2000 B.C. to A.D. 1620

500 Native American Languages

Different religious beliefs, political systems, and social values

Native American pottery mask 1000-800 B.C.

No written language – Oral Tradition

Native Americans typically believed that man and nature were part of a sacred whole. Man was believed to have a dual nature (Good/Evil).

Example: “The World on the Turtle’s Back” (Iroquois)

Lance Head 1500-1000 B.C.

Columbus’ Journal Epistola 1493

Of Plymouth Plantation, by William Bradford, recorded the history of the Plymouth colony pilgrims.

The General History of Virginia by Capt. John Smith is notoriously full of romantic embellishments.

Puritan sterling tea set

Africans in the New World European slave trade started by Portugal in the 1400s

Africans brought to West Indies to work on vast Spanish sugar plantations

1619 Jamestown, Virginia indentured servants

Silver pendant – slave era African American burial ground artifact

First printing press, free public grammar schools, Harvard College

Massachusetts Bay Colony Gov. John Winthrop saw his colony as “A city on a hill,” a Christian colony and example to the world of God’s love.

Puritan gravestone

Puritan Beliefs Original Sin (Nature of Man is Evil)

Salvation through grace

Calvinism

Bible is supreme authority on Earth

Puritan newspaper article reporting the execution of witches 1682

1620-1800

John Locke’s “natural laws” convinced colonists that they had rights that no king could deny

The Bible – God’s authority over government

Anti-Slavery Movement led by Puritans and others

The Declaration of Independence by John Trumbull 1786

U.S. Government policy was to convert Native Americans to Christianity and assimilate them.

Seneca Chief Red Jacket led resistance to assimilation

1830 Indian Removal Act forced resistant Native Americans west, eventually onto reservations.

Although man must struggle to overcome evil nature, social contracts could result in workable, free society

Native American curved sinew-backed bow with twisted sinew drawstring

Reaction to 1700’s Rationalism and Puritanism

Emphasized the “Limitations of Reason”

Celebrated individual spirit, emotions, imagination

Inspired by nature, some fascinated with the supernatural

Rejected traditional faith and reason

Autumn on the Hudson River by Jasper Cropsey (1823-1900)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Washington Irving (“Rip Van Winkle”) most popular American writers

Romanticism characterized by a preoccupation with atmosphere, sentiment, and optimism

Saw the nature of man as good

Rio de Luz by Frederic E. Church (1826-1900

Derived partly from German Romanticism

“Transcendent Forms” of truth exist beyond reason and experience

Ralph Waldo Emerson: Every individual can discover this higher truth through intuition

Nature of man is good; everyone defines good and evil for himself or herself

Sunday Morning on the Hudson River (1827) by Thomas Cole

Henry David Thoreau was Emerson’s friend and colleague who left society for a time to live in the wilderness, where he wrote Walden, a collection of essays.

Encouraged removing oneself from society, poverty, and isolation as means of finding divine truth.

Notch of the White Mountains by Thomas Cole (1801-1848

Gothic literature is characterized by weird settings and macabre plots.

Purpose was to reveal man’s capacity for evil.

Rejected Transcendental and Romantic views, sometimes attacking them directly.

Gothic glassware 1840’s

Examples of Gothicism Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein 1818

Bram Stoker’s Dracula 1897

Edgar Allan Poe

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption, Covington, Kentucky started in 1894, never completed.

Examples of Gothicism (continued) Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow”

Herman Melville’s Moby Dick

(contemporary example) Anne Rice

Tavern on the Green, New York 1800’s, originally a sheephold

Inspired partly by Gothic architecture of Middle Ages (400-1500 A.D.) Cavernous Gothic Cathedrals

Gargoyles

La Collégiale church in Germany, completed 1442

Characterized by “imaginative distortion of reality.”

Fascinated with fantastic, demonic, and insane.

Gothic works often have an overtly religious element, such as in Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

First Church, Boston 1868

Author Study: Edgar Allan Poe 1841 “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”

1845 “The Raven”

Experienced much loss in his own life; often wrote about isolation leading to insanity.

Reputation for alcoholism and drug abuse started by unauthorized biography, probably false.

Edgar Allan Poe

Replaced Romanticism as the dominant literary style

Truthful accounts of ordinary life, rather than the sentimentality of much romantic fiction.

Local-color Realism – Mark Twain (region-specific)

The Cello Player by Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins1896 Oil on canvas

Author Study: Mark Twain Samuel Langhorne Clemens

“The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” was his first short story

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer

Life on the Mississippi

Offshoot of Realism – also uses typical people in realistic situations.

Adds a new element: Outside forces are seen as controlling one’s fate, rather than free will.

Stephen Crane

The Women’s Movement – University education for women

1890’s Emily Dickinson

Charlotte Perkins Gilman – “The Yellow Wallpaper”

Kate Chopin – The Awakening

The Night Wind by Charles Burchfield 1918

Author Study: Emily Dickinson

Published 1,775 poems – but virtually unknown in her lifetime.

Much of her poetry reflects her religious speculation and doubt.

She lived in seclusion for almost twenty years, beginning in her thirties.

Of the 1,775 poems she wrote, only seven were published while she was alive.

Unprecedented period of literacy, musical, and artistic production among African Americans that reached its peak in the 1920’s.

Centered in the Harlem section of Manhattan in New York City

The Cotton Club Louis Armstrong

Duke Ellington

Louis Armstrong

Langston Hughes’ The Weary Blues 1925 Praised “Blackness”

Embraced common people as his subjects

Blended elements of blues and jazz into his work

Zora Neale Hurston published stories, novels, essays, and folklore collections

revealing a love of black language and manners.

• Historical Context• World War I

• The Roaring Twenties

• Modernism was a direct response to these social and cultural changes

Modernists were disillusioned by the war.

Appalled by “materialism” of the age

Ezra Pound – “Make it new!”

Modernists feared that individuals, especially artists, were threatened by “mass society”

Carnival by Arthur Dove 1935, Oil and metallic paint on canvas

Characters in a modern work are almost always alienated, withdrawn, unresponsive, hurt by unnamed forces. Like Naturalism, outside forces control fate, but modernists often named the force: corrupt, fractured American society

White Shapes on Blue Background by IlyaBolotowsky, ca. 1939, Oil on canvas

Modernists’ Experimentation in Writing: Katherine Anne Porter – Stream of Consciousness

Ernest Hemingway and Richard Wright – fragmentation

Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot – fragmented poetry

The Little Lake by Joseph Stella ca. 1927

Modern Visual Artists Picasso

Matisse

Duchamp

Cubism, cutouts, collages Untitled collage by Ann Ryan (1889-1954)

Girl with Mandolin by Pablo Picasso (cubism) 1910 Matisse cutout

Modernists Notable for What They Leave Out No narrative voice with explanations, details

Implied Themes, rather than stated

Reader must piece together the story from fragments. Fragmentation in literature or art symbolized a fragmented American society.

Figure by Alexander Archipenko 1917

Author Study: Robert Frost Most Popular American Poet

North of Boston includes the poem “Mending Wall”

1924 Pulitzer Prize for New Hampshire, a collection of poems. He would win three more in his career.

Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird

J.D. Sallinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar depicted American society as insane.

Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five presented anti-war themes through satire.

Kurt Vonnegut

Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man revealed racial tension in U.S.

Flannery O’Connor’s and Catherine Anne Porter’s short fiction dealt with Christianity, religious doubt, and the search for truth in a nuclear age.

Campbell’s Soup Can by Andy Warhol 1961

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye critiques America’s idea of beauty influenced by racism.

Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses explores isolation and the evil of man.

Don DeLillo’s Falling Man explores mass media and American perceptions of terrorism.

Surreal by Marcus A. Jansen 2009

Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club portrays immigrant life in the U.S.

Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried is a collection of stories from the Vietnam War.

Fading Away by Luis Cornejo

Laura Hillenbrand (Seabiscuit, an American Legend, Unbroken) and Sebastian Junger (The Perfect Storm) are “contemporary historians” whose work is considered less “highbrow” but significant.