13.

19th century American Literature before the Civil War: Irving,

Cooper, Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Transcendentalists, Stowe,
slave narratives, etc.

1st Half of the 19th Century

Early 19th century

- growth of population
- expansion westward
- massive immigration (from Ireland, Scandinavia, western Europe + later Chinese in
California)
- rise of industrialization, railroad
- increasing number of newspapers
- slavery, race issues, abolitionist societies
 1831 – Nat Turner uprising
 1850 – Fugitive Slave Act
- movement for female rights
- literature (still) believed to have an educational and moral aspects
- American renaissance – something original, truly American
- there was no important movement until the end of 19 th century about important writers
who would influence the Europe
- until the 19th century everything was taken (copied) from Europe
- 1820s – 1860s (until the Civil War)
- a Romantic period in American literature
- American literature’s first achievement of literary excellence and establishment of a
classical American tradition in which European styles and standards were applied to
American subjects
- many authors experimented in style and developed themes important to American
identity and expression
- rising readership and literacy increase with development of industrial publishing
- 1820s – 1860s = period of national greatness and tragedy: the USA grew enormously,
expanding across North America via “Manifest Destiny,” generating and rising middle
 class in numerous new cities, falling into Civil War over slavery and reactionary
“Gilded Age” of rich-and-poor culture
- influence of European writers
 Gothic novel – Hawthorne, Poe
 English regional realism – women writers

Slave Narratives

- first-hand accounts of slave life

- some just very short, some book-length
- historically very accurate
- majority written in the 1830s, 1840s
- Sojourner Truth – abolitionist and women’s rights activist
- Frederick Douglass – Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave
(1845)
- Harriet Ann Jacobs – Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
- Booker T. Washington – Up from Slavery (1901)
- W. E. B. Du Bois (1868 – 1963) – first African-American to earn a Ph.D. from
Harvard University, The Souls of Black Folks (1903) – collection of essays

Washington Irving

- History of New York

 influenced by J. Swift
 parody
 made fun of Thomas Jefferson, provincial culture, American chauvinism
- for him:
 Europe = the past, poetry, eternal, mythical
 America = the new, moving forward, energy, spirit of the time, political hopes
and promises, beauty of landscape
- Rip Van Winkle, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
 tried to replant European myths and legends into the US
James Fenimore Cooper

- 1st important novelist

- explored the potential of the frontier for literature; meaning of American history;
nature of democracy, the results of US revolution (The Spy), critical
- invented for US literature the frontier novel, historical novel, sea novel (The Pilot),
novel of manners, dynastic novel, etc.
- The Leatherstocking Tales: The Pioneers, The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, The
Pathfinder, The Deerslayer

Edgar Allan Poe

- influenced by Scott, Byron, popular fads – mesmerism, Egyptology (curses), gothic

novel
- poems, tales, prose romance, critical essays (Eureka)
- did not imitate European novels and tales of horror
- focused on the psychic life and its fragmentation
 split between reason and imagination
 consciousness and unconsciousness
- did not reject familiar gothic devices
- originality: preoccupied by the connection of the state of terror with abstract ideas,
symbolic of mental or spiritual condition of heroes
- darkly metaphysical vision mixed with elements of realism, parody, irony
- refined the short story genre and invented detective fiction; many of his stories
prefigure the genres of science fiction, horror and fantasy
- stories and poems are populated with doomed, introspective aristocrats – these
characters never seem to work or socialize; instead they bury themselves in dark
- rhyme very musical and strictly metrical
- explores psyche
- described the underside of the American dream of the self-made man and showed the
price of materialism and excessive competition – loneliness, alienation and images of
death-in-life
- important contributions to American literature:
 short story
 o characters in unusual situations, the object of horror not present →
reader must use imagination
o modern detective story – realistic, simple style; brilliant detective
 literary criticism
o wrote reviews for the Southern Literary Messenger, others criticized
him for his cold almost mathematical approach
 poetry
o the sound more important than the content
o goal of poetry is “pleasure, not truth” (pleasure ≠ happiness)
- Tamerlane and Other Poems
- The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
- around 1840s – best tales: Ligeia, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Tell-Tale
Heart, The Pit and the Pendulum → horror comes from within

Poe’s Influence

- theory of superior insight → influenced Shaw and Nietzsche

- interest in criminal psychology → influenced Dostoyevsky
- description of “detection” → influenced Doyle and Stevenson
- French symbolists
- sharp contrast to the Transcendentalists
- romantic agony, alienation between art and nature

Catherine Maria Sedgewick

- similar concerns as Cooper, anti-sentimental

Lydia Maria Child

- abolitionist – An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans (1833)

- against the bad treatment of Native Americans – An Appeal for the Indians (1868)
- Hobomok: A Tale of Early Times (1824, novel)
Nathaniel Hawthorne

- romanticism; moral tales with symbolism

- short stories, novels – “romances”
- grew up in Salem, Massachusetts
- joined the transcendentalist Utopian community at Brook Farm (only shortly)
- friends with Herman Melville (Moby Dick)
- themes:
 interpretation of (Puritan) past
 individual vs. society
 danger of isolation
 impossibility of earthy perfection
 obsession, guilt, evil
- The Birthmark, Twice-Told Tales. Moses from an Old Manse
- The Scarlet Letter (1850) – indictment of Puritan America
- The House of the Seven Gables – about Salem and the burden of guilt

Herman Melville

- forced to make living early – worked on ships → exposed to brutal working conditions
- identified with slaves and native people
- Typee
- White-Jacket
- Moby-Dick (1851) – fusing fact and symbol; whale hunting as mythic quest

Harriet Beecher Stowe

- Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) – anti-slavery (abolitionist), sentimental

Gilded Age

- 1865 – 1912
- boom times of vulgarity, specious glitter, superficial glow
- industrialization, secularism
The Brahmin Poets

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 very popular in his time, wrote mostly lyric poetry, also poems with didactic
elements, mostly impersonal
 also translator (translated Dante)
 Evangeline (1847)
o a book-length epic poem about the historical event of expulsion
(deportation) of Acadians from Nova Scotia (18 th century) by New
Englanders and the British
o story of lovers separated by the deportation and seeking one another all
their lives
 The Song of Hiawatha – a long poem loosely based on Native American
mythology and also Norse legends
 The Courtship of Miles Standish and Other Poems
- John Greenleaf Whittier
 most active poet of the period
 journalist, abolitionist (founding member of the American Anti-Slavery
Society)
 anti-slavery poems
 poems with regional realistic focus

Transcendentalism

- movement of 1830s – 1840s

- centered in New England (Harvard)
- reaction to Enlightenment – accepted its optimism, but refused its rationalism
- influence of Puritanism, Unitarianism, Romanticism, German idealist philosophy
- you can have greater spiritual experience in nature than in church
- every person has something good inside of them
- against 18th century rationalism and a manifestation of the general humanitarian trend
of 19th century
- belief to the unity of the world and God
 - individual’s soul was identical with the world
- self-reliance and individualism
- connected with Concord, New England
- human nature as divine, idea of self-improvement, religion as natural and rational
- ethics:
 self-reliance – individualism = better society
 simple living
 love: friendship, spiritual love, love to God = to humanity
 anti-slavery
- poet = prophet

Features

- spiritual, philosophical, literary

- philosophical aspects:
 human nature is divine, individual is the spirit center of the universe
 idea of self-improvement, idea of Over-Soul
 universe as beautiful whole, importance of intuition
 doctrine of correspondence: spiritual parallels the natural (“knowing yourself”
= “studying nature”)
- ethics:
 self-reliance, individualism leads to better society
 simple living, “practical religion”
 love = physical; friendship, spiritual love
 love to God = to humanity
 abolitionist rights of women, educational reform
 emphasis on free conscience
- aesthetics:
 valued art as instrument of spiritual growth
 idea of poet as prophet
 inspired artist is more effective than a preacher
 genius over tradition
Ralph Waldo Emerson

- chief spokesman for transcendentalism

- lecturer
- refused ceremonies of church – preferred individual firsthand experience of God
- defined traditional American values:
 self-reliance
 individual authority, individual responsibility
 resolute optimism
 moral idealism
 worshipful return to nature
- Nature (1836)
- nature as a picture of the internal world of every human being

Henry David Thoreau

- acquainted with R. W. Emerson

- ecologist movement
- against materialistic society
- did not focus on the style of his works – usually straightforward
- ‘Civil Disobedience’ (moral necessity for the just individual to disobey unjust laws)
- Walden (1854)
- Civil Disobedience

Margaret Fuller

- Woman in the 19th Century (1845) – role of a woman in the society, suggest an ideal
society
- social, political, and utopian reforms