism.
2. Rise of the middle class and precarious conditions of the working class.
3. Immigration from both Europe and Asia peaking during the last half of the 19th
century > cheap labor to rising urban centers.
4. Activists (African-Americans, Native Americans, women, the working class) and
reformers working to battle injustice and social ills

2. Turn of the Century Portraits of Reality

The notable changes came not in what was written about but in ways of writing… the
upheaval forced language toward a new realism to undermine old myths, ideals and faiths.
(Bradbury and Ruland 1991, 188)

→ Depicting life as it is became the preoccupation of the newer American novelists.

(Bradbury and Ruland 1991, 190).
→ Artists and writers turned to realist styles addressing new concerns as, for instance,
the rise of the middle class and the struggles of the working class…

1. Characters: New character types emerged: ambitious business leaders, industrial

workers, the rural poor, unheroic soldiers... Characters that resembled ordinary
people living in ordinary circumstances, who experienced plausible real-life struggles
and who often, as in life, were unable to find resolution to their conflicts. These
characters were developed by using ordinary speech in dialogue.
2. Plot: Characterization and plot became intertwined, as the plot was formed from the
exploration of a character working through or reacting to a particular issue or struggle.
In other words, characters often drove the plot of the story.

3. Narrators: Characters in Realistic fiction were three-dimensional, and their inner lives
were often revealed through an objective, omniscient narrator.

4. Settings: Realists set their fiction in places that actually existed, and they were
interested in recent or contemporary life, not in history or legend.

Realism is the dominant literary style of the period, but realism was (and is) a slippery term:
 1. Observation and documentation of the details of everyday life. Realists believed in
the accuracy of detail, and, for them, accuracy helped build the “truth” conveyed in
the work. The implied assumption for these writers is that “reality” is verifiable, is
separate from human perception of it, and can be agreed upon collectively.

2. Portraying life as they saw it: the ordinary and local just as suitable for art as the
sublime. Realistic writers believed that the function of the author is to show, not
simply tell. The story should be allowed to tell itself with a decided lack of authorial
intrusion. Realistic writers attempted to avoid sentimentality or any kind of forced or
heavy-handed emotional appeal.

3. Realism in the USA: “local color” and regionalism

In the USA, realism began as “local color” and as “regionalism”, two earlier literary styles that
contributed to the emergence of Realism: these cannot be completely separated from one
another or from Realism itself, all three styles have intersecting points, even if there are
distinct features of each style.
“Local color”, “regionalism” and realism:
1. Interest in the local or regional, especially as regards the folkways of the South, the
West, and rural New England.
2. Often also “nostalgic utopianism”, looking back in longing to a former, more
“innocent” past.
3. Focus on the characters, dialects, customs, topography, and other features particular
to a specific region that makes use of the speech, dress, mannerisms, and habits of
that specific region.
4. Tendency to associate the term “realism” with writing in or about the centers of
power, and “regionalism” or “local color” with the supposed periphery.

3.1. Local Color

Detailed description of a particular locality, enabling the reader to “see” the setting. The
setting is realistically drawn as well: a real-life location, with accurate depictions of setting,
people, and local customs.

→ Concerned with habits, customs, religious practices, dress, fashion, foods, language,
dialect, common expressions, peculiarities, and surrounding flora and fauna.

→ The characters are more realistically drawn, with very human, sometimes ignoble,
traits: they swear, speak in regional dialect, swat flies away from their faces, and make
mistakes; they are both comic and pitiable
 → Nostalgia and sentimentality, and even elements of the Romantic style of the earlier
part of the century, may infuse a Local Color story. Transitional type of writing that
took American literature away from the Romantic style and more firmly into the
Realistic style.
o In some stories, the local inhabitants would examine their own environments,
nostalgically trying to preserve in writing the “ways things were” in the “good
old days.”

→ Sometimes told from the perspective of an outsider (such as travellers or journalists)

looking into a particular rural, isolated locale that had been generally closed off from
the contemporary world. The Local Color story often involved a worldly “stranger”
coming into a rather closed off locale populated with common folk. From there the
story took a variety of turns, but often the stranger, who believed he was superior to
the country bumpkins, was fooled or tricked in some way … Often, the story is
humorous, with a local trickster figure outwitting the more urbane outsider.

→ Local Color writing, however, does not reach the more stylistically and thematically
complicated dimensions of Realistic writing: Local Color works tend to be somewhat
sentimental stories with happy endings or at least endings where good prevails over
evil. Characters are often flat or two-dimensional who are either good or bad.

3.2. Regionalism
Regarded as a more sophisticated form of Local Color, with the author using one main
character (the protagonist) to offer a specific point of view in the story. The Regional writer
attempts to render a convincing surface of a particular time and place but investigates the
psychological character traits from a more universal perspective.

→ Characters tend to be more three-dimensional and the plot less formulaic or

predictable.
→ Regionalism has often been used as a term to describe many works by women writers
during the late nineteenth century; however, it is a term which… has confined these
women writers’ contribution to American literature to a particular style [while their]
larger focus was on ordinary women in domestic spaces who seek self-agency in a
male-dominated culture:
o Kate Chopin set most of her works among the Creole and Acadian social classes
of the Louisiana Bayou region, yet the larger themes of her works offer
examinations of women who long for passionate and personal fulfilment and
for the ability to live authentic, self directed lives.
Regionalist and/or “local color” writing often committed to celebration of a vanishing social
order or commemoration of one that had already vanished: unsurprisingly much of this
writing came from and concerned the South: nostalgic allegiance to the good old days and
interest in the legends that had helped justify oppression and engineer civil conflict.

4. Realism
Literary realism is the dominant style of the period (1865 – 1914), BUT “realism” meant
different things to different writers:

→ William Dean Howells says that literary realism “is nothing more and nothing less than
the truthful treatment of material”. Desire to report “just the facts”, journalistic style.
→ Henry James and Edith Wharton focus their literary realism on interior psychological
states (upper-class characters).

4.1. William Dean Howells

The “dean” of American letters at the turn of the century. Hugely influential not only as an
author and a theorist of realism but also as an advocate for the careers of up-and-coming
authors. His fiction tries to register as accurately as possible the way Americans were living,
resisting the romantic and the sentimental. Focus on society, not the individual. Interested in
the commonalities, the collective... the way society work. Interested in that. Commonalities
of the individual.

4.2. Henry James

“The master”. As an author of serious realist fiction, he was unparalleled at the turn of the
century: The Portrait of a Lady (1881) The Turn of the Screw (1898) The Wings of the Dove
(1902) The Ambassadors (1903) The Golden Bowl (1904).
Sometimes also considered as an early modernist due to his constant experimentation with
form, narrative structure, characterization and, above all, narrative view (e.g., stream of
consciousness in The Turn of Screw)

For James reality is not referential and shared, he focuses on the inner reality, on “life” as
mediated through the mind > reality is contingent on perspective.
He was more interested in “the special case”: how common moral conflicts and shared social
concerns were realized in the complexities of individual experience and filtered through
individual consciousness.

4.3. Edith Wharton

Emotional and moral dilemmas of the upper classes = Henry James... --> “continued cry that
I am an echo of Mr. James”. Wharton was far more popular than James ever was.

→ Her writing was less interested in narrative experimentation and more driven by plot
and action, her social knowledge was more precise.
→ Sense of social and sexual imprisonment.

5. Naturalism
Type of literary realism (or an alternative to it) characterized by:
- Determining influence of heredity and environment: human actions shaped by forces
beyond our control (biology, environment, and chance), environmental forces control
events and the individuals are acted upon rather than active.
- The world is more random than predictable.
- Landscapes, social and natural that are at best indifferent and at worst hostile.
- Characters from the fringes of society.
- No “happy endings”.
Determinately male movement: power and struggle, life as war. Woman writers in the 19 th
century: equally concerned with issues of power but frequently as they relate to patriarchal
structures and institutions, such as marriage. Kate Chopin, Charlotte Perkins Gilman.

REALISM
Set in believable, everyday locales
Middle class characters
Plots that worked toward
the restoration of order
A realist might suggest that good prevails
NATURALISM
Extreme settings
Lower class characters
Characters confront major crises and
are destroyed by them
Naturalistic characters are doomed by fate

5.1. Stephen Crane

Very pessimistic view of reality as meaningless, there is no purpose in life but existing, there
is nothing to do. The world does not care about you as an individual. Nature and the social
environment are oblivious to human need. Reality as a naturalistic struggle for existence in a
hostile natural and social world.

→ Maffie, A Girl of the Streets (1893).

→ The Red Badge of Courage (1895)

5.2. Jack London

“Nature as ‘unmoral’: It is pure precisely because it is primitive, existing apart from human
judgment”. Life as a battle for power.
 6. The Woman Quesiton
The “Woman Question,” – common phrase from this period – was actually more than a single
question:

→ Education, participation in the workforce.

→ Female autonomy and the institution of marriage.
→ Main political issue identified with women during this period: suffrage

1870 ratification of the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution extended—at least in

theory—the voting franchise to African American men but not to women of any race.
Membership in the National Woman Suffrage Association, founded in 1869, grew
dramatically in the late nineteenth century.

6.1. Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The impulse towards literary realism led to the development of “the literature of argument”:

→ Sociological literature that argued for the reform of social ills.

→ A body of literary texts with a strong reform agenda of their own.

Few writers more neatly capture the “literature of argument” than Charlotte Perkins Gilman,
who wrote both nonfiction treatises and fiction novels, all of which advocated for the rights
of women.

→ Leading intellectual in the women’s movement around the turn of the century.
→ Mainly known during her lifetime for her nonfictional work.
→ Utopian novels: Moving the Mountain (1911), Herland (1915) …
→ Wrote more than two hundred stories, among these the feminist masterpiece: “The
Yellow Wallpaper” (1892).

6.2. Kate Chopin

Early Life
Born to an Irish immigrant father and a Catholic mother of French descent. Well-to-do family
in Missouri. Writes strong female characters, wealthy women in “gilded cages”.
Married Life

She recognized the ready market for “local color” or regional writing and decided to fashion
a literary career out of her experiences of the Creole and Cajun cultures she had come to
know.
Life as writer and her writing
Chopin turned to fiction writing to support her family, published in the leading magazines of
her day: her husband and mother died, leaving her alone to raise her six young children. In
her ten-year writing career, she wrote 150+ stories, three novels, poetry and criticism.

→ Interested in sexual politics and the politics of marriage.

→ Also sexual desire: highly lyrical and symbolic language.
→ Women's relationship to the changing worlds of home and work.
→ Main conflict in her fiction: social demands vs. Personal need:
o Social requirement that a woman should center her life on her husband and
children VS.
o A woman’s necessary obedience to her own compulsions and impulses to
follow, express, and develop her individuality.
Often a transgressive voice; some of her stories were not deemed fit to print, and others she
did not attempt to place in the public domain- the most famous of these being the story of
joyful adulterous sex, “The Storm”, written in 1898:
“When he touched her breasts they gave themselves up in quivering ecstasy, inviting
his lips. […] Her mouth was a fountainhead of delight. And when he possessed her, they
seemed to swoon together at the very borderland of life’s mystery.”
The Awakening (1899)
It was banned for a while in St Louis, it was not well received.

→ Sensual and sexual coming to consciousness of a young woman, Edna Pontellier.

→ Edna Pontellier is not a “new woman”; but an unrepentant “sensualist”.
→ Influence of French fiction: her stories were much more erotic – and guilt-free – than
the American norm.
→ Portrayal of the protagonist’s psychological turmoil: internalized feelings of remorse.
→ Attention to the details and the pressures of reality.
→ Mixed reviews: critics all over the United States condemned the novel as “morbid,”
“unhealthy,” “not wholesome,” “vulgar,” “repellent,” and even “poison.”