American Literature

120 flashcards by MentisLibrary

American writing from the Puritan colonies to the present: Romanticism, Transcendentalism, realism and naturalism, modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, Southern Gothic and the postwar novel, with the poets and playwrights alongside.

What is Of Plymouth Plantation?
A history of the Pilgrim colony written by its longtime governor, covering the voyage, the first winter and the settlement's early decades. It circulated in manuscript for two centuries before publication.
Who was the first published poet in colonial America?
Anne Bradstreet. Her collection The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America appeared in London in 1650, sent to press by her brother-in-law without her knowledge.
Which sermon is the best known text of the Great Awakening?
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, preached at Enfield, Connecticut. It builds its terror through sustained figurative language rather than volume.
What kind of book is Franklin's Autobiography?
An unfinished account of a self-made life, written in four parts and published after his death. It presents character as a project you can plan and audit.
Who wrote Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral?
Phillis Wheatley, brought from West Africa and enslaved in Boston as a child. She wrote in polished neoclassical couplets and was examined by Boston notables who doubted she was the author.
What did Common Sense argue?
That hereditary monarchy is absurd and that the colonies should declare independence immediately. It was written in plain language for readers with no political training.
What is a captivity narrative?
A first-person account of being seized by Native Americans and eventually released or ransomed, read by Puritan audiences as a spiritual trial.
What is The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano?
An autobiography describing capture in Africa, the Middle Passage, enslavement in the Americas and eventual purchase of his own freedom.
Which stories made Washington Irving the first American author famous in Europe?
Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, both published in The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.
What are the Leatherstocking Tales?
Five novels following the frontiersman Natty Bumppo across his life, including The Last of the Mohicans and The Deerslayer.
What defines American Romanticism?
A turn from reason toward imagination, feeling, nature, the individual and the remote past, roughly from the 1820s to the Civil War.
What is Dark Romanticism?
The strand of Romanticism preoccupied with guilt, evil and the limits of human perfectibility, written largely in reaction to Transcendental optimism.
What is Poe's theory of the single effect?
That a short work should be built so that every word contributes to one preconceived emotional effect, and should be short enough to be read at a sitting.
Which Poe story invented the detective genre?
The Murders in the Rue Morgue, which introduced C. Auguste Dupin, the brilliant amateur whose reasoning the narrator reports.
What happens in The Fall of the House of Usher?
A visitor watches Roderick Usher decline in a decaying mansion, his sister Madeline is entombed alive, and the house splits and sinks as the family line ends.
What is The Scarlet Letter about?
Hester Prynne bears an illegitimate child in Puritan Boston, is forced to wear the letter A, and refuses to name the father, who is the minister Arthur Dimmesdale.
What happens in Young Goodman Brown?
A Puritan villager walks into the forest at night, witnesses what appears to be a satanic gathering of everyone he respects, and returns unable to trust anyone again.
What is Moby-Dick?
Ishmael's account of sailing on the Pequod under Captain Ahab, who has turned the ship's commercial voyage into a hunt for the white whale that took his leg.
What is the phrase that defines Bartleby, the Scrivener?
I would prefer not to. The copyist repeats it until he has withdrawn from work, food and finally life, while his employer narrates his own helplessness.
What is Billy Budd, Sailor?
A handsome young sailor, falsely accused by the master-at-arms Claggart, strikes and kills him and is hanged under naval law by a captain who believes him innocent.
What was Uncle Tom's Cabin and what did it do?
A novel of slavery that follows Tom, sold south, and Eliza, who escapes across the ice. It sold in enormous numbers and hardened Northern opinion before the Civil War.
What is the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass?
Douglass's account of his enslavement in Maryland, his secret acquisition of literacy, and his escape north, published to prove his public speeches were his own experience.
What is Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl?
Harriet Jacobs's narrative, published under the name Linda Brent, describing sexual coercion by her enslaver and seven years spent hidden in a crawl space above her grandmother's house.
What did the Transcendentalists believe?
That truth is reached through intuition rather than doctrine or empirical proof, that nature is the visible form of spirit, and that the individual conscience outranks institutions.
What does Emerson's essay Nature argue?
That direct experience of the natural world gives access to spiritual truth, and that each generation should build its own relation to the universe rather than inherit one.
What is the argument of Self-Reliance?
That conformity is a form of self-betrayal, that a person should trust the thought they had before consulting anyone, and that consistency for its own sake is a small virtue.
What did Emerson call for in The American Scholar?
An American intellectual life independent of Europe, built on nature, books used actively rather than reverently, and action as the scholar's necessary training.
What is Walden?
Thoreau's account of two years living in a cabin he built beside Walden Pond, organized as a single year and arguing for deliberate, simplified living.
What does Civil Disobedience argue?
That a citizen's first obligation is to conscience, and that a just person should refuse cooperation with an unjust government, accepting the punishment.
Who wrote Woman in the Nineteenth Century?
Margaret Fuller, the first editor of the Transcendentalist journal The Dial and later a foreign correspondent for the New York Tribune.