American Lit 101

From Nathaniel Hawthorne to Harper Lee and Naturalism to Magical Realism, an essential guide to American writers and works

Brianne Keith

• Publisher: Adams Media
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781440599699
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

From poetry to fiction to essays, American Lit 101 leaves no page unturned! Edgar Allan Poe. Willa Cather. Henry David Thoreau. Mark Twain. The list of important American writers goes on and on. These voices played a vital role in shaping the scope of American literature, and the United States itself. But too often, textbooks reduce this storied history to dry text that would put even a tenured professor to sleep. American Lit 101 is an engaging and comprehensive guide through the major players in American literature. From colonialism to postmodernism and every literary movement in between, this primer is packed with hundreds of entertaining tidbits and concepts, along with easy-to-understand explanations on why each author's work was important then and still relevant now. So whether you're looking for a refresher course on key American literature or want to learn about it for the first time, American Lit 101 has all the answers--even the ones you didn't know you were looking for.

Chapter 1

Literature of the New World

Early American literature has a lot to teach about the lives, hopes, wishes, and values of the early colonists who settled America. The intensity of their religious devotion was reflected in their poetry, their extreme suffering in the New World ran deep throughout their personal diaries and captivity narratives, and their belief in their religious experiment blazed through their sermons. The sermons and poems produced during this era were united by an attempt to keep faith strong and remind colonists of their purpose in the face of a harsh and harrowing new experience trying to survive in the New World.

Alongside these early Puritan settlers were other groups of people, too—people who came for entirely different reasons than religious refuge. Some came to seek adventure, some came to better their economic status, some came to escape imprisonment at home. And of course, there were the people already living here—the Native Americans. All of their lives, stories, and voices are part of the fabric of early American literature. In this chapter, you will read selections that reflect their stories and voices and the changing modes of understanding the world that were developing almost as soon as the first English settlers established their colonies on the Eastern Seaboard in the early seventeenth century.

Exploring America

Explorers’ Accounts and the “Contact Zone”

When two people meet for the first time, they exchange a lot of information. Think about when you first meet someone, especially someone from a different culture. Quite naturally, your eyes automatically scan the person’s appearance, dress, and gestures. The larger the differences between your cultures, the more information you will need to process.

So imagine when the natives of South and North America spotted the early European explorers sailing toward their shores in huge, multisail ships that were so different from their own. Talk about information overload!

First Impressions

When European explorers met with the natives of these new continents, there was much more at stake than a simple exchange of information—for all parties. The Europeans arrived with an agenda: to conquer new territory to call their own. This was a clash of epic proportions, and no one would be left unchanged. The natives’ agenda? To survive.

(Mis)Interpretations

One literary scholar, Mary Louise Pratt, has a term for these types of interactions where cultures meet and a power struggle ensues. She calls this the “contact zone.” When two cultures meet, the records of their exchanges are fraught with the attitudes, beliefs, and agenda of each culture. In these contact zones, Pratt claims, there is much at stake, and the texts must be read carefully for clues of dominance and submission, power and oppression. For a complete history, the voices from both sides are needed.

When Bernal Díaz del Castillo (1492–1584) wrote his The True History of the Conquest of New Spain, he certainly was staking his claim in the history of Spanish conquest of Mexico. Diaz, who spent most of his life in the West Indies, accompanied both Hernando de Soto and Hernán Cortés on expeditions to lay claim to new land. These bloody missions left an indelible mark on Díaz, who later said he could not sleep through the night. At the age of eighty-four, blind and deaf, Díaz sat down to write his story. In the True History, he tells of how the Aztecs presented the Spaniards with gifts:

The [Aztec] prince Quintalbor . . . bore . . . presents . . . The first was a disk in the shape of a sun, as big as a cartwheel and made of a very fine gold . . . There was another larger disk of brightly shining silver in the shape of a moon, with other figures on it, and this was worth a great deal for it was very heavy. . . Quintalbor also brought back [a] helmet full of small grains of gold, just as they come from the mines and worth three thousand pesos. The gold in the helmet was worth more than twenty thousand pesos to us, because it proved to us that there were good mines in the country.

In this passage we can see that Díaz, as with many other Spanish soldiers of the conquest, had one interest in mind: what he stood to gain after the Aztecs were conquered. In this simple exchange of gifts, Díaz was less interested in what the Aztecs meant by presenting these gifts and more interested in what the gifts suggested about the presence of gold in the country, and subsequently, the riches they could keep for themselves and send back home to Spain.

Interpreting Literature

What does it mean to “interpret” literature? When you interpret literature, you analyze the author’s purpose, viewpoint, main idea, and details to create an interpretation of the piece.

How would Quintalbor’s account of this exchange read? Much differently one could suppose! What did Quintalbor mean by presenting the gifts? What did the gifts mean to the Aztec culture? What message did the gifts send?

If Quintalbor had written an account of the dominance, destruction, and enslavement of his people by Díaz and his fellow conquistadores, his text would be an example of autoethnography (don’t get too distracted by the term). In an autoethnographic text, an author tells and connects his or her own story to the wider historical context of which it is a part. Quintalbor would in a sense “recapture” his story and the story of the Aztecs from Díaz’s account, which has made its way down in history as the story of the “winner.”

What Does It Mean?

Autoethnography is made up of the prefix auto, meaning “self,” and the word ethnography, which refers to the scientific description of the customs of individuals and cultures.

In fact, natives of the New World did eventually create their own accounts of their first encounters with European conquerors. Within a few dozen years of the arrival of the Spanish, Aztecs began to learn the Spanish language and Roman alphabet, and in their own literature they documented the horrors of their captivity and destruction. Perhaps the earliest account is this Nahuatl (Aztec) poem from 1528:

Broken spears lie in the roads;

we have torn our hair in grief.

The houses are roofless now, and their walls

are red with blood.

Accounts of the New World

Díaz’s account was just one of many explorers’ accounts of the New World. Of course, we all know of Columbus, who “in 1492 sailed the ocean blue” and his texts. And thanks to the invention of the printing press in the mid-1400s, we have a number of other texts, including formal statements to the kings and queens financing the expeditions back in Europe, letters, diary entries, and narratives that survive from this age telling the stories of these “voyages of discovery.” It’s important to remember that these texts all had a purpose: They were written to influence policymakers back home, to convince financiers that their investments in these voyages were successful and bearing fruit, and some were more personal, to provide firsthand testimony of the destruction and horror explorers’ bore witness to.

Bartolomé de Las Casas (1474–1566)

De Las Casas is an example of an explorer who came to regret his actions in the New World. He came to the New World from Spain in 1502 on a mission to Hispaniola and later wrote about his exploitations in an effort to reform brutal Spanish policy overseas. He wrote in his The Very Brief Relation of the Devastation of the Indies how “Christians, with their horses and swords and pikes began to carry out massacres and strange cruelties” against natives, and described in detail practices that would horrify readers today. De Las Casas wrote that natives’ weapons were “weak” and “because of this, the wars of Indians against each other were little more than games played by children,” giving a glimpse into the world that the Spanish destroyed.

Native American Literature

Oral Traditions

Using the term “Native American literature” to describe the stories of natives of the New World is kind of a misnomer since natives of the New World didn’t have written traditions. There was no established alphabet by which native tribes across the continents wrote down their stories.

Native cultures had oral traditions. A story would be passed down from generation to generation, spoken by a storyteller, usually around a fire at night. Stories would change as each storyteller put his or her own spin on the stories with gestures, tone, and other alterations to minor story details. The main part of the story would remain intact, though, but would be given new life and meaning with each generation’s storytellers.

Some Written Traditions

Some cultures did have forms of written traditions—Aztecs used intricate arrangements of shells to make records, and other cultures used hieroglyphics and other pictographic drawings to record important stories and messages.

Moreover, there was no common language shared by native nations across the Americas at the time of the Europeans arrival. In fact, no unified Native American culture existed at that time or at any other. Hundreds of tribes and nations ranged across the continents and organi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Literature of the New World
• Chapter 2: Literature of a Growing Republic
• Chapter 3: Creating an American Literature
• Chapter 4: Literature of the Civil War
• Chapter 5: Realism and Naturalism
• Chapter 6: Modernism
• Chapter 7: Postwar Literature
• Chapter 8: Contemporary American Literature and Beyond