Colonial Era

Early Republic

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  The shift from a biblical reading of the world – Puritan typology – towards a thinking of the world as something that was to be created here and now led to one of the first important secular texts of the American enlightenment and the first major project of the self-determined individual
  
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  considered the first self-made man in American history
  
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  Partly of this is due to his biography: moving from Puritan Boston to secular and cosmopolitan Philadelphia and finally to Europe finally
  
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  from being a printer’s apprentice to diplomat
  
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  Franklin believed that to be an American was defined by “to do”: “You are what you do or achieve.”
  
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  for the colonies it is not important where a man comes from, to which class or rank he belonged, but what he is capable to DO.
  
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  Franklin combines inventiveness and workmanship, business sense and learnedness  emblem of a universal genius!
  
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  his ability to acquire and perfect literary  made him one of the most influential writers
  
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  first publications  published anonymously, satires and essays (“Silence Dogood Papers” 1722)
  
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  pseudonym of the widow Silence Dogood  satirical mirror for colonial society
  
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  Anonymous: Poor Richard’s Almanach (1733-38)  very successful
  
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  The anonymous satire  to uncover and criticize current grievances
  
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  His Autobiography: sets forth the ideal of self-determination as a literary concept
  
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    text as medium for endeavor to realize the best of you
    
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  two goals: to serve posterity (Nachwelt) as example and instruction; to define writing as never-ending project to define one’s life
  
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  about the practical and continuous self-education within this world. The puritan “new adam” has evolved into a “self-made adam”, taking his destiny in his own hands.
  
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  Franklin said in the voice of his “poor Richard”: “Help yourself, then help you God.”
  
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  second goal: taking your own life as work in process.
  
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    text serves as reflection of your experience, accounts for your achievements with the aim of constantly optimizing and perfecting your self-image
    
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  This self-made man then basically is a book-made self, a textually created self
  

Explain Thomas Paine's enlightened notion of "common sense". Think about style, function, and address of his work as well as his philosophical-political theory.

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  Addressed to the Inhabitants of America, written in the crucial year of 1776, the year of actual independence
  
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  claims to offer “nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common sense.”
  
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  Popular due to simple and direct style that even common people could easily understand and relate to
  
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  American cause as example for the world to reject England’s crown and thus England’s tyranny
  
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    destroyed the natural order of society
    
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    brutal crimes on American soil committed by British severed existing political ties to Americans
    
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  offers reforms: the declaration of Independence being the only solution, necessity of republican form of government  grant all citizens equality before the law
  
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  Paine’s rhetoric is of Enlightenment, but it is also one of agitation: it forces decisions and results, it wants demarcations and agency. His militant rhetoric confirms America as model of success apart from British influence and he fiercely opposes monarchy with arguments taken from nature and based on human reason and god’s will.
  

What is the basic distinction between novel and romance in early American fiction? Give examples.

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  The European tradition of the novel as the genre of extended prose fiction is rooted in the tradition of medieval “romances”
  
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  Even today, most European languages make that clear by using the word roman roughly the way that English uses the word novel. The word novel claims roots in the European novella.
  
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    Yet, epic length or the focus on a central hero giving the work its name (as in Robinson Crusoe or Oliver Twist) are features derived from the tradition of “romances”
    
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  The word roman or romance had become a stable generic term by the beginning of the 13th century, as in the Roman de la Rose (c. 1230), famous today in English through Geoffrey Chaucer's late 14th-century translation. The term linked fictions back to the histories that had appeared in the Romance language of 11th and 12th-century France.
  
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  The early modern genre conflict between “novels” and “romances” can be traced back to the 14th-century cycles  showed advantages over the production of rival extended epic-length romances.
  
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    They attacked each other if they felt the stories of their opponents had missed their points  competition among the genres developed
    
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  rise of the word “novel” at the cost of the rivaling “romance” remained a Spanish and English phenomenon
  
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  For readers all over western Europe: novel(la) or short history was an alternative in the second half of the 17th century
  
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  by mid-18th century: probably market had developed two terms: "romance" as the generic term, "novel" as the term for the fashionable production that focused on modern life.
  
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  late 18th-century: "romantic" movement's readiness to reclaim the word "romance" as term for explicitly strange and distant fictional settings
  
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    "romance" was eventually restricted to love stories in the course of the 19th century
    
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  “Novels” from the 18^th century on  works of realism, centering the new class of the bourgeoisie and featuring distinctly Enlightenment ethics
  
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    clearly educational and moralistic agenda
    
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    Problem: depicted experiences that were to be representative for the reader, were actually fictionalized experiences.  until today, accounts for the genre’s appeal
    

Why was reading novels considered dangerous by many in early America?

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  reader cannot distinguish between reality and fiction
  
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  if the novel has a pedagogical program: warning against evil can only be presented by actual showing and telling à fatal logic: vice and lack of reason – i.e. illicit sex and hot emotions, for example – are given a stage within the novel, and therefore the stage is open for the fascination with darkness.
  
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  contemporary reactions were skeptical/critical
  
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    Novel : triggering the imagination and moral corruption instead of education
    
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    mobilizes a strong sense of illusion and offers identification based on subjective experience
    
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    enlightened ideals had not so much a problem with emotions, but with the control of these emotions. Emotions were believed to be controllable, subject to human reason.
    
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    Especially the sentimental novel, the first major novel genre of the time, was a curious case, since it addresses the emotions of the readers directly and leaving it to the individual readers to handle those emotions.
    
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    dangerous potential: transgression of moral rules causing a self-satisfaction/gratification the reader  trigger for all the melodramatic forms until today
    
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    novel came into being as a product of the Enlightenment of the 18^th century  but from the start in conflict with ideals of Enlightenment exemplary moral experience of the novel could be misinterpreted due to its illusionary character
    
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    Thus, while the novel aimed at being moralistic and educational, there was a subversive potential for moral misbehavior. Taboos could be enacted on an imaginary plane.
    

What are the major characteristics of the sentimental novel? Choose an example to explain.

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  Examples:
  
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    Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple
    
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    Hannah Webster’s The Coquette
    
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  today: may seem to rely on unbearable sensationalism and to exhort exaggerated sentimentality or even to sport implausible narrative designs.
  
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  at that time: offered didactic comments on the problematic relationship between reason and emotions
  
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  Charlotte Temple addresses conflict between the moral ideal of virtue (innocence) and its destruction through inadequate and uncontrollable feelings
  
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    discrepancy shown as loss of guidance through seduction
    
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    loss of guidance  loss of fatherly authority: the father or the family in general loses influence.
    
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    Seduction through giving in to wrong feelings, triggered by “wrong” people
    

Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland: What genre does the text belong to? How does Brown employ the characteristics of that genre? (Give a brief description of Brown's text.)

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  All of Brown’s novels are situated on the borderline of normality and pathology
  
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  best-known novel :Wieland  plot is highly sensational (about a serial killer), highly mysterious
  
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    people hear voices without any physical presence of speakers
    
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  Typical for sentimental novel: virtuous heroine  very much enlightened, reader experiences loss of reason and gliding into madness/the inexplicable through her perspective
  
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  Brown is deeply skeptical of rationalism and empirics  criticizes the most important capacities praised by the proponents of Enlightenment
  
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  sets the stage for the emergence of the American literature of half a century later (Poe and Hawthorne)
  
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  implicitly starts to mark the difference between novel and romance
  
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    novel – as in sentimental novel – is grounded on a realist approach  what happens is depicted in realistic fashion
    
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    romance – as in the gothic romance – grounds in the unrealistic representation: the supernatural and inexplicable is at the center, closer to the subconscious and irrational, to passion and perversity, to repression and sexuality.
    

What is Washington Irving's claim to fame regarding the development of American literature?

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  first American writer who could actually make a living from writing
  
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  satirical and humorous  parody and self-parody (fictive historiography: The History of New York, from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty (1809)  supposedly written by an imaginary person, Diedrich Knickerbocker, an old New Yorker of Dutch descent)
  
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    parodies the tradition of writing history as well as the historian (himself) as author
    
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    highly eccentric and highly unreliable narrator of so-called high culture in America.
    
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  later: essays and sketches  no fixed boundary between description of his subject and his reflection about it
  
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  Irving’s two best-known tales
  
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    “Rip van Winkle”: blurring the boundaries of historical facts and imaginative dream-world, hero sleeps through the American Revolution  most important event of American History, doesn’t act. Irony through Rip’s characterization as a no-good  represents nostalgic transfiguration of a pre-revolutionary past.
    
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      Rip: represents old Dutch colonial power but also representative of a generation who has lost its identity (doesn’t fit into present world)
      
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      Aestheticized American landscape
      
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      Ambivalent interpretations: on the one hand loss of old values and ideals are bemoaned, when read as satire, however, Rip becomes a caricature
      
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    “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”: inspired by a German folktale  headless horseman searches for his lost head killing everyone who obstructs his plan. Here the horseman is turned into the ghost of a Hessian trooper who had his head shot off during a battle of the American Revolutionary War.
    
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  plays out his artistic fantasy
  
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  are praised as the founding pieces of the American short story
  
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  the shorter prose that existed before did not have that kind of fictional character
  
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  not pedagogical essays, folk tales, but a separate, distinct and new genre (also formally)
  
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  setting is American but themes are taken from European models (German and English) legends, fairy tales and folk tales.
  
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  Contrary to the earlier History of New York, these texts are clearly heading towards Romanticism
  
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    sentimental rhetoric (even though making fun of it at the same time)
    
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    romantic interest in landscape, folklore and the past
    
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    Unlike Brockden Brown  uses an easy, ironic tone and even though dreams are the central motive, Irving’s tales are not so much written in a gothic manner
    
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    American history is the raw material for fantastic stories  story reflects its own cultural situation. This play between reality and fantasy will lead to later romantic literature
    
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    created a fictional territory between national historiography and fantastic fiction that Hawthorne later will call “neutral ground”  “neutral” because of its absence from pedagogy, no didactic agenda like in sentimental novel. And with this aesthetic claim Irving is a pioneer for Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville.