part i the literature of colonial america. teaching focus i. historical introductionhistorical...

Part I The Literature of Colonial America

Teaching Focus I. Historical IntroductionHistorical Introduction II. The First American Writings & WritersThe First American Writings & Writers III. Early New England LiteratureEarly New England Literature IV. Puritan ThoughtsPuritan Thoughts V. Puritanisms influence on American literaturePuritanisms influence on American literature

I. Historical Introduction 1. The discovery of the American continent by Christopher Columbus in 14921492

Christopher Columbuss discovery of America

English and European Explorers The earliest settlers included Dutch, Swedes, Germans, French, Spaniards, Italians, and Portuguese, each group settling in different parts of the continent and they all contributed to the forming of the American civilization, but the colonies that became the first United States were for the most part English sustained by English traditions, ruled by English laws, supported by English commerce, and named after English monarchs and English lands.

English and European Settlements The first permanent English settlement in North America was established at Jamestown, Virginia in 1607. At last early in the 17th century, the English settlements in Virginia and Massachusetts began the main stream of what we recognize as the American history.

Two Important New England Settlements (Map) (Map) The Plymouth Colony Flagship Mayflower arrives - 1620 Leader - William Bradford Settlers known as Pilgrims and Separatists "The Mayflower Compact" provides for social, religious, and economic freedom, while still maintaining ties to Great Britain. "The Mayflower Compact" The Massachusetts Bay Colony Flagship Arbella arrives 1630 Leader - John Winthrop Settlers are mostly Puritans or Congregational Puritans "The Arbella Covenant" clearly establishes a religious and theocratic settlement, free of ties to Great Britain. "The Arbella Covenant"

II. The First American Writings and Writers The first writings that we call American were the narratives and journals of these settlements. They wrote in diaries and in journals. They wrote letters and contracts and government charters and religious and political statements. They wrote about their voyage to the new land, about adapting themselves to the unfamiliar climates and crops, about dealing with Indians. All seemed possible to them in the new world through hard work and faith.

1)Captain John Smith

His reports of exploration, published in the early 1600s, were the first distinctly American literature to be written in English. Smiths descriptions of America were filled with themes, myths, images, scenes, characters, and events that were a foundation for the nations literature. He portrayed English North America as a land of endless bounty. His vision helped lure the Pilgrims and the Puritans who saw themselves as new saints with a spiritual mission to flee the Old World and create a New Israel (Jerusalem---Heaven on earth), a New Promised Land, in the America that John Smith had described.

2) The writers of the Southern and Middle Colonies The writers of the Southern and Middle Colonies who followed John Smith made their greatest contribution to American literature in the 18th century, in the Age of Reason and Revolution. William Byrd II Thomas Jefferson Until that time, literature developed slowly, especially in the South. Farms widely dispersed. Towns were few. Illiteracy was high. And there was little of the religious ferment and zeal that inspired such a tide of literature to flow from Puritan New England.

The First American Writer Captain John Smith (1580-1631) was the first American writer and he published eight in all. 1) A True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Note as Hath Happened in Virginia Since the First Planting of That Colony (1608), defending the handling of the settlement and proclaiming the merits of the new land. 2) A Map of Virginia: with a Description of the Country (1612), a guide to the country and an invitation to the bold sprits needed to enlarge and strengthen the English plantations in the new land.

3) General History of Virginia (1624), containing his most famous tale of how the Indian princess Pocahontas saved him from the wrath of her father Powhatan. Captain John Smith contributed more to the survival of the Jamestown colony than anyone else did. And he saw from the beginning what was eventually to be a basic principle of American history, the need of workers instead of gentlemen for the tough job of planting colonies and pushing the frontiers westward.

III. Early New England Literature New England: (Map)(Map) A region of the northeast United States comprising the modern states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.

New England had from the beginning a literature of ideas: theological, moral, historical, political. The Puritans had come to New England for the sake of religious freedom, while Virginia had been planted mainly as a commercial venture. Southern society was almost completely rural, interested primarily in the development of a tobacco economy. 1) A literature of ideas

2) Theocracy( / ) The Puritans in New England embraced hardships, together with the discipline of a harsh church. The first intention in Massachusetts was to found a theocracya society in which God would govern through the church. The church thus became the supreme political body. The ideal may have been inspiring, but because of the imperfections of the human material, in practice theocracy often led to injustice and intolerance.

Over the years the puritans built a way of life that was in harmony with their somber religion, one that stressed hard work, thrift, piety, and sobriety. These were the Puritan values that dominated much of the earliest American writing, including the sermons, books, and letters of such noted Puritan clergyman as John Cotton and Cotton Mather. 3) The Puritan values that dominated much of the earliest American writing

Cotton Mather wrote more than 450 works, an example as well as an advocate of the Puritan ideal of hard work.

The American poets who emerged in the 17th century adapted the style of established European poets to the subject matter confronted in a strange, new environment. Anne Bradstreet was one such poet. 4) The American poets

William Bradford and John Winthrop 1. William Bradford (1590-1657), first governor of Plymouth wrote The History of Plymouth Plantation (1856).

William Bradford started the History in 1630, ten years after the Mayflower voyage, beginning his story with an account of the small group of Puritans who migrated from England to Amsterdam and then to the New World. In addition to History, Bradford left a wealth of letters, other prose writings about the colony, and even a narrative poem. He was perhaps the greatest of the Pilgrim Fathers. The New England colonies mourned him at his death, in words written later by Cotton Mather, as a common blessing and father to them all. The Pilgrim Fathers: English puritans who went to America in 1620 and founded the colony of Plymouth, Massachusetts.

(1588 1649), first governor at Boston, wrote The History of New England (1826). John Winthrop

John Winthrop began to keep a journal on the Bay Colonists voyage to Massachusetts aboard the ship Arbella in 1630 and he maintained this practice for the rest of his life. The History is less appropriate than journal, for the work has not the scope and order of a history. Yet it remains Winthrops chief work.

Both works are notable for their candid simplicity and honesty. Each book is the most valuable kind of historical sourcean account of events by a man who has been a major figure of his time. Both accounts were written, not from literary ambition, but from a sense of the need to record important events in permanent form. Yet, through a direct and vigorous prose style, each account attained literary excellence. Importance of the Histories

IV.Puritan Thoughts 1. What was a Puritan? The Puritan was a would-be purifier. Puritans wanted to make pure their religious beliefs and practices. The word was coined by the opponents of the group and was applied to them in scorn; it was intended to ridicule them as persons who thought themselves holier or better than others. The undaunted Puritans claimed the name for themselves, adopting it as a badge of honor.

2. What did the Puritans want to do? The Puritans wished to restore simplicity to church services and the authority of the Bible to theology. They felt that the Church of England was too close to the Church of Rome in doctrine, form of worship, and organization of authority. Another point of controversy was that the Church of England was the established church, that is, the official church of the state, and the most extreme Puritans, among them the Plymouth Plantation group, felt the influences of politics and the court had led to corruption within the church.

Puritan Thoughts These Puritans were Separatists--- that is, they wished to break free from the Church of England. The Massachusetts Bay group, on the other hand, wished to reform the church but remain a part of it. Yet once they were settled in the new land, they too moved gradually toward complete separation.

3. What kind of people were the Puritans? Puritans include people from the humblest to the loftiest ranks of English society, both educated and uneducated, poor and rich. The Puritans looked upon themselves as a chosen people, and it followed logically that anyone who challenged their way of life was opposing Gods will and was not to be accepted. They were thus zealous in defense of their own beliefs but often intolerant of the beliefs of others. They drove out of their settlements all those whose opinions seemed dangerous to them.

Puritan Thoughts Puritan opposition to pleasure and the arts has sometimes been exaggerated, but it is true that their lives were disciplined and hard.(P9) Puritans tended to suspect joy and laughter as symptoms of sin. They made strict laws about private morality as well as public behavior. Puritan religious teaching tended to emphasize the image of a wrathful God and to forget his mercy. From this harsh side of Puritan thought comes the picture of what Nathaniel Hawthorne called the stern ( , ) and black-browed ( , ) Puritans. Yet this was indeed one of their aspects, but only one. Governor Bradford and Governor Winthrop were men of character, courage, and noble spirit.

Puritan Thoughts Puritan thoughts: to make pure their religious beliefs and practices, to restore simplicity, to live a hard and disciplined life and oppose pleasure and arts. ( ) John Cotton (1584-1652) and Roger Williams contradictory examples of Puritans

John Cotton The first major intellectual spokesman of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, sometimes called the Patriarch of New England. From the time he came to Boston in 1633, he was the teacher( that is, spiritual leader) of the community, and its guiding influence toward the ideal of theocracy ( a state ruled by the church).

John Cotton John Cottons primary influence was through the pulpit. The people of Massachusetts delighted to hear him preach, and some of his listeners were convinced that he could make no mistake, for God would not suffer Mr. Cotton err. Yet err he did, great and good man that he was. Practical circumstances allied him with much less noble spirits than his own in suppressing differences of opinion.

John Cotton Through John Cotton we can see an important characteristic of the Puritans. They were much more concerned with authority than with democracy. The Puritans faults were those common to persons who hold extreme opinions. Puritanism (the practices and doctrines of the Puritans) was the strongest in the New England region and had great influence upon its history, its people and its literature.

Roger Williams With Williams begins the history of religious toleration in America, and with him, too, the history of the separation of church and state. Williams advocated the freedom of belief. In him we have a balance to John Cotton. Roger Williams was interested in the Indian language. One of his works was A Key into the Language of America; or, A Help to the Language of the Nation in That Part of America Called New England.

Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor Many Puritans wrote verse, sometimes using that form for their narratives of actual events. Most Puritan verse was decidedly plodding ( , ), but the work of the two writers, Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor, rose to the level of real poetry.

Anne Bradstreet Anne Dudley Bradstreet is one of the most interesting of the early poets.

Anne Dudley Bradstreet Both her father and her husband were governors of Massachusetts. Bradstreets first published work appeared in London: The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America. She wrote well when she dealt with the simple events of her daily life. The note of piety, gently sounded, was in her work.

Edward Taylor: Puritan Preacher and Poet The best of the Puritan poets was Edward Taylor. His work followed the style and forms of the leading English poets of the mid- seventeenth century.

Edward Taylor Most of Taylors work treated religious themes, with many poems based directly on the Psalms. Taylor did not publish any of his work. His poems were found in manuscript in 1937, more than two hundred years after his death. This discovery brought Taylor to immediate prominence in the colonial literary history, and enriched American poetic heritage. A complete edition of Taylors poems appeared in 1960.

V. Puritanisms influence on American literature Purpose: pragmatic Contents: practical matter-of-fact accounts of life in the new world; highly theoretical discussions of religious questions. Form: diary, autobiography, sermon, letter Style: tight and logic structure, precise and compact expression, avoidance of rhetorical decoration, adoption of homely imagery, simplicity of diction.

Supplementary Reading: http://web.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/ch ap1/chap1_index.html http://web.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/ch ap1/chap1_index.html 1999. . 1990. 2004.

To My Dear and Loving Husband If ever two were one, then surely we. If ever man were lovd by wife, then thee; If ever wife was happy in a man, Compare with me ye momen if you can. I prize thy love more than whole Mines of gold, Or all the riches that the East doth hold. My love is such that Rivers cannot quench, Nor ought but love from thee, give recompence. Thy love is such I can no way repay, The heavens reward thee manifold I pray. Then while we live, in love let's so persevere, That when we live no more, we may live ever. BY Anne Bradstreet

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part i the literature of colonial america. teaching focus i. historical introductionhistorical...

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