Antebellum American Literature |
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ENG 221: Major American Authors By the end of this unit, you should:
Please complete
these assignments on or before the dates in bold.
Week 4: Early Romanticism ResourcesYou can find more information about the subjects covered in this lesson by consulting these resources: Be Your Best: Reading Poetry includes detailed guidance on
understanding and explicating poetry. Updated January 29, 2002
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AnnouncementsHaving explored the origins of the United States and its literature, we turn now to a period when we might say American literature came of age: the antebellum period. It was during this era that some of America’s greatest writers lived and wrote, and we will study many of them, including Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, and Emily Dickinson. Please note that you have several assignments due during this unit. First, your essay on the colonial era is due at the beginning of class on Friday, February 1. Second, you must submit a draft of your portfolio on Monday, February 11. This portfolio should include your introduction, your first essay, and a draft of your author project. Your essay on the antebellum era is due at the beginning of class on Friday, March 1. For the details of these assignments, see the “Assignments” section of the syllabus. Only those students who submit all of their assignments on time will receive detailed written evaluations from me. Remember, you may submit your work in the form of an online portfolio or a printed portfolio. For those who wish to create an online portfolio, I will conduct an optional workshop at 10 a.m. on Wednesday, January 30, in Dial 149. During this workshop, which will last about an hour, you will learn everything you need to know to create an online portfolio. Finally, please note that a number of you are scheduled to give your presentations on your authors. Please check the syllabus for the schedule. Think FastBelow are some writing exercises designed to help you master the knowledge and skills covered in this unit.
DiscussionHistoryThe period from 1784 to 1865 was a time of both expansion and division in the United States. After winning their independence from Britain in the Revolutionary War, Americans gradually expanded their nation to the West. Indeed, newspaper editor John O'Sullivan famously proclaimed in 1845 that the land to the West of the original colonies belonged to the United States "by right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federatative self-government entrusted to us." The reality was not as attractive as this idealistic sentiment. For one thing, while the Mormons who migrated to modern-day Utah in the 1840s certainly sought liberty, most of the other people who settled the West were motivated by material concerns. The pioneers who traveled on the Oregon Trail in the 1830s and 1840s, for example, sought land where they could earn a decent living, while some heading west during the 1849 California Gold Rush hoped to get rich. Furthermore, the process of settling--or, in some cases, exploiting--this land involved many unsavory consequences, including conflicts with Native Americans, destruction of buffalo, and mistreatment of Chinese immigrants. While America was expanding west, it also was dividing between north and south. In the northern United States, where the economy was largely industrial, many Americans opposed slavery and tried to restrict its spread or even outlaw it entirely. The southern states, on the other hand, had a primarily agricultural economy and depended heavily on slave labor. Despite attempts at compromise, such as the Missouri Compromise of 1820 and the Compromise of 1850, 11 southern states eventually seceded from the Union and formed the Confederate States of America. In the American Civil War, which lasted from 1861 to 1865, the Confederate Army of the south--seeking its independence--fought against the north's Union Army, which sought to preserve the Union. The war ended when Confederate General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Union General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia. The American culture of this period showed the same hunger, confidence, and sense of adventure that characterized the westward migration. While western pioneers were exploring and settling the land, other Americans broke ground in the scientific, social, and artistic realms. Major inventions included Eli Whitney's cotton gin in 1793, Samuel B. Morse's telegraph in 1844, and Elias Howe's "sewing jenny" in 1846. Between 1830, when the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad became the first to operate in America, and the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad in 1869, American laborers laid more than 30,000 miles of track. Meanwhile, dramatic changes took place in American society, thanks to social reformers such as educators Horace Mann and Catharine Beecher, prison reformer Dorothea Dix, women's advocate Lucretia Mott, and abolitionists Frederick Douglass, John Brown, and William Lloyd Garrison. This was also the age of temperance societies and utopian communities, including New Harmony and Brook Farm. Finally, Americans were reading more than they ever had and were witnessing important developments in the field of art. Literate Americans could choose from numerous magazines and newspapers, including 47 newspapers in New York alone in 1830. New Yorkers packed a free gallery operated by the American Art-Union, an association of artists and patrons who sought to promote American art, and the world saw the emergence of several important American artists, including Albert Bierstadt, Thomas Cole, and Hiram Powers. LiteratureBetween the official end of the Revolutionary War against England in 1783 and the end of the Civil War in 1865, American literature grew up. Like the colonial writers who had preceded them, the first writers in antebellum America largely followed British models. Joel Barlow, for example, wrote epic and mock epic poetry in the tradition of English writers such as John Milton and Alexander Pope, and Royall Tyler's play The Contrast closely resembles British Restoration comedies by Richard Brinsley Sheridan and William Congreve. Meanwhile, Susanna Rowson and Charles Brockden Brown wrote sentimental or Gothic novels that could have passed for British productions. An early milestone in the history of a truly American literature came in 1819, when Washington Irving published the first installments of The Sketch Book, a collection of essays and stories, including "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." A year later, fellow New Yorker James Fenimore Cooper published his first novel. While the works of these two writers also looked British in many ways, their work demonstrated two important developments in American literature. First, each writer, particularly Cooper in his Leatherstocking Tales, capitalized on American settings and American themes. Second, both Irving and Cooper were more than inferior proteges; rather, they were as talented as many of the English masters and even earned the respect of English readers. The next milestone came in 1837 when Ralph Waldo Emerson of Massachusetts delivered a lecture called "The American Scholar," which fellow writer Oliver Wendell Holmes called America's "intellectual Declaration of Independence." For the next two decades, American writers such as Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Frederick Douglass, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Walt Whitman, T.B. Thorpe, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Herman Melville produced scores of essays, nonfiction narratives, poems, short stories, and novels that formed a distinctive American literature. Much of this literature still showed signs of British or at least European influence. Most notably, Poe wrote Gothic stories and set many of them in European locales, and Longfellow, a professor of Romance languages at Harvard, borrowed verse forms and even subject matter from Europe. Still, Poe, Longfellow, and their great contemporaries were clearly American writers in both form and content. In the areas of form and technique, for example, Poe--along with Thorpe, Hawthorne, and others--shaped a distinctively American short story, and Whitman departed from European poetic models by developing free verse. Both Hawthorne and Melville wrote symbolic, even ethereal novels that differed from the works of their English contemporaries. In content, Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Longfellow, Whitman, Cooper, Stowe, and Melville not only set works in American locales, but drew heavily on American themes, issues, and identities--including exploration, democracy, individualism, slavery, native Americans, frontiersmen, and Cajuns--while also lending their American perspectives to eternal subjects, such as nature, religion, and truth. Think AgainChoose one of the topics below and respond to it in a clear, thorough, detailed, and insightful 500-word essay. Include each essay in your portfolio.
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