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American Novels, Poetry, Short Stories - Coggle Diagram

- - - - classic study
      - Analyses and defines what literature was back then
        
        special focus on 1850 - 1855
        
        AUthors
        
        Emerson
        
        Hawthorne
        
        Melville
        
        Thoreau
        
        Whitman
        
        Works that express American perspectives.
      - American literature and culture had "com[e] to its first maturity and had affirm[ed] its rightful heritage in the whole expanse of art and culture. ... You might search all the rest of American literature without being able to collect a group of books equal to these in imaginative vitality
      - production of an American literature of world standard..
      - The one common denominator of my five writers, uniting even Hawthorne and Whitman, was their devotion to the possibilities of democracy
      - Illuminates and underscores Principles of liberal Democracy and individualism, because the American system left room for this kind of descent and for the flowering of oppositional artistic creativity
      - changes in Anthologies, in Collections in literature in 80s and 90s
      - huge impact on scholarship, on public perception and students, accepted until 1970s and 80s
        
        focus on "great writers"
        
        white/male canon
        
        -> small canon of American masterworks-influential until 1970s/1980s
    - - left out writers like
        
        Frederick Douglass, Narrative
        
        Susan Warner
        
        Harriet Beecher Stowe
        
        Frances Harper
        
        Maria Cummins
        
        Harriet Jacobs, incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.. etc
        
        Native American writers
        
        Black writers
      - Canon Revision 1980s/1990s - new canon/revisionist canon
        
        more women writers
        
        more ethic writers
        
        more texts outside traditions, forms/genres
- - - - The Power of Sympathy, or , The Triumph of Nature (1789)
      - BEGIN OF THE AMERICAN NOVEL
    - - Susanna Haswell Rowson
    - - Charles Brockden Brown
    - - Henry Hugh Brackenridge
- - - - novel used in the context of cultural nationalism
  - - - The Pioneers (1823)
      - The Last of the Mahicans
      - The Prairie
      - The PAthfinder
      - The Deerslayer
- - - - poet, journalist, editor, political essays
      - focus on nature
      - vastness of love
      - focus on nature, the city, technology and war for example
      - credited for an inauguration of a new American Poetry in both content and form
      - "The job of the poet was to resolve all the tongues into his own, the poet is the joiner, he sees how they join"
      - Leaves of Grass (1855)
        
        complex production history 1855-1892
        
        includes 12 poems, also the famous "Song of Myself"
        
        preface
        
        poetological statement
        
        literary and cultural nationalism
        
        "The Americans of all nations at any time upon the earth have probably the fullest poetical nature. The united States themselves are essentially the greatest poem
        
        poet as bard = prophet of democracy
        
        Major features
        
        democracy = best political system for individual
        
        central aspects: democracy and individualism
        
        structural aspects and language/register - innovation (free form/verse, vernacular; catalogues)
        
        autobiographical dimensions & body
        
        central symbol - grass
        
        language that emerges from America and is not brought in from the outside or determined by traditional or foreign conventions
        
        expression of democracy and emphasises the poetic imagination
        
        Whitman is a major innovator and precursor of many works to come
      - No Author was on the title page, the poet was seen as the "MEDIUM" (of divine Energy)
- - - - Wealthy
      - Served as a Minister to London and Spain
      - Travelled in Europe
      - Conservative
      - International
      - High diplomatic positions
      - He was widely read in Europ. Literatures and Romanicizm and folklore, important for his Americanization of European legends and stories.
      - center
        
        Romantic writing
        
        Regional materials and local speech > local color/regionalism
        
        international
        
        professionalization
        
        turns to common people and presents nature as grand and impressive
        
        is interested in regional Materials and stories from particular American areas
        
        use of local speech
      - first American author of international fame
        
        first American writer who is able to make a living of his writing
      - strong contrast to Frankllin
        
        idleness against the hectic of the work ethic
      - ultimately a critical perspective on America
      - "Rip Van Winkle"
        
        Idle man, who enjoys the local pub and tries to escape the tyranny of his wife. During one of his hunting trips, he encounters an old men with dutch fashion. They arrive at a strange scene. People playing bowling, he had a few drinks in their company and falls asleep. .
        
        He returns to the village and realizes changes. His dog is gone, his gun has become rusty. His wife has died and the house has decayed. The portrait of king George III has been replaced by a portrait of George Washington. Rip has missed revolution and independence. He is firstly disoriented and at first unable to adjust to the new Circumstances
        
        Rip spends the rest of his life with his now married daughter, but unmolested because of his own age and no more tyrrany of his wife.
        
        he becomes a remnant of the past
        
        personification of a chronical of the old times before the war
        
        source: German legend Barbaross; Peter Klaus; fairy taly
        
        magic sleep -> Americanization
        
        Authenticity vs. fiction
        
        Tale
        
        Journey
        
        Time
        
        Identity
        
        'old' Dutch village > new American, Yankee ways: critique
        
        Psychological reading > prototype
      - movements TOWARDS short stories
  - - - remained popular in America, even after decline in England and after the Revolution
- - - - too exzessive imagination
      - at the same time a brilliant stylist and precursor of modernist literature and a master of the short story and poetry
  - - - The Philosophy of Composition
      - THe Poetic Principle
      - Analysis of Nathaniel Hawthornes work
    - - constructed effect
      - autonomy of art
      - the beautiful
      - anti-imitation/anti-mimesis
    - - Gothic horror
      - Imp of the perverse
      - grotesque
        
        Wolfgang Kaiser: "The juxtaposition of inharmonious parts"
      - world as enigma / tale of ratiocination
        
        acts of deciphering an enigma, acts of coming to terms with a "world that you do not understand"
      - people returning from the dead, violent and lusty aristocrats and innocent young madens
      - short story important for:
        
        local color writing, women's writing