AMERICAN REVOLUTION

AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE

• The American Revolution against Britain (1775-1783) was the first modern war of liberation against a colonial power.

MANIFEST DESTINY: Americans were

destined for greatness

ENGLAND – AMERICALITERARY DEPENDENCE

• Americans´ excessive dependence on English literary models.

• America’s literary identification with England, an excessive imitation of English or classical literary models.

• The roots of the Colonial writers of the Revolutionary generation.

• Politics, law, and diplomacy paid. Writing, on the other hand, did not pay.

• No publishers. No audience. No copy right laws.

Enlightenment thinkers and writers were devoted to the ideals of:

• Benjamin Franklin lived from 17 January 1706 to 17 April 1790.

• Benjamin was the 6th president of Pennsylvania and was one of the Founding Fathers of United States.

• Franklin had many professions, he was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, scientist, inventor and diplomat.

• he was the most famous and respected private figure of his time.

• He learned from the Enlightment writers to apply reason to his own life and to break with tradition.

• He also had the Puritan capacity for hard, careful work, constant self scrutiny, and the desire to better himself.

• He initiated a characteristically American genre — the SELF-HELP BOOK.

• Poor Richard’s Almanack:

• Useful encouragement, advice, and factual

information

Franklin’s Autobiography

• Written to advise his son

Franklin lists 13 virtues: temperance,

silence, order,

resolution, frugality, industry,sincerity, justice,

moderation, cleanliness,tranquility,

chastity, and humility.

Despite his prosperity and fame, Franklin never lost his democratic sensibility:

he wasan important figure at the

1787 when the US constitution was drafted

he was president of an antislaveryassociation.

His last efforts was to promoteuniversal public education.

HECTOR ST. JOHN DE CRÈVECOEUR

• Born on December 31, 1735 – November 12, 1813, in France.

• Naturalized in New York as John Hector St. John, was a French-American writer.

• He gave Europeans a glowing idea of opportunities for peace, wealth, and pride in America through his work.

Crèvecoeur was the earliest European to exploit the “MELTING POT” image of America, in a famous passage:

POLITICAL PAMPHLET

• The passion of Revolutionary literature is found in pamphlets.

• Over 2,000 pamphlets were published during the Revolution.

• The pamphlets thrilled patriots and threatened loyalists.

• They were often read aloud in public to excite audiences.

• American soldiers read them aloud in their Camps.

THOMAS PAINE

• Born February 9, 1737 - June 8, 1809.

• Thomas Paine was known as a pamphleteer and contributed to the American Revolutions with the pamphlet Common Sense.

“The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind,”

DEMOCRATIC ORIGINS AND REVOLUTIONARY WRITERS

WRITERS OF FICTION

CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN

Brockden Brown was born in 1771 and died in 1810. He was an American novelist, historian, and editor of the Early National period.

Brown was the fourth of five brothers and six surviving siblings total in a Philadelphia Quaker merchant family.

He wrote novels as Wieland (1798),Arthur Mervyn (1799), Ormond (1799), and Edgar Huntley (1799).

Novels

MAIN CHARACTERISTICS

American gothic.American settings.Explore political and ideological

conflicts.Dramatics, suspenseful tales of crisis.Psychological derangement.First person narratives.Emphasis on social and political

anxieties.

WASHINTONG IRVING

Irving was an American author, essayist, biographer, historian, and diplomat of the early 19th century.

He is best known for “The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent ” .

BOOKS

Main Characteristics

The medieval past.

Imagery.

Rural settings.

Dramatic aspects of American History.

Refuse the American condition.

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER

James Fenimore Cooper was born in Burlington, New Jersey, to William Cooper and Elizabeth (Fenimore) Cooper, the eleventh child of twelve children.

His historical romances of frontier and Indian life in the early American days created a unique form of American literature.

Among the novels are Precaution (1820), The Pioneers (1823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826) etc.

Novels

MAIN CHARACTERISTICS OF NOVELS

A sense of the past

Based on the real life

Reveal a deep tension

Acceptation of American condition

American characters, settings and themes.

WOMEN AND MINORITIES

Colonial Women

Anne Bradstreet

Anne Hutchinson

Ann Cotton

Sarah Kemble Knight

Phillis Wheatley Phillis Wheatley was born in

Africa and brought to Boston, Massachusetts.

The first African-American author of importance in the United States.

Among her best-known poems are “To S.M., a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works”.

Other Women Writers(Revolutionary Era)

Susanna Rowson (c. 1762-1824)

Hannah Foster (1758-1840)

Judith Sargent Murray (1751-1820)

Charlotte Temple (1791)

The Coquette (1797)

History of the Rise,

Progress, and Termination

of the American Revolution

(1805)

MAIN CHARACTERISTICS OF FICTION’S WRITERS

AMERICAN SUBJECTS

HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

THEMES OF CHANGE

NOSTALGIC TONES

MANY PROSE GENRES

A LIVING THROUGH LITERATURE