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e populations by European imperial powers, but we need not think of the intellectual exchange between the two hemispheres as being entirely in one direction. A Taino Indian whom Columbus seized and trained as a translator, and renamed Diego Coln in Spain, had as much to say to his people upon his return to the Caribbean in 1494 as Columbus did to Ferdinand and Isabella after his triumphant first expedition. The new world that Columbus boasted of to the Spanish monarchs in 1500 was neither an expanse of empty space nor a replica of European culture, tools, textiles, and religion, but a combination of Native, European, and African people living in complex relation to one another. After early wonder and awe at their unexpected discovery of inhabited land, Europeans used their technological edge in weaponry (gunpowder and steel) to conquer the region. They were aided in this task by the host of diseases they had brought from the Old World, against which early Americans had no immune resistance. Smallpox, measles, and typhus decimated Native populations, and in response to the lack of a local labor force the Spanish began importing Africans to take their place, thereby compounding genocide with slavery. But by no means were Natives merely helpless victims. adopted European weapons and tactics to defend themselves from invaders, and while some collaborated with Europeans, as did some Aztecs with Cortss Spanish force against their king Montezuma, or the Narragansetts and Mohegans with the New Englanders against the Pequots, they did so not out of submission or gullibility but to gain a temporary upper hand against their Native rivalstruly, a resourceful response to an impossible situation. The Native cultures Columbus found in the New World displayed a huge variety of languages, social customs, and creative expressions, with a common practice of oral literature without parallel east of the Atlantic. Compared to the three dozen languages, common religion and printed alphabet, and stable boundaries of the European nation-states, the Native peoples were much more diverse. They spoke hundreds of distantly related languages and widely differed in their social organization, from the hunting-gathering, nomadic Utes to the highly structured farming society of the Iroquois confederation. Eight different creation stories have been catalogued, each attesting to the religious diversity of early Americans. But since no Native peoples had a written alphabet, they relied instead on an oral tradition of chants, songs, and spoken narrative, what some critics have called orature, for their artistic expressions. These verbal genres (trickster tales, jokes, naming and grievance chants, and dream songs, among many others) are literary in the sense that they represent the imaginative and emotional responses of their anonymous authors to Native culture. But our Western sense of literature is mainly derived from the effects of the written word and has little to do with the performance issues of tempo, pauses, and intonation common to verbal genres. Translations of orature, first into English and then onto the page, leave out a great deal. Exploratory expeditions to the New World quickly led to colonial settlements, as the major European countries vied with each other for a portion of the western hemispheres riches. Early voyages by Columbus for Spain, Cabot for England, and Vespucci and Cabral for
Portugal mapped and claimed large areas for later colonies. Small settlements made on Hispaniola by Columbus (1493) and in Jamestown by John Smith (1607) faced organized and more numerous Native adversaries as well as internal dissent and mutiny; the early settlers were followed by waves of better armed and equipped settlers who came to stay. The Spanish were most successful in establishing their empire, which by the 1540s reached from central North America and Florida southward, to northern and western South America. The Portuguese settled in eastern Brazil, the French along the St. Lawrence River in present-day Canada, first explored by Jacques Cartier and then settled sixty years later by Samuel de Champlain. The English came to the New World late, after several failed expeditions by Walter Raleigh, Humphrey Gilbert, and Martin Frobisher. Once the Jamestown colony survived its first trials of starvation, disease, riots, and violence with the Powhatan tribe, the English expanded from this base up and down the eastern coast of North America. The role of writing during the initial establishment and administration of these overseas colonies involved influencing policy makers at home, justifying actions taken without their explicit permission, or bearing witness to the direct and unintended consequences of European conquest of the Americas. The development of the printing press fifty years before Columbuss first voyage allowed many of his descriptions of the New World to spur the national ambitions and personal imaginations of the Spanish, ensuring new expeditions and future colonies. The long lag time between sending and receiving directions from Europe meant many written records exist as briefs, in which better informed explorers attempted to adjust colonial policy written largely in reaction to events abroad or to justify opportunistic actions taken without the crowns knowledge, as with Cortss messages to Charles V about his subjugation of the Aztecs. Writing also recorded the hideous consequences of empire wrought by the Europeans, many of whom reacted strongly against both the unintentional infection of the Natives with Old World diseases and the enslavement of the remainder for plantation labor. It could also be used subversively, as it was by an anonymous Aztec poet who lamented the fall of Montezuma in the Nahuatl language, but in the Roman alphabet. It also afforded opportunities to scribes such as Diego del Castillo and John Smith, who were born into the European underclass, to reshape the possibilities of colonial life away from hereditary privilege and in favor of merit, talent, and effort, all three of which were in short supply but high demand in the New World. The Puritans who settled in New England represented a different type of colonist, one that emigrated for religious rather than national or economic reasons. The first Puritans who arrived in Massachusetts founded Plymouth Plantation in 1620 and, under William Bradford, began a settlement devoted to religious life: they thought of themselves as Pilgrims. They were separatists whose beliefs were persecuted by the Church of England; after moving briefly to the Netherlands, they chartered the Mayflower and sailed for America, where with help from the Wampanoag tribe they survived their first winter. When John Winthrop arrived in Massachusetts Bay in 1630 with many more Calvinist dissenters, Plymouth was subsumed into the larger organization. Pilgrims and Puritans held similar beliefs, such as the doctrine of election, that God had predestined before birth those who would be saved and damned. But although the Puritans were rigidly exclusive in their early colonial days, requiring public accounts of conversion before admitting people
to church membership and their communion, their faith emphasized rapturous joy and zeal rather than bleak or doleful subsistence. Since the English language arrived late to the New World, it was by no means inevitable that the English would dominate, even in their own colonies. But by 1700, the strength of the (mostly religious) literary output of New England had made English the preeminent language of early American literature. Bostons size, independent college and printing press at Harvard (founded in 1636), and non-nationalist, locally driven project of producing Puritan literature gave New England the publishing edge over the other colonies. But other tongues existed in small enclaves within the thirteen English colonies that gave a foreign inflection to the local culture. In Albany, New York, for example, Dutch and Belgian mixed with French and Spanish speakers, and the inhabitants were immigrants from throughout Europe; Dutch persisted as an everyday language until the mid-1800s. Similarly, German immigrants in Pennsylvania prompted publishers to cater to their native language. The state of American literature in 1700, consisting of only about 250 published works, reflects the pressing religious, security, and cultural concerns of colonial life. Printing presses operated in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Annapolis, and colonists could also acquire works published in England. The most prolific author of the period was Cotton Mather, whose writings recorded the late-century war between New England and New France and its Indian allies, a series of biographies (in the Magnalia Christi Americana) of American religious saints, and conduct guides for ministers and servants. Other authors focused on relations with Native Americans, including pamphlets on conferences with New Yorks important Iroquois allies and captivity narratives recounting the barbarity of their Indian enemies. Still others focused on matters of unsuccessful social integration, as was the case for Quaker dissenters in Boston in 1660, or looked ahead to social problems looming on the horizon, as did Samuel Sewalls antislavery tract The Selling of Joseph (1700). During the eighteenth century, the religious, intellectual, and economic horizons of the thirteen English colonies expanded, challenging the dominance of Puritan culture with Enlightenment thought and uniting the different regions behind common national interests. The death of the minister and author Cotton Mather in 1728 symbolizes the waning influence of Puritan theocentrism. The scientific and philosophical writings of Isaac Newton and John Locke argued in favor of a worldview that accepted the ability of individuals to puzzle through and understand the universe and placed a premium on mutual sympathy, or sentiment, to guide moral action rather than religious grace alone. The Enlightenment emphasis on sentiment helped guide Americans to accept rapid population expansion due to European immigrants, lured overseas by tales of healthier, less crowded communities and merit-based opportunities, and economic expansion, especially in industries relating to agriculture and shipping. The boom in these industries resulted in cosmopolitan comforts, wealth and prosperity, and trade linkages between the colonies and the other ports and countries of the Atlantic Rim. But it also caused suffering for exploited indentured laborers and the African slaves who were brought to work on plantations. And the two populations who had met each other when the Pilgrims landed in 1620 found their numbers and influence dwindling: many communities of New England Indians disappeared
entirely due to urban expansion, and from the same cause many of the small-town Puritan settlements lost families due to religious dissension and a search for better farmlands. The same prosperity and security that led colonists to rely less on their neighbors for their physical safety allowed them to think less of what separated them from communities in other colonies (or from those descended from other ethnicities) than of their common social and cultural experiencespotentially national interests that would lead directly to the Revolution. The Enlightenment involved the uneasy mixture of new scientific and philosophical investigations into the nature of the universe with traditional responses to scripture. Some of these questioners were deists, who believed in a comprehensible universe ordered by a supreme being who was rational and benevolent. Their empirical studies replaced the Puritans habit of looking past reality for emblems of spiritual grace with an emphasis on the stable, observable world. People became more interested in how their actions related to the social well-being of their neighbors than their own spiritual progress; similarly, readers were more eager to read the accounts of ordinary individuals as they thoughtfully responded to the feelings and experiences of others, such as Benjamin Franklins Autobiography, than the metaphysical introspections of divines like Cotton Mather popular in the preceding generations. Enlightenment thought drove many to reject the innate depravity of human beings in favor of the assumption that people were basically good, and therefore capable of living together in sympathy and understanding with their fellow citizens. In response to the Enlightenments intellectual rigor and call to ethical sentiment, the Great Awakening of 173550 encouraged a return to Calvinist zeal by stressing an intense emotional commitment and complete surrender to faith. Itinerant ministers like the Methodist George Whitefield traveled the countrysides of England and America, preaching to thousands of new converts with appeals designed to register with the cult of feeling John Lockes philosophy had sponsored. Jonathan Edwardss preaching in New England was the most successful integration of Enlightenment thought and Puritanic zeal during the Great Awakening. His ministry rejuvenated the Calvinist doctrine of election in spite of its irrationality by stressing the rational delights to be gained by surrendering to Gods sovereignty and how spiritually moving true religious feeling could be. Edwards went too far when he demanded early signs of personal conversion; his Northampton congregation dismissed him from his ministry in 1749. Imperial politics and the American Revolution dominated the writings of the late eighteenth century. After the British began imposing punitive and damaging laws on the colonies to punish dissent and repay debts from a recent war with France, the Second Continental Congress pushed through a Declaration of Independence authored by Thomas Jefferson. What had started as a meeting to oppose overseas taxation policies quickly led to open revolt once the common interests of the delegates were made clear. Revolutionary writings by Thomas Paine, most notably Common Sense (1776) and The American Crisis, used Enlightenment ideals and the antimonarchy language of the British Whig Party to spur public support for the fledgling rebellion. The success of Paines writings underscores the growing importance of American newspapers, the first of which appeared in 1704, and
whose number had grown to about fifty by the Revolution. Significant political writings like those by Hamilton and Jay and Madisons Federalist Papers (17878 , which successfully argued for adoption of the U.S. Constitution, appeared mainly in New York newspapers, and after the war, poets and satirists like Philip Freneau continued to use periodicals to engage in partisan attacks on political positions. Some successful women writers, most notably Judith Sargent Murray and Sarah Wentworth Morton, used pseudonymous publications in periodicals to claim their right as women to engage in the political sphere traditionally reserved for men. And some women novelists like Susannah Rowson and Hannah Webster Foster capitalized on the increased appetite for womens writing to publish novels they hoped would sell enough to stay in print. Lasting effects of the Enlightenment include a greater social mobility, cultural acceptance of ideals such as reason and equality, and the assumption of an innate moral sense in all Americans. Whereas John Winthrop had assumed in his Model of Christian Charity (1630) that both privileged and poor had a stable place in society, by 1800, President John Adams would remark on the American lack of an aristocracy and therefore the possibilities for social mobility unheard of in Europe, at least for white men. Others were less fortunate: African Americans were enslaved, and even the Founding Fathers turned a blind eye to such hypocrisy; and white women, despite their privileges, could neither vote, nor own property, nor earn wages for themselves. Native Americans, too, found their lot unacceptable: they had supported the British in the Revolution and now faced reprisals from greedy and vengeful Americans. But by and large, the preeminent mood of the period was one that supported the ultimate perfectability of man, and the Enlightenment principles that had led to the Revolution would eventually be extended to those groups that had not won liberty and equality. For many, Benjamin Franklins example proves most representative for this period: ambitious, self-educated, and constantly curious, selfimproving, introspective, and civic-minded. Franklins influence and direct involvement are evident in many of the important documents and treaties of the Revolutionary period. His idealistic assumption that all people shared a common sense of right and wrong was shared by many Enlightenment thinkers and represents a fundamental tenet of American democracy. 1820-1865 The 1941 publication of F. O. Matthiessens American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman helped to establish the writers in this volume as pioneers of American literary nationalism who helped shape American literature for the next two centuries. Matthiessen argued that the years between 1820 and the Civil War represented a first flowering of American literary talent. Calling the period a renaissance, he selected a small group of neglected authors (Melville, Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau) whose works he felt had been undervalued by readers and critics. Matthiessen argued that the writers of this period helped to forge a stable national literary perspective and greatly influenced the nineteenth- and twentieth- century writers who came after them. Matthiessens list of renaissance writers has been challenged and adapted since its first publication. Among other things, his list focused primarily on male writers from the same class and ethnic background, and excluded many of the more popular novelists and poets whom most
readers living during these years might have read and recognized. Critics have also noted that Matthiessen exaggerates the separateness of the English and American literary traditions. Still, the idea of an American renaissance has proven useful to students and critics wishing to study how these antebellum writers both built upon the work of those who preceded them and shaped the work of future writers. During the 1820s, writers and critics called for nationalistic literature to reflect the new sense of cultural independence from Britain. After Andrew Jacksons victory at the Battle of New Orleans to end the War of 1812, a heroic national myth grew up around him that asserted the strength and optimism of the American character and suggested a hopeful trajectory for national literature that concentrated on ordinary people. British literary nationalists looked down on the efforts of American authors to establish a distinct or emancipated literary tradition, and many of the most successful U.S. writers of the 1820s saw themselves in conversation with European culture rather than separated from it. Instabilities in the territorial boundaries of the growing country and unresolved sectional contradictions regarding approaches to slavery, tariffs, and federal works projects made any consensus on how American literature should represent its culture extremely difficult to achieve. By and large, though, authors in the 1820s shared a sense of the distinctiveness of the American landscape, its colonial history, and the legitimacy of its traditions, and worked to represent the ways that ordinary Americans were coming to grips with their countrys contradictions. The geographical expansion and population growth of the United States in the first fifty years of the nineteenth century was matched by a marked increase in publication of books and periodicals. As cities grew in size and transportation to the interior of the country became faster and easier thanks to the construction of canals and railroads, the market for printed materials expanded. The professional writers ability to devote his or her time to creative writing during the antebellum years was often challenged by differences in international and American copyright laws and by negative attitudes about the writers occupation. American readers might have benefited from cheap pirated editions of novels and poems, but the unpredictability of copyright royalties meant that many authors had to support themselves through another occupation, such as editing or writing short journalistic criticism for a newspaper or magazine. Social stigmas made it difficult on the one hand for male writers to justify sole occupation as poet or novelist, and on the other hand for women to enter the public sphere as authoritative social commentators. Despite these economic difficulties, antebellum writers had the ability to reach a larger and more educated audience than ever before. Many used this opportunity to argue for reform and to represent the necessity of resolving looming cultural conflicts. Ralph Waldo Emersons writings, in particular, argued for the creative power of the imagination and implied an agency for the individual in rethinking his or her role in society. Emersons influence on authors such as Whitman, Hawthorne, Fuller, and Melville can be found in their willingness to question current institutions and reinterpret the status quo of American society within their works. Much of the energy for reform during these years derived from literatures ability to cause readers to sympathize with other peoples plights by representing characters from unequal positions of privilege or freedomslaves, Native
Americans, and poor immigrants in urban settings. Many women writers, rising to prominence through abolitionist or urban reform efforts, also wrote about the right to vote for women and the need for greater legal equality between men and women. The Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, the first national suffrage meeting of its kind, is one example of the expanded role of women in national politics, but the massive popularity of womens temperance and anti-slavery literature (especially Harriet Beecher Stowes Uncle Toms Cabin) speaks to the power of womens involvement in these social issues. One typical rhetorical tactic used by both suffragist and abolitionist reformers was to remind their readers of the unrealized potential of the Declaration of Independence. Margaret Fuller, for example, argued in The Great Lawsuit (1843) that Jeffersons Declaration implied that the right to vote ought to extend to women as well as to men. Henry David Thoreaus speech Slavery in Massachusetts (1854), meanwhile, objected strenuously to the hypocrisy of a northern state that had voted to outlaw slavery yet abetted the recapture by southerners of fugitive slaves. As reform movements increasingly were replaced by violent harbingers of the Civil War to come, writers of the renaissance turned increasingly to expressions of disillusionment with the failed promise of the American Revolution. Although the American renaissance should by no means be considered a coherent school or movement, the writers included in this anthology responded to the same pressing issues of their times and stayed in conversation with each other through their writings. Much of the literature of the antebellum years reflects the direct and indirect influences these writers had on one another. Common interests in travel and international friendship, as well as a shared sense of the need to shore up their current literature in references to the languages and cultures of the classical and imperial past, also linked these authors. But their desire to root the writings of the renaissance in a nationalist historical tradition was always in service to the development of an American perspective that could take its place in the context of the other cultures of the world. 1865-1914 Between 1865 and 1914 the United States transformed from a country just emerging from a destructive civil war to an imperial nation with overseas possessions and coasts on both the Atlantic and Pacific. Completed in 1869, the transcontinental railroad opened up the interior to settlement by homesteaders and prospectors, who arrived to exploit cheap land and discoveries of gold and other useful ores. Such innovations as the development of telegraph, telephone, and electricity networks helped develop these new Western settlements along with the East and allowed a burst of economic prosperity and industrialization. Enticed by promises of ready work made by businesses trying to keep wages down through an oversupply of labor, a massive influx of immigrants arrived, mostly from Europe and East Asia, and swelled the ranks of New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. By 1893, so many Americans had moved westward that the historian Frederick Jackson Turner declared the frontier closed. Americans subsequently turned their attentions overseas, toward new territories in Samoa and Hawaii and former Spanish possessions in Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico, in an attempt to join the European empires on the world stage.
Though these years brought wealth to some and stature to America in the eyes of the world, the undesirable consequences of rapid territorial, population, and industrial expansion were felt most by those with the least resources to resist the greedy, unscrupulous, and powerful. The Native American populations of the Great Plains, whose cultures depended on the freeroaming buffalo herds, faced the shock of interference in their hunting grounds by crisscrossing telegraph lines and railroad tracks. The federal government developed small reservations to replace hunting traditions with farming, always with the expectation that Native customs and distinctiveness would eventually vanish. Much of the land stolen from Natives was acquired cheaply by railroad companies and land prospectors, even though the Homestead Act of 1862 had intended the land to be improved by small farmers and immigrant families. Those homesteaders who did settle the plains were squeezed by the pricing policies of railroad monopolies that attempted to corner the transportation market and eliminate all competition. In the railroad industry, as with steel, oil, meat packing, and banking and finance, corporate power was focused in the hands of a few powerful men such as Gould, Stanford, Vanderbilt, Carnegie, Morgan, Hill, and Rockefeller. The plight of workers in the major cities was dire, not just because of the monopolists control over inhumane and often dangerous working conditions, but because of corrupt government officials who allowed them to act without hindrance. Early efforts to organize labor against the monopolists were often violent and had to fight against social prejudices favoring unfettered capitalism and a hands-off approach to business. In the same way, small farmers often failed to organize because of an abiding desire for independence that trumped the benefits of collective action. The literature of this period appears in the context of the dramatic diversification of American experience, both ethnic and regional, and the small but insistent movement among authors to combat the social inequities arising from too-rapid growth. Immigration from Europe and Asia resulted in a newly heterogeneous American population, now no longer mainly of New England descent, and now more diverse in terms of class and ethnic backgrounds. As populations in large urban centers and all geographic areas of the country increased, newspapers and magazines focusing on specific ethnic and regional readerships flourished. Among many others, the Jewish Daily Forward, founded by Abraham Cahan, catered to a Yiddish-speaking New York reader, and the Overland Express was the first periodical to feature Western-themed fiction and journalism. With new publishing opportunities available to depict previously underrepresented and marginalized peoples, many fictional characters, often created by authors from the same cultural and economic backgrounds, began to challenge received notions about the American character. But this new diversity often resulted in suspicion, antagonism, and cultural paranoia, triggering a cultural unease that pitted urban against rural, labor against management, and immigrant against native. In response, a generation of writers spoke out against social, economic, and political injustices in newspapers and magazines. Among these were journalists known as muckrakers for their devotion to exposing the dangers of the city and the evils of monopolies. Some notable muckrakers included Hamlin Garland and Frank Norris, who took on the railroad monopoly on behalf of small farmers, and Lincoln Steffens, who exposed the corruption of government officials like Boss Tweed of New York. Other writers took advantage of the new periodical media to write the literature of argument, which brought the spirit of reform to sociology, philosophy, and economics: some
examples include Helen Hunt Jacksons A Century of Dishonor (1881), which attacked U.S. injustices against Native Americans, Charlotte Perkins Gilmans Women and Economics (1898), which explored wealth and womens rights, and Thorstein Veblens Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), which examined the conspicuous consumption of the super-wealthy business magnates. Booker T. Washingtons Up from Slavery (1900) and W. E. B. Du Boiss The Souls of Black Folk (1903) are two examples of nonfiction prose that responded to racial injustices by challenging white audiences to work toward political solutions. To face the challenge of representing these dynamic cultural changes, American authors turned to the international aesthetic of realism, whose European practitioners include Leo Tolstoy, Henrik Ibsen, and Gustave Flaubert. American realism was an attempt to accurately represent life as authors saw it through the use of concrete descriptive details that readers would recognize from their own lives. William Dean Howells advanced a type of realism that concentrated on affectionate portrayals of ordinary, middle-class characters in an attempt to make the novel more democratic and inclusive. Henry James and Edith Wharton, meanwhile, focused on refined mental states, rather than exterior surfaces and surroundings. Their psychological realism attempted to find a precise language for intangible moral situations. The realism of Mark Twain was devoted to rendering the vernacular dialects and colloquialisms of his ordinary characters, often using humor to help readers sympathize with roguish heroes like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. A distinct aesthetic response to the late nineteenth century, American naturalism continued the realist attempt to represent new and unfamiliar types of characters, but naturalists concentrated on lower-class and marginalized people and merged the realist attention to detail with a strong belief in social determinism rather than free will. Building on the theory of natural selection proposed by Charles Darwins Origin of Species (1859), naturalists like Frank Norris, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London tried to represent life scientifically rather than providentially. Characters in naturalist novels exist in worlds where the environment determines character, events happen randomly, the strong prey on the weak, and protagonists often have neither the intelligence nor the resources to overcome adversity. But despite these bleak and unforgiving features, naturalist novels present their characters as case studies to suggest social solutions: Cranes The Open Boat, for example, emphasizes the individual frailties of its protagonists in order to commend how they eventually band together and survive. Another crucial development of realism was regional, or local color, writing, an attempt to capture distinct language, perspectives, and geographical settings before industrialization and cultural homogenization erased them. Some regionalist writing relied on nostalgia to generate interest in authentic but vanishing characters. In the West, writers like Bret Harte, Twain, and Owen Wister romanticized the lone cowboy and frontiersman, while Native American writers like Sarah Winnemucca offered a Native alternative. But other writers found regional specificity to be a vehicle for social change. Hamlin Garland used local descriptions of the Midwest to combat nostalgic stereotypes and depict the real plight of farmers. Women writers found regional writing an important opportunity to record their perspectives. The fiction of Sarah Orne Jewett, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Mary Austin
challenges readers to attune themselves to womens thoughts and rethink societys privileging of men. Kate Chopins The Awakening is a regional work that demands respect for a feminine perspective while also critiquing the patriarchal constraints of Catholic Louisiana. 1914-1945 Between 1914 and 1945, the United States engaged in two world wars and emerged as a modern nation and a major world power. American involvement in World War I was brief (191719) and left many yearning for the isolation of previous years. Yet despite some exclusionary immigration measures in the 1920s after a Red Scare of suspicion about foreign control over labor union activities, progress toward a more mobile and international perspective seemed unstoppable. A generation of American expatriates enjoyed European life thanks to a newly favorable currency exchange rate. African American soldiers and officers returned from WWI determined to see their rights in the army continue at home. And those workers who could not travel were inspired by the international Communist movement to agitate for fairer pay and conditions. After the stock market crashed in 1929 and the United States sank into the Great Depression, social tensions threatened the countrys stability for a decade, until Americans were united by World War II. The dominant literary aesthetic of these years is known as modernism, a response to the contradictions and pressures of contemporary life. In the same way that the country struggled with rapid modernization, modernist authors struggled to put a current face on traditional literature and to translate American themes and preoccupations into an international style. Many of the social and cultural changes of the interwar period centered around the sexual and psychological theories of Sigmund Freud, the social and racial writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, and the economic and political programs of Karl Marx. Freud, the inventor and chief practitioner of psychoanalysis, developed the idea of the unconscious, a repository of sexual desires and dreams. Freuds theories helped some Americans break free from smalltown, white, Protestant values in favor of increasingly permissive and tolerant attitudes toward the sexual freedoms and desires of women and acceptance of gay and lesbian individuals. African Americans, who migrated northward to fill factory vacancies during WWI, found a social theorist in Du Bois to describe their complex status in American society. Du Boiss The Souls of Black Folks identified in the black psyche a double consciousness of blacks themselves as Americans and as the racial stereotypes accepted by whites. Through the NAACP and journals published in the black neighborhood of Harlem in New York, the city within a city to which thousands of blacks migrated, Du Bois and others argued for the intellectual and cultural achievements of African Americans within this urban setting. Marxs economic theories were used to diagnose class inequalities as antagonism between owners and management (collectively known as capital) on the one side and labor on the other. His writings encouraged workers to reject the middle-class individualist ethos in favor of collective action to improve the lot of all workers. Marxs ideas led directly to the Russian Revolution of 1917, which inspired communists around the world to act in concert to overthrow their own governments. Two infamous court cases from this period demonstrate the resistance to the social changes
these theorists promoted. The trial and execution of Sacco and Vanzetti in 1921 was thought by many to have been unfairly decided based on the defendants status as Italian immigrants and active anarchists. The conviction in Scottsboro, Alabama, of nine black men for the rape of two white women on dubious evidence convinced many writers that the southern justice system was fundamentally unfair to blacks. Alongside these social changes, rapid advances in science and technology contributed to the modernization of America, resulting in the birth of a mass popular culture and the sundering of empirical science from the artistic search for meaning. The increased presence of new inventions like electric lighting and appliances, telephones, phonograph record players, motion pictures, and the radio combined to make person-to-person communication quicker and easier and to standardize American tastes in fashions and ideas. The automobile changed America more than any other invention by allowing new industries and jobs dependent on transportation, by causing a network of new roads and highways to spring up, and by dictating the birth and death of cities, suburbs, and towns based on proximity to those arteries. But while these technologies were breakthroughs in the ease and productivity of everyday life, the science underlying them seemed increasingly difficult and contrary to common sense. Einsteins relativity theories, Heisenbergs uncertainty principle, and the discovery of both subatomic particles and the infiniteness of the universe threatened the traditional role of science as an explanation of felt human experience. As a result, scientists and artists became mistrustful of one anothers methods, and art began to rival science as a way of interpreting reality, especially in terms of subjective experience. The crisis point for the interwar period occurred during the 1930s, when international cultural, economic, and political tensions resulted in the Great Depression and World War II. In Germany, Italy, and Spain fascist dictators rose to power and began to threaten their neighbors with aggressive rhetoric, military rearmament, and anti-Semitic genocide. In the United States, Franklin Roosevelts New Deal offered a pragmatic solution to the disastrous failure of free-market capitalism. Through social security, unemployment insurance, welfare support, and government creation of utility and public works jobs, the United States averted the revolution that had seemed inevitable. Even so, many writers were sympathetic to the Communist cause and the USSR as the answer to the U.S. crisis, mainly because the Soviets seemed to be the chief opponent of fascism. But the Russian dictator Stalins oppressive rule and nonaggression treaty with Hitler in 1939 soured many to Communism by the end of the decade. The literary aesthetic of high modernism, which represented the ways modernity was transforming traditional culture by experimenting with, adapting, and altering literary styles and forms, is best understood as an antagonism between popular and serious literature. The antimodern sentiments of many modernists who thought of the present in terms of what had been lost did not keep them from disrespecting the literary styles of their predecessors to represent that loss. Modernist poetry and prose tended to be short, precise, subjective, and suggestive rather than exhaustively detailed with exterior descriptions, to include fragments and disjointed perspectives rather than cohesive or coherent patterns, to favor questions over pat explanations, and to reject artificial literary order and assurances of objective truth
that they did not see in the real world. When works like T. S. Eliots Waste Land did include overarching patterns, they referred to classical or mythic narratives through allusion or foregrounded the self-reflexive search for meaning as a rationale to continue asking difficult questions. The modernist emphasis on individual experience over objective truth also meant incorporating elements of popular culture, which had not been thought literary enough for high art until then, mixing in colloquialisms and dialects without the aid of an interpretive narrator. The demands of modernist style meant a small readership but prestige and influence; modernists scorned the popular writers and desired their fame, but accused commercially successful writers, like Hemingway and Fitzgerald, of selling out. Occasionally, writers could blur the divide between middlebrow culture and serious high art, as in the case of Kay Boyle and Raymond Chandler. Though modernism began as a self-consciously international and apolitical aesthetic, many American modernists attempted to use the movement to promote national literary and political ambitions. The United States had been introduced to the audacity of modernism through the Armory Show of Cubist paintings in 1913 in New York City and events like Stravinskys The Rite of Spring, both of which caused uproars, and indeed most major American proponents of modernism were permanent expatriates, like Gertrude Stein, Eliot, Ezra Pound, and H.D., or lived abroad for part of the period. But some writers employed modernist principles to write ambitious American works; Hart Cranes The Bridge and William Carlos Williamss Paterson were poetic examples, as was John Dos Passoss USA trilogy in prose. Others, like Robert Frost, William Faulkner, and Willa Cather, brought modernism to bear on regional concerns, introducing an international style to a specific locale and idiom. When modernism was used for political ends, its effects were often subtle. The efforts of Harlem Renaissance writers like Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston incorporated blues rhythms and folk culture into their texts, but focused on the vitality of black culture or upbeat assessments of racial justice rather than angry denunciations of the status quo. And modernists like Marianne Moore, H.D., Katherine Anne Porter, and Nella Larsen depicted womens thoughts and experiences without explicitly advocating feminist positions. A last major development was the maturity of American drama during the interwar years thanks to experiments by playwrights reacting to Broadway and successful mixtures of American theatrical elements. Broadway, the center of American theatrical activity in the late nineteenth century, had begun premiering shows and plays in New York City and then sending them to tour the rest of the United States. In reaction to these largely commercial and conservative ventures, Susan Glaspell and others formed the Provincetown Players in 1915 to premier small, experimental works. Smaller houses like Glaspells often showed changes before Broadway, as ONeill with elements of German Expressionism, Maxwell Anderson with blank verse, George Kaufman with jokey domestic farces, and Rogers and Hammerstein with musical comedies. Many of these experiments incorporated earlier vaudevillian and burlesque songs and dances, as well as new formal and stylistic conventions. As many modernists realized the potential of plays to speak to a larger audience, drama moved into the literary mainstream. SINCE 1945
After World War II, the United States emerged as the strongest world power and assumed the role of speaking on behalf of liberal democratic ideals. Having fought until Germany and Japan had unconditionally surrendered, the triumphant Allies attended to their warravaged economic infrastructures, but only the United States had the wherewithal to build on its success in the conflict. The overseas empires of Britain and France began to dissolve, often violently. And the Soviet Union, weakened by the German assault of 1941, eventually could not sustain the investment necessary to vie militarily with the Americans. The Cold War (194689) between the United States and the USSR involved an ideological struggle between capitalist and communist states worldwide, which erupted into proxy fights in Korea and Vietnam, but eventually confirmed American military preeminence. At home, these political struggles resulted in three major aesthetic reactions. First, the period immediately following World War II was characterized by cultural conformity and nationalist ambition, as artists responded to the Cold War by closing ranks and writing on behalf of an assumed collective identity. Second, in the 1960s and 1970s, the unfulfilled promise of the Kennedy administration along with the turmoil of the Vietnam War prompted cultural introspection, as more and more artists rejected conformity and searched for ways to represent previously excluded minority voices. Third, from the 1980s to the present, artists consolidated the progress made in the previous years, until diversity and inclusivity became aesthetic ideals as well as political goals. In the aftermath of the economic and cultural reorganizations of World War II, American society became fascinated by cultural homogeneity and political unity. The war effort had shifted industrial production to military ends and recruited women to replace factory workers fighting overseas. When those workers came home, many women found returning to domesticity only temporarily acceptable. Similarly, African Americans who had been drafted into a fully integrated army found their return to second-class citizenship difficult to accept. But for the majority of the 1950s, most Americans dedicated themselves to stability at home in order to bolster the American cause abroad. During the Cold War, American competition with the Soviet Union took the form of political containment of the Russians, Chinese, and their satellite states through international organizations like the United Nations (for the Korean War) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (in the case of the Eastern European Warsaw Pact). Once the USSR developed nuclear weapons, both sides formulated policies that favored deterring their adversaries economically rather than deploying the weapons. In light of the struggle between capitalist and socialist economies, Americans treated materialism (which valued wealth as a good in itself) as patriotic. The G.I. Bill, which granted college educations to returning soldiers, ensured a highly skilled workforce, and the developing network of American-owned international corporations resulted in prosperity and the creation of a managerial class. Interstate highways connected suburbs with urban hubs to allow businessmen to shuttle between work and home, but this increased mobility underscored the homogeneity of these interchangeable zones of commerce. The literature of the 1950s reflects the cultural preoccupations of stability and conformity as it responded to the aesthetic project of modernism. Many artists sought to depict what they took to be common or essential to all Americans regardless of gender, class, ethnicity,
or regional identity. Such striving for representativeness derived in part from the grand ambitions of modernist novelists like Ernest Hemingway, whose lingering macho challenge to write the Great American Novel pushed writers to universalize or generalize so that their works could speak to any reader. Other novelists were inspired by William Faulkner to use regional specificity to make major statements about race, history, and national identity. By the end of the decade, fiction writers began to suspect that novelistic conventions were inadequate to the task of representing essential Americana, much less contemporary reality. The Death of the Novel controversy, as it was called, pointed to the dependence of novels on stable assumptions about character, plot development, and symbolism. During the 1960s, novelists like Philip Roth were increasingly skeptical of such assumptions. Poetry followed a course similar to that of prose in these years. Starting with finely wrought, intricate, personal lyric meditations, which were stylistic holdovers from modernist influences, poets in the Fifties began to experiment with formal openness and thematic inclusiveness of non-mainstream perspectives. Two books that symbolized poetrys break with modernist form are Allen Ginsbergs Howl (1956), with its wandering, oral rhythms and energetic rejections of conformity, and Robert Lowells Life Studies (1959), featuring a less difficult, more direct style and an autobiographical intensity. Ginsbergs and Lowells works helped prepare for the confessional poetry of the 1960s, which stressed the distinctiveness rather than the representativeness of the lyric voice. The inevitable collision of conformity and individuality was foreshadowed in the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960. Kennedys New Frontier challenged the prosperous and complacent to provide for the underprivileged and socially marginalized through the desegregation of the South and government programs like the Peace Corps. Many of Kennedys civil and voting rights proposals were realized by Lyndon Johnson in the late 1960s as part of his Great Society. The assassination of Kennedy in 1963 began a dozen years of cultural revolution in which intellectual unrest over the Vietnam War resulted in urban and campus violence, but also gave rise to movements for the betterment of women, blacks, and Native Americans. The feminist movement, which encouraged women to promote their collective legal, political, and cultural interests, made strides in equality for women not seen since suffrage; similarly, the civil rights movement made advances in awareness and combating racial discrimination, unfinished business since Reconstruction one hundred years earlier. But the good will earned by the Great Society was largely squandered by escalation in Vietnam under Johnson and Nixon and the governments often deceitful handling of information about Southeast Asia. Cynicism and activism in universities resulted in riots on campuses and deaths at Kent State and Jackson State in 1970; unrest did not cease until Nixon resigned in 1974 under threat of impeachment for abuse of power during the Watergate scandal and American troops withdrew from Vietnam in 1975. The political divisions, disruptions, and uncertainties of the 1960s were mirrored in the literature of the decade, in which writers came to terms with changing attitudes toward social involvement, government and corporate power, individual and minority rights, drug use, and technological advances like television and consumer air travel that lent themselves to a global perspective but disrupted normal ways of thinking about time and space. The Death of the Novel debates in fiction and the increasingly provisional, momentary nature of
poetry emphasized the fragility of language. In literary theory, the school of deconstruction, starting in about 1966, examined the fundamentally unstable quality of all utterances and how any statement depends on often unspoken and arbitrarily constructed assumptions. Still, some writers like the novelists John Updike and Ann Beattie and poets like Elizabeth Bishop and Stanley Kunitz remained committed to realistic description and traditional connections between text and represented world. Others, like those in the Minimalist school of prose fiction, labored to create a rigorously believable and philosophically acceptable aesthetic. While some mainly white voices responded to the 1960s by accounting for their aesthetic privilege, others took the decade as an opportunity to add their voices to American ideas of distinctive identity. Large platforms like literary feminism and the Black Arts Movement allowed individual authors to render particular experiences without having to feel they spoke for their race, ethnicity, or gender: Philip Roth and Bernard Malamud were American writers participating in this trend, and Adrienne Rich and Ursula Le Guin are good examples of powerful women writers. In the case of Native American literature, for which historical and cultural contexts did not exist to combat lingering stereotypes, the 1960s saw a parallel movement of critical writings to supplement creative works by Native authors. After the Vietnam War, Americans voted on their cynicism about government intervention and nostalgia for traditional values by electing Ronald Reagan president in 1980. Reagan presided over the demise of the Soviet Union thanks to a massive buildup in American military spending that the Russians could not match. His economic policies hearkened back to the personal quest for wealth of the 1950s rather than the social activism of the early 1960s. Under Reagan and Clinton, industries downsized and were made more efficient for competition in a globalized marketplace. Instead of a monolithic communist threat, the United States faced a succession of smaller challenges in Grenada, Panama, Somalia, and Iraq that it could dispatch handily. The new shape of American influence materialized with the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon; instead of large states, Americans now face radical fundamentalist cells, and U.S. culture has only begun to respond to this antagonist. As the Cold War ended, writers worked to broaden the cultural achievements of the 1960s, widening the scope of American experience and casting diversity and plurality as aesthetic ideals. African American women like Toni Morrison, Lucille Clifton, and Rita Dove wrote in national, racial, and ethnic terms; likewise, Sherman Alexie and Louise Erdrich succeeded in writing in the often ignored or suppressed tradition of Native American literature. Immigrant writers like Maxine Hong Kingston and Jhumpa Lahiri augmented national dialogues of assimilation and ethnic identity for Mexican, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian Americans. Perhaps the most telling emblem of this contemporary acceptance of new perspectives into conceptions of American experience is the Internet. Online, new hypertext realities need only be imagined to exist virtually, all users may join online communities, and writing exists in open-ended and interactive relationships with its readers. MAKING CONNECTIONS
TO 1820 1. One of the few things that Thomas Paine and Jonathan Edwards have in common is their reliance on simplicity and directness of rhetorical style (see Paines Common Sense and Edwardss Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.) In Franklins Autobiography, he also declares a bias in favor of clarity of diction. Other examples of authors whose writings are often thought to be disarmingly simple, but which follow in the tradition of direct American rhetoric, include Harriet Jacobss Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Walt Whitmans Leaves of Grass; Mark Twains Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow WallPaper; Ernest Hemingways The Snows of Kilimanjaro; William Carlos Williamss The Young Housewife; Allen Ginsbergs Howl; Raymond Carvers Cathedral; and Billy Collinss Forgetfulness. 2. Since this part of the anthology covers the very beginnings of American literature, works from the later periods understandably and often refer back to some of these foundational texts. Illustrative comparisons are possible between Columbuss letters to Spain and Emma Lazaruss 1492; Anne Bradstreets The Tenth Muse and John Berrymans Homage to Mistress Bradstreet; between William Bradfords chapter Mr. Morton of Merrymount from Of Plymouth Plantation and Nathaniel Hawthornes The Maypole of Merry Mount and between Jonathan Edwardss Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and Robert Lowells Mr. Edwards and the Spider. 3. Narratives of discovery expeditions are among the first European writings that deal with the New World, from the letters of Columbus to the writings of Cabeza de Vaca, Thomas Harriot John Smith, and William Bradford. These early writings helped set the tone for later works on travel, including Mary Rowlandsons Narrative of Captivity and Restoration; Sarah Kemble Knights The Private Journal of a Journey from Boston to New York; Olaudah Equianos Interesting Narrative; Walt Whitmans Crossing Brooklyn Ferry; Mark Twains Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Stephen Cranes The Open Boat; Robert Frosts Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening; Wallace Stevenss Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird; Jack Kerouacs Big Sur; and Robert Haydens Middle Passage. 4. Texts that deal with religious fervor, both from the Puritan days and from the Great Awakening, abound in American literature before 1820. From deeply religious works like Bradfords Of Plymouth Plantation and John Winthrops A Model of Christian Charity to more disturbing though no less religious displays such as Mary Rowlandsons Narrative of Captivity and Restoration and Cotton Mathers The Trial of Martha Carrier from The Wonders of the Invisible World, the period before 1700 was saturated with Calvinist faith. The Great Awakenings zeal prompted works like Phyllis Wheatleys On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield, 1770 and Thoughts on the Works of Providence as well as Jonathan Edwardss A Divine and Supernatural Light and Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. Other religious and spiritual writings for comparison include Ralph Waldo Emersons Nature and Brahma;Nathaniel Hawthornes Young Goodman Brown and The Ministers Black Veil; Mary Wilkins Freemans A New England Nun; T. S. Eliots Journey of the Magi and Burnt Norton; Robert Frosts Design; Robert
Lowells The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket; and Philip Roths Defender of the Faith. 5. The ideals of the Enlightenment, reason and sympathy, helped give rise to Thomas Paines Common Sense and The Crisis , Thomas Jeffersons Declaration of Independence, and Benjamin Franklins Autobiography. They shaped the founding fathers understandings of the world they lived in and laid the foundation for the independent nation the Revolution produced. Works that use Enlightenment ideals to represent the promise of the young nation include Crvecoeurs Letters to an American Farmer, Equianos Interesting Narrative, and the letters of John and Abigail Adams. Later works which interrogate that promise for its actual content of reason and sentiment include Nathaniel Hawthornes My Kinsman, Major Molineux; Frederick Douglasss What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?; W. E. B. Du Boiss The Souls of Black Folks; Paul Laurence Dunbars We Wear the Mask; Countee Cullens Incident; Carlos Bulosans Be American; Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man; and Robert Lowells For the Union Dead. 1820-1865 1. The period introduction for 18201865 notes the development of the American Renaissance as a way of describing those years in terms of literary nationalism. Some examples of works from these years that try to develop and represent a national character include Emersons The American Scholar and The Poet and Whitmans Song of Myself and Letter to Ralph Waldo Emerson. Any literary project attempting to adapt or cause a rebirth in such a national perspective depends on its earlier representations; in the same way, its success or failure will be borne out by what succeeding authors found helpful in their own works. For early attempts that helped form the beginnings of this national character, see those sections of William Bradfords Of Plymouth Plantation, which describe the voluntary Mayflower Compact; the efforts of Cotton Mather, The Wonders of the Invisible World , and Jonathan Edwards, A Divine and Supernatural Light , to distinguish the elect quality of what the colonists were doing; and the personal narratives of Benjamin Franklin, John Woolman, and Thomas Jefferson . For significant extensions and revisions in American literary nationalism after the Civil War, please see Emma Lazaruss The New Colossus , Sui Sin Fars In the Land of the Free , Ezra Pounds A Pact, Langston Hughess I, Too, Robert Lowells The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket, and Michael Harpers American History. 2. Part of the provisional quality of literary nationalism in the 1820s resulted from the repercussions of the American Revolution and authors attempts to make sense of the dramatic change from imperial colony to new nation. Some of the works from 18201865 depict characters coming to grips with sudden independence, including Washington Irvings Rip Van Winkle and Nathaniel Hawthornes My Kinsman, Major Molineux . After 1865, however, the Civil War seems to have joined the Revolution as a major historical challenge to work through as an American author. Some examples of Civil War retrospects include Walt Whitmans When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomd , Herman Melvilles The Portent , Stephen Cranes War is Kind , and Robert Lowells For the Union Dead.
3. One major development in American literature 18201865 is the expansion of the means to produce and the audience to read American novels, poems, newspapers, and magazines. The economics of making a living as a writer also enters into the literature of this time in works such as Emily Dickinsons [This is my letter to the World] and [Publication is the Auction] and Fanny Ferns Male Criticism on Ladies Books and Fresh Leaves, by Fanny Fern . By the Civil War the profession of the full-time author had become established, but before 1820 its beginnings can be traced in Anne Bradstreets The Author to her Book and Benjamin Franklins The Way to Wealth . Another interesting trajectory is the appearance of famous works in widely circulated pamphlet form, such as Thomas Paines Common Sense and Hamilton, Jay, and Madisons The Federalist , as compared with works that appeared in the new periodical medium, such as Margaret Fullers The Great Lawsuit and Edgar Allan Poes short stories The Tell-Tale Heart and The Fall of the House of Usher. 4. In Nature , Emerson proposes a radically different approach to the way people should interact with their environment. Many of the authors from 18201865 share an interest in charting a special relationship between American characters and the natural landscapes they inhabit, such as Washington Irvings Rip Van Winkle , Dickinsons [A Bird came down the Walk ] and [I dreaded that first Robin, so] , Poes The Raven , Hawthornes Young Goodman Brown , Whitmans Facing West from Californias Shores , and Henry David Thoreaus Walden (especially Where I Lived, and What I Lived For []). This special relationship has a long legacy beginning with John Smiths General History of Virginia and William Bradfords Of Plymouth Plantation , Sarah Kimble Knights The Private Journal of a Journey from Boston to New York , and Philip Freneaus The Wild Honeysuckle and On the Religion of Nature . Later efforts to link an American voice with a country setting include Sarah Orne Jewetts A Wild Heron , Willa Cathers Neighbor Rosicky , Robert Frosts After Apple Picking and Birches , Sylvia Plaths Blackberrying , and Jack Kerouacs Big Sur. 5. Emersonian Transcendentalism lent itself to many of the reform movements of the antebellum years; some of the best examples of works showing signs of his influence include Thoreaus Resistance to Civil Government and Fullers The Great Lawsuit . Emersons emphasis on the minds ability to rethink the way the world works is reminiscent of earlier American texts, whether spiritually based, like John Winthrops A Model of Christian Charity , or explicitly devoted to the emerging nation, like Jeffersons Declaration of Independence . Legacies of Emersons willingness to reject the status quo and use literature to argue for change extend into the present, from Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wall-Paper and Wallace Stevenss Sunday Morning to Alan Ginsbergs Howl and Adrienne Richs Diving into the Wreck 1865-1914 1. The most important literary theme of the 18651914 period introduction is the territorial and population expansion and transformation of America during these years. In The
Significance of the Frontier in American History, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner argues that the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development. Texts from 18651914 that bear out Turners frontier hypothesis against a western setting include Mark Twains The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County; Bret Hartes The Luck of Roaring Camp; and Jack Londons To Build a Fire. Earlier texts that can help students trace the development of American assessments of frontiers, boundaries, and limits include sections of Rowlandsons A Narrative of Captivity and Restoration; Cotton Mathers A People of God in the Devils Territories from The Wonders of the Invisible World; Crvecoeurs Letter III (What Is an American) from Letters from an American Farmer; James Fenimore Coopers Last of the Mohicans; William Cullen Bryants The Prairies; and Walt Whitmans Facing West from Californias Shores. Hawthornes Young Goodman Brown and Henry David Thoreaus Where I Lived, and What I Loved For chapter of Walden both represent psychic or spiritual frontiers within already settled areas. Later texts in search of new frontier areas outside America include Katherine Anne Porters Flowering Judas; F. Scott Fitzgeralds Babylon Revisited; Ernest Hemingways The Snows of Kilimanjaro; Randall Jarrells Thinking of the Lost World; and Jack Kerouacs Big Sur. Raymond Carvers Cathedral and Adrienne Richs Snapshots of a DaughterinLaw also represent authors pushing against nonphysical frontiers in the form of blindness and sexism, respectively. 2. One aspect of Native American literature stressed by this section of the anthology is the elegiac tone of many of these writings, as white settlers displaced Native Americans from ancestral lands and disrupted their traditional ways of life. Native writings in the anthology that record this tone include Sarah Winnemuccas Life Among the Piutes and Zitkala as The SoftHearted Sioux. The excerpt from Helen Hunt Jacksons A Century of Dishonor records one white perspective sympathetic to Natives. But the anthology can help register the weight of Native loss by representing what they once had: begin with Iroquois and Pima Creation Stories and continue with the Native response to the initial contact and settlement of Europeans, including oratory by Pontiac, Samson Occam, Red Jacket, and Tecumseh in Native Americans: Contact and Conflict and continue with the records of Black Hawk, Petalesharo, and Elias Boudinot in Native Americans: Resistance and Removal. For contemporaneous white writers perspectives, see Cabeza de Vacas Relation; William Bradfords chapter Indian Relations in Of Plymouth Plantation; Benjamin Franklins Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America; Thomas Jeffersons Chief Logans Speech from Notes on the State of Virginia; and William Apesss An Indians LookingGlass for the White Man. For modern representations of Natives after the period of enforced dispersal to reservations, see Louise Erdrichs Fleur and Sherman Alexies At Navajo Monument Valley Tribal School and Do Not Go Gentle. 3. Much is made in the anthology of the public disagreement between the African American statesmen Booker T. Washington in Up from Slavery and W. E. B. Du Boiss Of Booker T. Washington and Others in The Souls of Black Folk. Within the
Americanization cluster appear further responses to Washington in Charles W. Chestnutts A Defamer of his Race and Anna Julia Coopers One Phase of American Literature. Cooper points out that both Washington and Du Bois concentrate exclusively on the black male perspective, but their female counterparts were often to be found in print discussing race as it pertains to womens bodies and experiences. Pauline Hopkinss Contending Forces is one such text from 18651914; others include Phillis Wheatleys On Being Brought from Africa to America and To S.M., a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works;Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl; Sojourner Truths I am a Womans Rights; Frances Harpers The Fugitives Wife and Bury Me in a Free Land; Zora Neale Hurstons How It Feels to Be Colored Me and The Gilded SixBits; Gwendolyn Brookss poems from A Street in Bronzeville; Lucille Cliftons miss rosie and homage to my hips; Audre Lordes Coal and The Woman Thing; Rita Doves Adolescence I and Banneker; and Toni Morrisons Recitatif. 4. The two major aesthetic movements of these years were realism and naturalism. Prose discussing both can be found in the Realism and Naturalism cluster, featuring work by William Dean Howells, Henry James, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London. Notable realist works in the anthology include Jamess Daisy Miller and The Real Thing; Edith Whartons The Other Two and Roman Fever; and Mark Twains Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Naturalist works include Stephen Cranes The Open Boat; Dreisers Sister Carrie; and Londons To Build a Fire. Realism had its roots in the romantic period, and comparisons to the heavy symbolism and idealistic narration of events can be instructive; take, for example, James Fenimore Coopers The Last of the Mohicans; Edgar Allan Poes The Fall of the House of Usher and The Black Cat; Herman Melvilles Benito Cereno; and Nathaniel Hawthornes Young Goodman Brown and The Ministers Black Veil. Legacies of both realism and naturalism persist into the twentieth century: Sherwood Andersons Winesburg, Ohio and Richard Wrights The Man Who was Almost a Man display influences of naturalist objectivity, and John Updikes Separating and Raymond Carvers Cathedral represent late embraces of realistic description. 5. Another development of this period was the use of local idioms and geographical references to create a regional perspective. Examples of regionalist writing include Mark Twains The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Kate Chopins Dsires Baby and The Awakening and Sarah Orne Jewetts A White Heron. Legacies of the regionalist attempt to map out literary spaces include Edwin Arlington Robinsons Luke Havergal and Richard Cory; Carl Sandburgs Chicago; Edgar Lee Masterss Spoon River Anthology; Robert Frosts Mending Wall and Birches; William Faulkners Barn Burning; Eudora Weltys Petrified Man; Flannery OConnors Good Country People; and Tennessee Williamss A Streetcar Named Desire. 1914-1945 1. The literature of this period grappled with the rapid modernization of American society, with its technological innovations and the changes it brought for good or ill to everyday
life. Literature from between the world wars that dealt, often antagonistically, with technology includes Robert Frosts Out, Out; Ezra Pounds In a Station of the Metro; T. S. Eliots Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land; and Carl Sandburgs Chicago. Earlier works that had retreated before encroaching science and technology include Nathaniel Hawthornes The Birth Mark; Henry David Thoreaus Walden; and Stephen Cranes The Open Boat. Later works that continue to react to the inhuman effects of some technological advances are Allen Ginsbergs Howl; Thomas Pynchons Entropy; and Sherman Alexies Do Not Go Gentle. 2. Two hallmarks of modernist writing are difficulty and ambition; the harder the text, the less instructive or persuasive one would expect it to be, though some authors did not accept that. Examples of works that expected a mass following despite the elite readership they were guaranteed by their difficulty are T. S. Eliots Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and The Waste Land; Ezra Pounds Cantos; Wallace Stevenss Of Modern Poetry; Jean Toomers Cane; Marianne Moores Poetry; Hart Cranes Voyages; and William Faulkners Barn Burning. Later works that take up the challenge of modernist difficulty include Allen Ginsbergs Howl; Ralph Ellisons Invisible Man; John Ashberys Illustrations; and Jorie Grahams At Luca Signorellis Resurrection of the Body. 3. The Harlem Renaissance marked a full flowering of African American writing. Prompted by the personal encouragement of W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as by his Souls of Black Folk; Harlembased artists like the poets Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Claude McKay, and Countee Cullen employed modernist formal and thematic experimentation to represent the opportunities and characteristic features of Harlem. Zora Neale Hurstons How It Feels to Be Colored Me signals an extreme artistic focus, possibly at the expense of social awareness and activism; Hurston was taken to task, for example, by Richard Wright for her stylistic excesses in The Man Who Was Almost a Man, which makes a good counterpoint to her short essay. Earlier texts with affinities to the Harlem Renaissances preoccupations include Olaudah Equianos Interesting Narrative and the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, both of which testify to their authors desires to think of themselves as Enlightenment persons as well as African Americans; and Frederick Douglasss Narrative of the Life ; Harriet Jacobss Incidents in the Life; Booker T. Washingtons Up from Slavery; and Paul Laurence Dunbars poetry, which all shared the Harlem Renaissances mostly white audience looking for exoticism and a chance to judge African Americans. Fruitful pairings of Harlem Renaissance works with later pieces include Hughess The Negro Speaks of Rivers with Lucille Cliftons the mississippi river empties into the gulf; Hughess The Weary Blues with Robert Haydens Homage to the Empress of the Blues; and Hurstons How It Feels to Be Colored Me with Rita Doves Adolescence I and II. 4. Between the wars, American drama comes of age as a genre, thanks in large part to the efforts of Susan Glaspell (Trifles) and Eugene ONeill (Long Days Journey into Night) to promote independent theater away from the lights of Broadway. Later plays that show the influences of these two playwrights include Tennessee Williamss A Streetcar Named Desire and Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman.
5. Since this part of the anthology is heavily informed by two massive military conflicts, instructive comparisons can be made to writings from other wars throughout American history. Works from 1914 to 1945 that make such references include T. S. Eliots Gerontion and The Waste Land; Ernest Hemingways The Snows of Kilimanjaro; and Faulkners Barn Burning. More explicit works from before and after the modernist period include Mary Rowlandsons account of King Philips War in her Narrative; Walt Whitmans Cavalry Crossing a Ford and The Wound-Dresser; Stephen Cranes The Black Riders and War Is Kind; Philip Roths Defender of the Faith; and Randall Jarrells The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.
SINCE 1945 1. After World War II, America turned outward politically but inward culturally; new ideals of conformity and homogeneity developed that are best seen in works that argue against that conformity, like Arthur Millers Death of a Salesman; Saul Bellows Adventures of Augie March; Allen Ginsbergs Howl; and Philip Roths Defender of the Faith. Other works of nonconformity and rebellion against convention throughout American literature include William Bradfords Of Plymouth Plantation (in which the Pilgrims record their reasons for sailing from England); Jonathan Edwardss Personal Narrative; Henry David Thoreaus Resistance to Civil Government; Herman Melvilles Bartleby, the Scrivener; Henry Jamess Daisy Miller; Mark Twains Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Edwin Arlington Robinsons Miniver Cheevy; and William Faulkners Barn Burning. 2. One interesting feature of postwar literature is the theme of crosscultural mixtures and hybrid perspectives that result from globalized contemporary life. Works like Jhumpa Lahiris Sexy; Rita Doves Parsley; Gloria Anzaldas How to Tame a Wild Tongue; and LiYoung Lees Persimmons all have to do with translations of customs or language from another culture into American English. The vexed issue of translation has been part of the American tradition from its inception: see Cabeza de Vacas and Thomas Harriots descriptions of Native orature; and Roger Williamss A Key into the Language of America. 3. A major shift in American literature after World War II was the inclusion of new immigrant voices in the spectrum of national perspectives. Examples of works that maintain ties to a previous culture while establishing links to America include Sandra Cisneross Woman Hollering Creek; Cathy Songs The White Porch and Lost Sister; Maxine Hong Kingstons No Name Woman; and Jhumpa Lahiris Sexy. But the process of naturalization and the salvaging of ethnic identity were not always accepted by the majority of Americans. The best place to start examining the nations growing pains is the Americanization cluster in the 18651914 section of the anthology, especially in Twenty Years at Hull-House by Jane Addamsand Jose Marts Our America. Other works that deal with the inclusion or exclusion of minority groups include William Bradfords Dealings with the Natives and The First Thanksgiving from Of Plymouth
Plantation; Philip Freneaus An Indian Burying Ground; Henry Wadsworth Longfellows Jewish Cemetery at Newport; Emma Lazaruss In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport and The New Colossus; and Carlos Bulosans Be American. 4. The publication in the late 1950s of poetry in the confessional mode helped authors break some conventions of formality and universality in the lyric voice in favor of an autobiographical intensity. Examples of confessional poets include Allen Ginsberg; Robert Lowell; Sylvia Plath; and Anne Sexton. Earlier works that allowed for more individual expression include John Woolmans Journal; Thomas Jeffersons Autobiography; Benjamin Franklins Autobiography; the slave narratives of Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass; Walt Whitmans Song of Myself; and the slightly fictionalized autobiographical accounts in Charlotte Perkins Gilmans The Yellow Wall-Paper and Ernest Hemingways The Snows of Kilimanjaro. W.W.Norton & Company