Introduction to American Studies: American Literary History Period 1607-1765 COLONIAL PERIOD
Sociopolitical Context 1607 English found Jamestown, VA 1620 Pilgrims set sail for America, Plymouth Plantation established 1630-60 Puritan Migration
1675-76
King Philip’s War in New England
Writers and Their Works John Smith, A True Relation (1608) John Winthrop, “A Model of Christian Charity” (1630) Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (1682) [captivity narrative] Samuel Sewall’s Diary Poetry by Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor
1692-93
Cultural History literary trends/genres: accounts of voyages, promotion tracts, sermons, histories and biographies, diaries and autobiographies, poems (= nonfictional literature, no drama or novels) Puritanism: self-scrutiny (‘Am I saved?’) captivity narrative: first genuine American genre wilderness vs. civilization
Salem Witchcraft Trials 1765-1829
1765
REVOLUTIONARY AND EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD
1773 1776 1789
Stamp Act: colonists begin boycott of British goods Boston Tea Party Declaration of Independence Constitution in effect; Washington elected first president; French Revolution
1804-06
Lewis and Clark expedition
1812-14
British-American War
Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana (1702) Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (1771-89) political writings by Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776), Declaration of Independence (1776), Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer (1782) poetry by Philip Freneau, Timothy Dwight, Joel Barlow, William Cullen Bryant short fiction by Washington Irving drama by Royall Tyler, The
self-made man
in search of an American identity: ‘What is an American?’ frontier glorious contrast between Old and New World
1823
1828 1829-1865 ROMANTICISM AND AMERICAN RENAISSANCE
1829 1837 1845 1846 1848 1850 1854 1859 1860
1861-65 1863
Monroe Doctrine
Andrew Jackson elected president Andrew Jackson inaugurated 7th President financial panic ‘Manifest Destiny’ war with Mexico, great famine in Ireland -> Irish immigration Seneca Falls Convention Fugitive Slave Law Kansas-Nebraska Act leads to bloody conflicts between freestate and slave-state settlers John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry South Carolina secedes from the Union; Abraham Lincoln elected 16th President Civil War Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address and “Emancipation Proclamation”
Contrast (1787) novels by H.H. Brackenridge, Modern Chivalry (1792); Hannah Webster Foster, The Coquette (1797); Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland (1798); James Fenimore Cooper, Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826) ‘Fireside Poets’: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russel Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier
gothic fiction
poetry and short fiction by Edgar Allan Poe
Poe’s aesthetics of the short story
essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson: “Nature” (1836); “The American Scholar” (1837) 1850 Herman Melville’s Moby Dick 1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter 1851 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin 1854 Henry David Thoreau, Walden 1855 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass
industrialization, growth of cities
reform movements and the ‘feminization of America’: temperance, abolitionism, anticapital punishment, asylum and prison reform
‘American Renaissance’ (coined by F.O. Mathiessen) American ‘newness’: new concepts of man and the universe: Unitarianism and Transcendentalism romance as a genuine American genre Whitman and Dickinson and the emergence of modern poetry
poetry by Emily Dickinson 1865-1914 REALISM AND NATURALISM
1865 1865-77 1866
assassination of Lincoln Reconstruction Era Civil Rights Bill passed; Ku Klux Klan organized
1869
15th Amendment ensures Black suffrage
1880s and 90s
American Labor Movement
1900-08
Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt president Ford’s model T in mass production
1909
1900-1914
1914-18
World War I
EARLY MODERNISM
(short) fiction by Bret Harte, Sarah Local Color and Regionalism Orne Jewett, Charles Chesnutt, Joel Chandler Harris, Kate Chopin Samuel L. Clemens (= Mark Twain), The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) William Dean Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (1881) Stephen Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895) Frank Norris, McTeague (1899) Theodore Dreiser, Sister Carrie (1900) Upton Sinclair, The Jungle (1906) Getrude Stein, The Making of Americans (1906-8), Three Lives (1909), Tender Buttons (1914) Ezra Pound, “Imagist Manifesto” (1913)
1914-1945
1914-18
World War I
poetry by T.S. Eliot, The Waste
the ‘tall tale’ and American humor Realism and Naturalism ‘Gilded Age’ ‘Progressive Era’ Thorstein Veblen, “The Theory of the Leisure Class” (1899) (key word: conspicuous consumption) the city in literature Modernist movements in Europe: cubism, futurism, DADA, etc. Nietzsche (father of modernism): 1) perspectivism: reality is a construction of each individual 2) God is dead literary expatriates in Paris and
MODERNISM
1913-20 1917 1918 1919 1920 1927 1928 1929 1933-36 1939 1941 1944
1945 to the Present
1945
POST-WAR LITERATURE
Woodrow Wilson President US enters WWI Wilson outlines Fourteen Points for Peace Peace Treaty, including League of Nations covenant ‘Red raids’ execution of Sacco and Vanzetti Herbert Hoover elected President Great Depression Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal World War II Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, the US enters WW II Allied invasion of France end of WW II; Roosevelt dies, Harry S. Truman becomes President; US drops atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima; Japan surrenders
1946
Winston Churchill delivers his “iron curtain speech”; beginning of the Cold War: Anticommunism and Containment
1940s and
McCarthyism
Land (1920); Ezra Pound, Cantos (1917-68), William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost novels by Sinclair Lewis, Babbit (1922); F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925); Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises (1926), A Farewell To Arms (1929); William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929), Absalom! Absalom! (1936) John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939) Richard Wright, Native Son (1940) J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951); Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952); Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953)
London ‘High Modernism’ (1920-30) battlecry for American modernism: “Make it new!” (Pound) ‘lost generation’ hedonism Jazz Age (F.S. Fitzgerald) Harlem Renaissance anti-modernism and social criticism: “The Thirties in literature were the age of the plebes” (A. Kazin) in search of identity (“phony”) post-war sociology and psychology: Riesman, The Lonely Crowd (1950); Erik Erikson, Identity and the Life Cycle (1959)
50s
POSTMODERNISM
Korean War Dwight D. Eisenhower elected President
1955-68
Civil Rights Movement
1960
John F. Kennedy elected President Kennedy assassinated Johnson elected President bombing of North Vietnam and Americanization of the war begin
Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton
M.L. King assassinated; race riots sweep nation; Robert F. Kennedy assassinated; Vietnam piece talks open in Paris; Richard Nixon elected President
John Updike, John Cheever, Joyce Carol Oates
suburbia in literature
Raymond Carver, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love (1981); Tom Wolfe, The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987); Paul Auster, New York Trilogy (1985-87)
Neorealism
1963 1964 1965
1968
1972-74 1976-80 1980s 1988 1991
Watergate; Nixon resigns, Ford becomes president Carter’s presidency Reagan Era/ Reaganomics George H. W. Bush elected President Gulf War (Operation Desert
Allen Ginsberg, Howl (1955); Jack Kerouac, On the Road (1957); William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch (1959)
‘counter culture’ Beat Generation
1950-53 1952
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five (1969); Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)
N. Scott Momaday, House Made of Dawn (1968); Leslie Marmon Silko, Ceremony (1977); Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine (1984)
confessional poetry postmodern playfulness: metafiction, intertextuality, parody, performance, indeterminacy
Multiculturalism/Postcolonialism: Native American Renaissance storytellers, tricksters
1992 2000
9/11 2001 2008
Storm) Clinton elected President George W. Bush elected President attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon Barack Obama becomes first black President of the United States
Chicano Renaissance Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior (1976); Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club (1989)
Asian American literature
Tony Morrison, Beloved (1987); Philip Roth, Cynthia Ozick, Louis Begley
African American literature Jewish American literature
Jonathan Safran Foer, Art Spiegelman, Don DeLillo, Joseph O’Neill
9/11 literature
