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