The 19th Century American Literary History

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The 19th CenturyAmerican Literary History

• Introduction to Literary and Cultural Studies

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The 13 Original States
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Expansion
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Criticizer of the Mexican American War Henry
David Thoreau (1817-62)

• Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854)
• On the Duty of Civil Disobedience (1849)

Transcendentalism main representatives Thoreau
and Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) Seeking for
intellectual and spiritual independence of
America (after having achieved political
independence) Focus on the individual and on
self-reliance
Americas Intellectual Declaration of
IndependenceRalph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
The American Scholar (1837)
We have listened too long to the courtly muses
of Europe
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MANIFEST DESTINY
John Gast American Progress (1872)
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James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851)

• The Leather-Stocking Novels

Fiction concerned with the frontier Cooper
introduced the character of Natty Bumppo, a
uniquely American personification of rugged
individualism and the pioneer spirit, a romantic
mythological frontiersman. The Pioneers (1823),
The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie
(1827), The Pathfinder (1840), The Deerslayer
(1841) James Fenimore Cooper was America's first
successful popular novelist.
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Gold Rush
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The Transcontinental Railroad
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Expansion

• Lewis and Clark expedition (1804-1806)
• Annexations of territory Louisiana Purchase
  (1803), Monroe Doctrine (1823), Annexation of
  Texas (1845), Mexican American War (1846-48),
  Gadsden Purchase (1853)
• Manifest Destiny
• Gold Rush
• Transcontinental railroad (1869)

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Emily Dickinson 585
I like to see it lap the Miles  And lick the
Valleys up  And stop to feed itself at Tanks
 And then prodigious step   Around a Pile of
Mountains   And, supercilious peer In
Shanties by the sides of Roads And then a
Quarry pare   To fit its Ribs And crawl
between Complaining all the while In horrid
hooting stanza   Then chase itself down
Hill And neigh like Boanerges Then
punctual as a Star  Stop docile and
omnipotent  At its own stable door
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Walt Whitman (1819-1892)Leaves of Grass

• Strong opponent of slavery
• 1855 first edition of Leaves of Grass published
  (which was at first criticized for its crudeness,
  vulgar language and scandalous subject matter)
• From the first publication Whitman worked on his
  book, adding new poems and sections etc. ?
  continual revisions made the history of the
  publication complicated

Deathbed Edition (1891)
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Geronimo (18291909)
Sitting Bull
ca. 1831 1890)
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The American Civil War (18611865)
The American Civil War divides the nation about
the question of slavery Plantation owning south
vs. increasingly anti-slavery north
Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Toms Cabin (1852)
Abraham Lincoln is often quoted as having
declared, "So this is the little lady who made
this big war."
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The Battle of Gettysburg (July 1- July 3 1863)

• Three day battle app. 50.000 casualties
• Union army defeats Confederate army
• (led by General Robert E. Lee)

Photograph Timothy H. O'Sullivan, July 56, 1863
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Abraham Lincoln Gettysburg Address November 19,
1863
Transcription of the Gettysburg Address
inscribed on the walls at the Lincoln Memorial
in Washington, D.C.
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The slave narrative genre

• For example
• Frederick Douglass
• The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
  (1845), early example of African-American
  Literature, the former slave Douglass tells about
  his escape from Maryland to Massachusetts and
  about his liberation through education.
• Harriet Jacobs Incidents in the Life of a Slave
  Girl (1861), outspokenly condemned the sexual
  exploitation of slave women

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American Literary Renaissance
With only five years, 1850-55, several American
writers publish their most famous
works Nathanial Hawthorne The Scarlett Letter
(1850) Herman Melville Moby Dick (1851) Henry
David Thoreau Walden (1854) Walt Whitman Leaves
of Grass (1855) Broadening the scope one could
also add Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) Ralph Waldo
Emerson (1803-82) Emily Dickinson (1830-86)
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Nathaniel Hawthorne(1804-1864)
Young Goodman Brown (1835)

• many stories are situated in Puritan New
  England (his grandfather being a judge of the
  Salem Witchtrials 1692)
• themes of morality, sin, and redemption
• Hawthorne called his writing "romance
  historical settings and plots highly symbolic,
  almost phantasmagorical worlds