![]() Brown’s most famous novel, Wieland (1798), brings the gothic to a country estate outside of Philadelphia, where a man is goaded to kill his loved ones by a voice that sometimes is and sometimes isn’t just in his head. ![]() American gothic frequently registers the traumas of our nation’s history, exploring the “dark side” of our democratic experiment, the racism, classism, and sexism that exists alongside a rhetoric of equality. While this might make the gothic fiction sound primarily plot- and setting-oriented, gothic literature is also very much about psychology, about the half-hidden horrors of the human mind. Gothic literature is filled with hidden secrets, repressed desires, mysterious crumbling mansions, madmen, and damsels in distress. Charlotte Temple is a seduction novel, like many eighteenth-century British bestsellers, and it tells the story of a young woman lead astray by an attractive but ultimately immoral man who finds herself pregnant, alone, and, ultimately, dead.Ĭharles Brockden Brown is often referred to as the father of American fiction for the key role he played in turning the European gothic into an American art form. in 1794, is frequently cited as America’s first best-seller. ![]() Susanna Rowson’s Charlotte Temple, first published in London in 1791 and the U.S. “Thanatopsis” means “view of death,” and, in the poem, dying means embracing communion with nature and equality with others, as death is the ultimate leveler. William Cullen Bryant was one of the first American poets to achieve fame, through poems like “Thanatopsis” (1811). His essay “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man” (1833) is a fierce indictment of racial prejudice. In 1829, William Apess, a Pequot, published A Son of the Forest, the first extensive autobiography published by a Native American. In 1789, Olaudah Equiano published a narrative that became central to the antislavery cause, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, an early example of the slave narrative genre that would become wildly popular in the antebellum period. Two major authors of color emerged in the early republican period, fueling reformist fervor and inspiring writers for generations to come. The blue-backed speller was also an effort to standardize American spelling, a goal which also fueled Webster’s other key work, the American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), which forms the basis of most American dictionaries to this day. Webster’s textbook, usually referred to as the “blue-backed speller,” was used to teach five generations of Americans to read, first by learning syllables, then working up to whole words. One of the most important books to emerge in early America was Noah Webster’s The American Spelling Book (1783). Transporting books across the American expanse was difficult, time-consuming, and costly. Despite such literary nationalism, most of what Americans read in the early republic was British literature, in part because the absence of international copyright make it cheap and easy for American publishers to pirate British texts. This call for a truly distinctive American literature would be uttered repeatedly for generations, based on the belief that America’s distinctive form of government, unique mix of peoples, and geographical grandeur would naturally inspire a unique literary voice. ![]() ![]() With America’s declaration of political independence came the call for literary independence, for an American literature that would be independent of (and, implicitly, superior to) British literature. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |