TITLE: "FROM PURITANISM TO POSTMODERNISM"
SUBTITLE: "A History of American Literature"
AUTHOR: Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury
PUBLISHER: Penguin
EDITION: New York, New York (USA). 1991 (1991).
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CONTENTS:
PREFACE
PART I - THE LITERATURE OF BRITISH AMERICA
1. The Puritan Legacy
2. Awakening and Enlightenment
PART II - FROM COLONIAL OUTPOST TO CULTURAL PROVINCE
3. Revolution and (In)dependence
4. American Naissance
5. Yea-saying and Nay-saying
PART III - NATIVE AND COSMOPOLITAN CROSSCURRENTS: FROM
LOCAL COLOR TO REALISM AND NATURALISM
6. Secession and Loyalty
7. Muckrackers and Early Moderns
PART IV - MODERNISM IN THE AMERICAN GRAIN
8. Outland Darts and Homemade Worlds
9. The Second Flowering
10. Radical Reassessments
11. Strange Realities, Adequate Fictions
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SUMMARY:
PREFACE
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o Modernism is usually understood as a writing that is "unplaced" or
"unhoused". Hugh Kenner has a different point of view, suggesting
that Modernism actually did find a home: America.
o Nevertheless, a collaboration between European and American Modernists
did eventually develop and fed each other. There are quite a few examples
of such fruitful exchange of influences, and they took place mainly around
the two World Wars.
o Around a hundred years ago, it was Walt Whitman who expressed the view
that since the US was behind so many material and democratic changes in
the world, it was only a matter of time before it also created its own
great modern literature. This idea was also widely shared on the other
side of the Atlantic.
o However, it took a while for all this to happen. As recently as between
1888 and 1890, Edmund Clarence Stedman and E. M. Hutchinson compiled their
eleven-volume "Library of American Literature", from colonial times to
present. This work completely ignored Melville, and other authors who
would be recognized later on were considered only superficially: Whitman,
Poe, Hawthorne... It pretty much limited the true American literature
to what came to be called "the Genteel Tradition". Actually, still at
the time of the First World war there were many doubts as to whether
there was such a thing as a proper American literature that was worth
considering.
o It was not until the 1920s when the American literary past was somehow
"reinvented" at the same time that it underwent a major flowering and
started to influence the international literary scene. All of a sudden,
"once-major writers became minor, and once-minor writers like Melville,
Hawthorne and 'our cousin Mr. Poe' became major" (p. XIV).
o During the 1930s it was mainly the socioeconomic past of American
literature that was reconstructed, mainly as a consequence of the social
and political events of the time. Then, in the 1940s, American ideals
had to be re-energized as a consequence of the war. In the 1950s, as
the role of the nation in the international community raised, several
works sought the "distinctive American themes, myths, languages and
psychic motifs with the means of modern criticism and the conviction
that there was a major tradition to be recovered and explored" (p. XIV).
o Therefore, the idea of nationality has always been a constant in American
literature. The search for the "Americannes" of American literature
even became obsessive to quite a few authors. And yet, in spite of all
these efforts, it has always "remained part of a broad Western tradition,
from which it has drawn at least some of its usable past, to whose present
it has always contributed. Now, by virtue not only of its quality but
its modern resonance, and indeed America's own power of influence and
distribution as well as its posession of a world language, American
literature more than ever exists for more people than simply the
Americans" (p. XIX).
PART I - THE LITERATURE OF BRITISH AMERICA
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1. The Puritan Legacy
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o "A fundamental difference exists between American literature and nearly
all the other major literary traditions of the world: it is essentially
a modern, recent and international literature" (p. 3).
o American literature can only be understood as a consequence of "the
meeting between the land with its elusive and usually despised 'Indians'
and the discoverers and settlers who left the developed, literate
cultures of Renaissance Europe, first to explore and conquer, then to
populate, what they generally considered a virgin continent -a 'New World'
already promised them in their own mythology, now discovered by their
own talent and curiosity" (p. 3).
o But this mythological idea of America was not only in the minds of those
who came to the continent during the 17th century. It had been part of
the European intellectual tradition for quite a while, and it may be found
in the old myths of Avalon, Atlantis, the Seven Cities of Antillia, Canaan
or Paradise Renewed. "The idea of America as an exceptional place somehow
different from all others endures to this day, but it is not a myth of
modern American nationalism or recent political rhetoric. It is an
invention of Europe, as old as Western history itself." (p. 5) As such,
this utopian idea of America influenced pretty much every person who
crossed the ocean in the subsequent centuries.
o The first American books from the European point of view are "narratives
of travel and exploration, of religious mission and entrepeneurial
activity, letters home, reports to emperors and bishops, telling of wonders
seen, dangers risked, coasts charted, hopes justified or dashed, souls
saved or lost, tributes taken or evaded, treasures found or missed. (...)
Often these are practical reports or exhortations to colonization, but at
the same time the imaginary myths began to extend" (p. 6). After this,
came more in depth works: "Early explorers' accounts of navigation,
exploration, privation and wonder began yielding to annals, geographical
records, social, scientific and naturalist observations. When the first
permanent English settlement was founded under difficult and dangerous
circumstances at Jamestown in Virginia in 1607, it had its recorder,
Captain John Smith." (p. 7) "A True Relation of such occurrences and
accidents of noate as hath hapned in Virginia since the first planting of
the Colonny" was published in London in 1608, and created the first great
romantic tale of the new land with its story of John Smith's rescue by
the Indian princess Pocahontas. He also had to deal with the difficulties
of writing in a new territory: "He shows us both the need to narrate the
new and the problems involved in such narration. Introducing the word
into new space, he tries to give plot and purpose to travel and the
landscape." (p. 8)
o Soon thereafter the colonies multiplied: Plymouth Plantation (1620),
Massachusetts Bay (1630), Maryland (1634), Rhode Island (1636), New York
(1664), Pennsylvania (1681)... "Among these settlers were some who truly
believed this was the new beginning, a fresh start for history and
religion, a millenarian enterprise. They were the Puritans, who,
determined to maintain the purity of their separatist Protestant faith,
did aim to begin anew and find in that process of erecting towns,
peopling countries, teaching virtue and reforming things unjust a truly
fresh start." (p. 8) Just like Captain Smith, they also chronicled
everything they did, which ended in the very first book published in
America: "Bay Psalme Book" (1640). Nevertheless, although they wrote for
themselves and their successors, there is no doubt that they also had
the European readers in mind. The theme was now far more bathed in a
providential light, and the Bible (especially the concepts of Chosen
People and the Promised Land) were ever present.
o The leader of the Mayflower Separatists, John Bradford, wrote a personal
journal that was completed in 1650 (he started it in 1630), but was not
published until 1856. Bradford, who was governor of Plymouth, writes as
if they are "God's Chosen People, sent on a divine errand into the
wilderness." (p. 10) This same vision also influenced other similar
books, such as "The History of New England from 1630 to 1649", written
by John Winthrop, the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (it was
not published until much later too, in 1825-26). "The Puritnas were,
after all, attempting to found a new order of society based on a new
covenant of men and a new relation to religion and law. Everything was
thereby made ripe for interpretation. For those charged with the quest,
it seemed that the whole world watched as God and Satan contested the
meaning of human time on the American shore. The writer's urgent task
was to displace the traditional center of historical significance in
Europe and direct it onto the small band of spiritual pioneers who, for
the world's sake, had accepted God's injunction to establish His Kingdom
in the wilderness." (p. 14) In this respect, Cotton Mather's "Magnalia
Christi" can be considered the culmination of this process.
o "'The plaine style', the millenarian expectation, the ceaseless search
for the relationship between God's and man's history, between providential
intentions and the individual conscience: these were the essential
elements the Separatists brought with them when they left Britain to found
their Bible commonwealth. Running through their concerned recording was
a metaphysic of writing which endlessly sought meaning by separating the
word from ornate and ceremonial usage to attach it again to good
conscience and to revelation. (...) In Puritan experience, writer and
audience alike distrusted 'tainted sermons', talk or writing striving
for decoration or ceremonial. Unlike the devotional elegance of
Catholic or Anglican writing, this was language resacralized by its own
congregation, shaped by specific theological, social and political
assumptions." (p. 15) This was precisely the style of preachers such as
John Cotton, Thomas Hooker or Increase Mather.
o "Central to the Puritan's life was the question of individual election
and damnation, the pursuit by each man of God's works, the relation of
private destiny to predestined purpose. Besides the history and the
sermon, there was the journal, the recording of the individual life."
(p. 17) This tradition of the personal journal would have a deep
influence in American literature, and can be seen behind such important
works as Benjamin Franklin's "Autobiography".
o Therefore, most of the American literature from the Puritan period was
what we can call "non-imaginative" literature: journals, history, annals,
records, scientific observations... "Theater was condemned, and prose
fiction, in the age when the novel was finding itself abroad, was deeply
distrusted. Poetry, though important, had a rigorously defined place.
(...) The Puritan view of the word as a potential revelation saw allegory
and metaphor essentially as connective tissue linking humankind to divine
truth and limited the larger play of the imagination but never totally
denied it. (...) In this, Puritan thought anticipated many aspects of
Romanticism, especially that brand of it we call transcendentalism and
find notably American" (pp. 18-19). As a consequence of all this, to
this day, the Puritan approach to the arts is quite often identified
with "The New England Primer", which was used to teach the alphabet to
generations of kids using "a dogmatic set of mnemonic rhymes" that also
served the purpose of teaching the Puritan morals.
o Nevertheless, Puritan poetry did exist: Michael Wigglesworth's "The Day
of Doom", Anne Bradstreet's "The Tenth Muse, Lately Sprung Up in America"
(she may have been the first major woman poet in the English language),
and the minister Edward Taylor's poems dedicated to the glory and goodness
of God. "Taylor's poems pass beyond literary artifice to become emblems
of transcendent relationships, beyond allegory into the moral, psychological
and symbolic intensity that comes to characterize so much of the richest
American writing, from Emerson, Hawthorne and Melville through Emily
Dickinson and Henry James to William Faulkner." (p. 26)
o "(...) though the novel eventually became a major American form, it was
slow to put down roots. But one form of prose story, arising directly
out of the Puritan trials in the wilderness, did reach a striking level
of creative energy -- the Indian-captivity narratives. (...) The Indian-
captivity narratives can be read as the record of this story, another form
of providential history and annal, but they also became in time a
prototype of popular American writing, dominating publication during the
last years of the seventeenth century and serving as essential source for
much later American fiction. (...) These captivity stories tell of being
taken by the Indians, enduring dreadful hardships, witnessing horrors,
facing the cruelty of captors toward their prisoners, then of a rescue or
escape which restores the narrator and permits him or her to recount these
adventures to seek out their providential meaning." (pp. 26-27) Of all
these, perhaps the most important example was Mrs. Mary Rowlandson's
"The Soveraignty and Goodness of God, Together With the Faithfulness of
His Promises Displayed: Being a Narrative of the Captivity and Restauration
of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson" (1682).
o "By the end of the seventeenth century, New England was a dense, settled
culture, bookish, largely led by its ministers, in relatively close contact
with English and European thought. It was also a society confirmed by its
own history and the failure of the Puritan Revolution in Britain (in which
New Englanders participated) in its redemptive purpose and its sense of
living out an elected, providential history on American soil. It was a
culture of biblical promise and manifest purpose that deliberately excluded
much from without and within" (p. 29).
o "In the 1920s, when the modern American arts flowered, fierce debates still
raged about the destructive power of Puritan influence: it was frequently
held responsible for all that was materialistic, commercial and anti-
aesthetic in the American view of life. Critics blamed the Puritan heritage
for much that seemed to limit American writing: its heavily allegorizing
disposition, its failure to open out to experience or the ambiguity of the
symbol, its lack of inclusiveness, its dull response to the world of nature,
its rigorous moralism and its Anglo-Saxonism. More recently, a revival of
interest in the Puritan heritage has grown to the point of arguing its
centrality for the American imagination. (...) Neither view is entirely
true.
2. Awakening and Enlightenment
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