BLUEBOOK EXTRACT BY WOMBAT 1. The Beginnings: BACKGROUND: Mayflower (1620) => Plymouth Arbella (1630) => Massachusetts Bay Colony Prosybetarians vs Congregationalists (American) POETRY: Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672) Michael Wigglesworth (1631-1705) - The Day of Doom (1622) Edward Taylor (1645?-1729) CHRONICLES: William Bradford - Of Plymouth Plantation John Winthrop -Journal Cotton Mather -Magnalia Christi Americana Samuel Sewall -Diary Edward Johnson -Wonder-Working Providence NEXT GENERATION: Jonathan Edwards (the Great Awakening, Massachusetts) -Personal Narrative -Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God -Notes on the Apocalypse Benjamin Franklin (Age of Reason, Philadelphia) -A Dissertation on Liberty and Necessity, Pleasure and Pain (1725) -Poor Richard's Almanack -The Lighthouse Tragedy (poem) -Autobiography 2. Early American Fiction BACKGROUND: "The Copyright Law of 1790 protected him in this sense that his own works could not be reprinted without his permission and the subsequent remuneration. But it did not protect him from the competition of British of other foreign writers, since under the same law, their books could simply be reprinted in the United States without any compensation whatsoever. Thus an American publisher was more willing to make money by reprinting the works of a British writer with well-established reputation, whose books were likely to sell well, than to invest his money in the venture of launching a native author." AUTHORS: Francis Hopkinson -A Pretty Story (1774) Jeremy Belknap -The Foresters (1792) William Hill Brown -The Power of Sympathy (1789) Susanna Rowson -Charlotte Temple (1791) Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810) -Wieland (1798) -Alcuin: A Dialogue (1798) Hugh Henry Brackenridge (1748-1816) -Modern Chivalry (appeared in six parts (1792-1815) Washington Irving (1783-1859) - New York, later was on a tour in Europe -9 essays for "Morning Chronicle" edited by his brother, Pete -Salmagundi (papers) -A History of New York from the Beginnings of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker -The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent (Rip Van Winkle, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow) -The Alhambra James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) - was in Europe in 1826 -Precaution (1820) -The Spy (1821) -The Pioneers -The Pilot (1824) -The Last of Mohicans (1826) -The Prairie (1827) -The Pathfinder (1840) -The Deer Slayer (1841) -Notions of the Americans: Picked up by a Travelling Bachelor (1828) -A Letter to His Countrymen (1834) -The American Democrat (1838) William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) -Series of Poems: “Tamerlain and Other Poems”, “Al Aoraaf”, “Tamerlain and Minor Poems”, “Raven” -Stories: “MS found in a Bottle”, “Bernice”, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, “Tales of Grotesque and Arabesque” (25 stories in total including “Liqueta” -Novel: “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” -Essays and reviews -Poe’s prototype of a detective story: “The Murder in the Rue Morgue”, “The Purlored Letter”, “Thou Art The Man” (C. Auguste Dupin) -“Tales” and “The Raven” (1845) -“Eureka: A Prose Poem” 3. Transcendentalism: Emerson and Thoreau BACKGROUND: `Transcendental Club` (The Dial magazine) AUTHORS: Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) -Nature (1836) -The American Scholar (1837) -Divinity School Address (1838) -Self-Reliance (1841) -The Oversoul (1841) -The Poet (1844) -The Conduct of Life (1860) Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) -The Great Lawsuit: MAN versus MEN; WOMAN versus WOMEN (1843) Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) -Walden 4. Romantic Fiction: Hawthorne and Melville Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) -Twice-Told Tales (1837) -Moses from an Old Manse (1846) -The Snow Image (1851) -The Tanglewood Tales (1853) -Fanshawe -The Scarlet Letter (1850) -The House of the Seven Gables (1851) -The Blithedale Romabce (1852) -The Marble Faun (1860) -chosen short stories: -My Kinsman, Major Molineaux -Ethan Brand -Young Goodman Brown -Rappaccini's Daughter Herman Melville (1819-1891) -Typee (1846) -Omoo (1847) -Mardi (1849) -Redburn: His First Voyage (1849) -White Jacket (1850) -Moby Dick (1851) -Pierre (1852) -Israel Potter (1855) -The Piazza Tales (1856) -The Confidence-Man (1857) -Billy Bud (published 1924) -Poetry (written after deserted by audience:) -Battle-Pieces (1866, about the Civil War) -Clarel (1876, about a trip to Holy Land) -various other 5. Whitman and Dickinson Walt Whitman (1819-1892) -Leaves of Grass (First edition - 1855, eighth - 1889, last, nineth, so called "Death-Bed Edition" - 1891) -structure: a) inscriptions b) “Song of Myself” c) “Children of Adam” – hetero erotic d) “Calamus” – auto and homo erotic e) “Song of the Open Road” f) “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” g) “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” (Sea Drift) h) “Tears” (Sea Drift) i) “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” j) “The Dalince of the Easles” k) “Beconcilation” (Drum Taps – Civl War) l) “When Lilacs Are In Bloom” (Lincoln) m) “There was a Child Went Forth” (Autumn Rivulets) n) “Miracles” (Autumn Rivulets) o) “Passage to India” p) Whispers of Heavenly Poetry q) Songs of Parting Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) -wrote 1775 poems, which were properly printed in 1955 6. Mark Twain and the American Themes Mark Twain ) -Innocents Abroad (1869) -The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) -Life on Mississippi (1883) -The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) -Pudd'n Head Wilson (1894) -A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) -A Mysterious Stranger (1897-1900; started several times, never finished; grim and bitter in tone) 7. The Literary Art of Henry James Henry James (1843-1916) non fictional travel books: -Transatlantic Sketches (1875) -A Little Tour in France (1885) -English Hours (1905) narratives: -The American (1877) -Daisy Miller (1878) -The Portrait of a Lady (1881) -The Ambassadors (1903) -The Wings of the Dove (1902) -The Golden Bowl (1904) 8. From the Genteel Tradition to Naturalism William Dean Howells (1837-1920) -Criticism and Fiction (1891) -journalist (Ohio State Journal, Atlantic Monthly, Harper's Magazine) -wrote a biography of Lincoln -A Modern Instance (1882) -The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) -A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890) Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) - self-educated, joined the communist party in 1945, unhappy about not winning Nobel prize(1930) -Sister Carrie (1900) -Jennie Gerhardt (1911) -Trilogy of Desire: The Financier (1912), The Titan (1914), The Stoic (1947) -The Genius (1915) -An American Tragedy (1925) -Dreiser Looks at Russia (1928) -Tragic America (1931) -America Is Worth Saving (1941) -Notes on Life (unfinished, partially published in 1974) Hamlin Garland (1860-1940, Wisconsin); veritism -Main-Travelled Roads (1891) -Crumbling Idols (1894) Frank Norris (1870-1902) -McTeague (1899) -The Octopus (1901) -The Pit (1903) -Vandover and the Brute (1914, posthumous) Stephen Crane (1871-1900) -Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) -Red Badge of Courage (1895) -The Open Boat -covered Greco-Turkish and Spanish-Americans wars for New York Journal (started in 1897),died in Germany,Black Forest Jack London (1876-1916) -The Call of the Wild (1903) Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951, born in Minnesota, settled in NY), 1st American to win the Nobel prize in 1930 (Main Street) -Our Mr. Wrenn (1914) -Main Street (1920) -Babbitt (1922) -Arrowsmith (1925) -Elmer Gantry (1927) -Dodsworth (1929) Sherwood Anderson -Winesburg, Ohio (1919) John Steinbeck (1902-1968) - move from California to NY; Nobel prize in 1962 -Cup of Gold (1929) -The Pastures of Heaven (1932) -To a God Unknown (1933) -The Red Pony (1933) -Tortilla Flat (1935) - first major success -In Dubious Battle (1936) -Of Mice and Men (1937) -The Long Valley (1938) - a collection of short stories -The Grapes of Wrath (1939) -Cannery Row (1945) -The Pearl (1947) -East of Eden (1952) 9. Innovative Fiction Between the Two World Wars THE TWENTIES BACKGROUND: A variety of new styles and movements developed in Paris – fauvism, cubism, dada, and surrealism – which enriched and inspired artists working there. Among the Americans who stayed in Paris were the writers Gertrude Stein, Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passos, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the poets Ezra Pound, e.e.cummings, William Carlos Williams, Archibald MacLeish, Stephen Vincent Benet, Allen Tate and Hart Crane. Gertrude Stein -Three Lives (1909) -Tender Buttons (1914) - prose poems -The Making of Americans (1925) -The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1932) E.E. Cummings -The Enormous Room (1922) - about imprisonment by mistaken French after the war ended Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) - Nobel prize in 1954 -Three Stories and Ten Poems (1923) - short stories set in Paris -In Our Times (1925) - short stories set in Paris -The Sun Also Rises (1926) -A Farewell to Arms (1929) -Death in the Afternoon (1932) -For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) -Old Man and the Sea (1952) -A Moveable Feast (1962) - memoirs of Paris John Dos Passos (1896-1970) -One Man's Initiation (1920) -Three Soldiers (1921) -Manhattan Transfer (1925) -U.S.A trilogy: The Forty-Second Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), The Big Money (1936) -The Best Times - memoirs of Paris Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) -This Side of Paradise (1920) -The Beautiful and the Damned (1922) -The Great Gatsby (1925) -Tender is the Night (1934) -short stories: Bernice Bobs Her Hair, Winter Dreams, The Rich Boy, The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, Babylon Revisited -The Last Tycoon (1941) THE THIRTIES BACKGROUND: Great Depression (crash on Wall Street - 1929); Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) - playwright -The Cabala (1926) -The Bridge of San Louis Rey (1927) -The Ides of March (1948) -Heaven's My Destination (1934) - "depression novel", misadventures of devotee of Gandhi Henry Miller (his novels were officially considered pornographic and could not be published in the US until the 1950s) -Tropic for Cancer (1934) -Black Spring (1936) -Tropic for Capricorn (1939) Anais Nin (1903-1977) - recognised by feminist movement in 1960's -House of Incest (1936) - surrealist prose poem -Cities of Interior (1954) -A Spy in the House of Love (1954) -Diary Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) -Look Homeward, Angel (1935) -You Can't Go Home Again (1940) Nathaniel West (1903-1940) -The Dream Life of Balso Snell (1931) -Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) -The Day of the Locust (1939) William Faulkner (1897-1962) -Soldier's Pay (1926) -Mosquitoes (1927) -Sartoris (1929) -The Sound and the Fury (1929) -As I Lay, Dying (1930) -Light in August (1932) -Absalom, Absalom ! (1936) -The Wild Palms (1939) -Go Down, Moses (1942) -Intruder in the Dust (1948) -trilogy: The Hamlet (1940), The Town (1957), The Mansion (1959) -The Reivers (1962) 10. Post-War "Traditional" Fiction Saul Bellow (1915- ) - 1976: Nobel Prize -Dangling Man (1944) -The Victim (1947) -The Adventures of Augie March (1953) -Henderson the Rain King (1959) -Herzog (1964) -Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970) -Humboldt's Gift (1975) -The Dean's December (1982) -Mosby's Memoirs (1968) - collection of short stories -The Last Analysis (1965) - a play -To Jerusalem and Back (1976) - a record of his travel to Israel Philip Roth (1933- ) -Goodbye, Columbus (1959) - collection of short stories -Portnoy's Complaint (1969) -The Ghost Writer (1979) -Writing About Jews (1963) - essay -The Breast (1972) -The Great American Novel (1973) Bernard Malamud (1914- ) -The Natural (1952) - about baseball -The Assistant (1957) -The Fixer (1966) - National and Pulitzer awards -The Tennants (1971) -The Magic Barrel (1958) - stories -Idiots First (1963) - stories -Rembrandt's Hat (1973) - stories J.D.Salinger (1919- ) -The Catcher in the Rye (1951) William Wharton -Birdy (1979) -Dad (1981) -A Midnight Clear (1982) Jerzy Kosinski (1933- ) -Painted Bird (1965) - considered his best -Steps (1968) - National Book Award -Being There (1971) -Pinball (1982) William Styron (1925- ) - southerner, moved to New York -Lie Down in Darkness (1951) -The Long March (1952) -Set This House on Fire (1960) -The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) - not liked by blacks -Sophie's Choice (1979) Walker Percy (1916- ) - southerner -The Moviegoer (1961) -The Last Gentleman (1966) -Love in Ruins (1971) -Lancelot (1977) -The Second Coming (1980) -The Message in the Bottle (1975) - volume of essays Flannery O'Connor - southerner -Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) Carson McCullers (1917-1967)- loved the grotesque, her writing is sometimes dismissed as “Gothic”; southerner -The Ballad of Sad Cafe John Updike (1932- ) -Rabbit trilogy: Rabbit, Run (1960); Rabbit Redux (1971); Rabbit is Rich (1981) ` -Couples (1968) Norman Mailer (1923- ) -The Naked and the Dead (1948) - central characters, General Cummings, Lieutenant Hearn, and Sergeant Croft represent not only three levels of the military chain of command, but also three different approaches to war – and to life. What they have in common, and what is so characteristic for all of Mailer’s fiction, is that the best way to describe them is through their relation to power. Mailer is fascinated by it, be it physical, political or intellectual power. -An American Dream (1965) -Of a Fire on the Moon (1970) -The Executioner's Song (1979) -Ancient Evenings (1983) - life on court of Pharaoh NOTE: Many established writers have been omitted for the lack of space, to mention only Robert Coover, E.L. Doctorow, Stanley Elkin, Joyce Carol Oates, Joseph McElroy, Gilbert Sorrentino, Gore Vidal – and at least a dozen or so more. 11. Recent Innovations in American Fiction William Burroughs -Naked Lunch -Nova Express -Junkie William Gaddis -The Recognitions -JR Vladimir Nabokov -Pale Fire (Kinbote - notes, Shade - poet) -Lolita John Barth -Literature of Exhaustion (1967) - very important essay -The Sot-Weed Factor -Giles Goat-Boy -Letters Richard Brautigan -Trout Fishing in America -The Abortion: A Historical Romance -The Hawkline Monster NOTE: Parody is a pervasive element of contemporary innovative fiction in America.The postmodernists have comically transformed such traditional genres as the picaresque (Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy, Pynchon’s V., Nabokov’s Lolita, Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America, Donleavy’s novels), the epistolary novel (Barth’s Letters), or the historical romance Brautigan’s The Abortion: A Historical Romance). They also employ the framework of popular formulaic genres such as the thriller (Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Burrough’s Nova Express, Hawkes’ The Lime Twig, Pynchon’s novels), the Western (Brautigan’s The Hawkline Monster, Berger’s Little Big Man, Doctorow’s Welcome to Hard Times) as well as such popular genres as science fiction (Vonnegut), the war novel (Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, Heller’s Catch-22), the political novel (The Public Burning by Coover, Heller’s Good as Gold), or the business novel (Gaddis’ JR). Familiar conventions are taken and given a new twist, made unfamiliar and arresting through irony, exaggeration, repetition, distortion, or an unexpected viewpoint. For instance, picaresque adventures on the road and the historical background of Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor are elaborated to such an extravagant extent that they finally undermine their own validity, creating humorous distance between the reader and the text. Pynchon’s encyclopaedic novels V. and Gravity’s Rainbow offer a wide variety of parodies of the spy thriller, war story, novel of intrigue, picaresque novel, quest novel, pornography. The parody provides humor, as well as distance and an unconventional perspective for viewing the dilemmas of contemporary man, particularly his loss of stable, traditional values.