Early National Era

4 Key excerpts on "Early National Era"

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  Dislocating Race and Nation

  Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism

  • Robert S. Levine(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • The University of North Carolina Press

    (Publisher)

  In chapters 1 and 2, I will provide a fuller picture of developments in American literary nationalism, but suffice it to say here that much of what U.S. writers produced over the first several decades of the existence of the new nation struck many observers as imitative of the British tradition. As I will discuss in chapter 3, during the 1840s and 1850s, with the emergence of the writers we now associate with an “American Renaissance,” a more confident note was struck by the American literary nationalists associated with New York’s Young America literary circle. The story of American literary nationalism thus generally follows a triumphant arc in which we move from the allegedly imitative writings of Freneau and Dwight to the supposedly more authentic “American” writings of Emerson and Whitman (and Hawthorne, Melville, and others) who generally have been regarded, at least since the publication of F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance (1941), as having fulfilled the goals of the first generation of U.S. literary nationalists. This story of national literary development and fulfillment has a measure of explanatory power, but as critics over the past several decades have noted, it is limited for a number of reasons. In a very basic way, the historical premises of such a story are invariably anachronistic, the result of the needs, interpretive models, and desires of a relatively small number of literary nationalists being imposed retrospectively and all too neatly on literary debates that were much messier at the time than subsequent literary critics have generally allowed. The story of the emergence of a distinctively American literature also assumes that nonimitative is best (and even possible), when the reality is that most American literary nationalists of the early period saw imitation as a form of literary talent, even genius

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  The Cambridge History of American Poetry

  • Alfred Bendixen, Stephen Burt(Authors)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  * Part II A NEW NATION: POETRY FROM 1800 TO 1900 155 Chapter 7 Asserting a National Voice Frank Gado With the Revolution, our literature acquired a dramatically new role and pur- pose: having invented a nation, we were now to invent the terms of its dis- tinctive expression. The noblest literary pedigree rested in poetry, and the eighteenth century, true to its penchant for taxonomic hierarchies, exalted the epic as its highest form. To be sure, Americans had written commendable lyrical poems, but these were deemed modest accomplishments. Even after a century of independence, the eminent critic E. C. Stedman would lament that the country’s best poets excelled in the lyric, a genre he said suited limited ambitions. True grandeur, he asserted, would arrive “when poets of the upper cast desire to forego their studies and brief lyrical flights . . . to produce the composite and heroic works that rank as masterpieces.” 1 Only the emergence of an American epic would certify our credibility as a literary power and, more important, fortify our sense of nationhood. This compulsion both inspired and crippled. As Philip Freneau mocked at the outset, “Bards of huge fame in every hamlet rise, / Each (in idea) of Virgilian size: / Even beardless lads a rhyming knack display – / Iliads begun, and finished in a day!” 2 The Aeneid had the major influence, principally because it pointed toward the creation of the Roman republic – the very model for the American political experiment – and in Columbus these bards perceived an analog to Aeneas as the conveyer of a declining civilization to a new land. Curiously, prior to independence Columbus had been far to the back of the public mind. He was a Catholic, after all, who had sailed for the politically repressive Spanish monarchy – the counterpart to the “tyrannical” England that the American colonists had insisted should treat them as equal subjects, entitled to parliamentary representation.

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  The American H.D.

  • Annette Debo(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • University Of Iowa Press

    (Publisher)

  Literary historians turned to the American material available, eschewing historical justifications of greatness for aesthetic ones, and began to produce anthologies to prove the unique character of American literature and thus of the American. 3 This codification process began in earnest around 1890, four years after H.D.’s birth (Shumway 123). Besides the blossoming number of anthologies, the first journal of American literature, American Literature —a journal for which Pearson wrote six reviews—appeared in 1929, and American studies programs began in the 1930s at universities (Shumway 151). The focus on national definitions of literature increased during the twentieth century, as did governmental attention to the representation of American culture in literature. When the U.S. emerged as a superpower after the two world wars, American literature made extensive gains in prestige and definitively differentiated itself from British literature, in part through its expres-sion of the American nation. American literature began being regularly taught in American universities, and, according to David R. Shumway, “the American survey had become a fixture in English departments by America’s Second Great Literary Creation Period 75 1940” (201). During the Cold War, the conflict that dominated the last decade and a half of H.D.’s life, literature became more pronouncedly a tool for the nation-state. The United States actively used American literary history as a method for educating the rest of the world about American culture and for exporting American values, as encapsulated in that literature. 4 Defining literature by national origin presupposes that literature con-tains a definitive expression of national character and style, conditions useful in wartimes, when one nation must become decisively differentiated from others.

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  American Literature from 1600 Through the 1850s

  • Britannica Educational Publishing, Adam Augustyn(Authors)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Britannica Educational Publishing

    (Publisher)

  CHAPTER 3EARLY 19TH-CENTURY LITERATURE

  A fter the American Revolution, and increasingly after the War of 1812, American writers were exhorted to produce a literature that was truly native. As if in response, four authors of very respectable stature appeared. William Cullen Bryant, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe initiated a great half century of literary development.

  WILLIAM CULLEN BRYANT

  William Cullen Bryant was a poet of nature, best remembered for “Thanatopsis,” and editor for 50 years of the New York Evening Post . A descendant of early Puritan immigrants, Bryant was born in 1794 and at 16 entered the sophomore class of Williams College. Because of finances and in hopes of attending Yale, he withdrew without graduating. Unable to enter Yale, he studied law under private guidance at Worthington and at Bridgewater and at 21 was admitted to the bar. He spent nearly 10 years in Plainfield and at Great Barrington as an attorney, a calling for which he held a lifelong aversion. At 26 Bryant married Frances Fairchild, with whom he was happy until her death nearly half a century later.

  In 1825 he moved to New York City to become coeditor of the New York Review . He became an editor of the Evening Post in 1827; in 1829 he became editor in chief and part owner and continued in this position until his death in 1878. His careful investment of his income made Bryant wealthy. He was an active patron of the arts and letters.

  William Cullen Bryant . Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.

  The religious conservatism imposed on Bryant in childhood found expression in pious doggerel. The political conservatism of his father stimulated “The Embargo” (1808), in which the 13-year-old poet demanded the resignation of President Jefferson. But in “Thanatopsis” (from the Greek “a view of death”), which he wrote when he was 17 and which made him famous when it was published in The North American Review in 1817, he rejected Puritan dogma for Deism; thereafter he was a Unitarian. Turning also from Federalism, he joined the Democratic Party and made the Post an organ of free trade, workingmen’s rights, free speech, and abolition. Bryant was for a time a Free-Soiler and later one of the founders of the Republican Party. As a man of letters, Bryant securely established himself at the age of 27 with Poems

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