Literatura Estadounidense: Romanticismo, Sentimentalismo y Literatura Nativa

Sentimental fiction

Sentimental fiction: The sentimental novel or the novel of sensibility is an 18th-century literary genre that celebrates the emotional and intellectual concepts of sentiment, sentimentalism, and sensibility. Emphasis is placed on the moral aspects of the novel in order to be accepted: novelists seek to present virtue in the best form and vice in the worst form possible. In sentimental fiction, the empire of the mother and the values given by bonds of womanhood are also sustained. Pre-Civil War women's fiction celebrates matriarchal institutions and idealizes the time of blissful connection between mother and child.

Solipsism

Solipsism: only one's own mind is sure to exist.

Romance

Romance: The European Romantic movement reached America in the early 19th century. American Romanticism was just as individualistic as it was in Europe. Like the Europeans, the American Romantics demonstrated a high level of moral enthusiasm, commitment to individualism and the unfolding of the self, an emphasis on intuitive perception, and the assumption that the natural world was inherently good, while human society was filled with corruption.

American Renaissance

American Renaissance: 1850s → The Great American Renaissance was the first great literary generation, and it developed with the construction of the literary canon.

Native American literature

Native American literature: The first Native American literary texts were offered orally, and they link the earth-surface people with the plants and animals, the rivers and rocks, and all things believed significant in the life of America's first people. The texts tie Indian people to the earth and its life through a spiritual kinship with the living and dead relatives of Native Americans. The history of literature written in English by American Indians parallels the history of white migration across the continent. White exploration and settlement were followed by the arrival of missionaries who converted Indians to Christianity and educated them in religious schools.

Leslie Fiedler

Leslie Fiedler: was an American literary critic, known for his interest in mythography and his championing of genre fiction. His work also involves the application of psychological theories to American literature.

Themes in American Literature

Themes in American Literature: American novels tend to avoid a love story or a passionate encounter. The only example may be The Scarlet Letter, but this passion occurs before the novel begins. The American novel is different from the European one because its essential differences arise from its treatment of sex and of women.

Literary conditions in the pre-Civil War period

Literary conditions in the pre-Civil War period: oral transmission as a literary form; formal elements of oral natives; themes → the ideal hero, a single individual engaged in conflict, who brings it to a crisis and resolves that crisis → individualistic values are affirmed. Unity and singularity are allied concepts, and it is the difference in perception of the significance of people's experience that distinguishes American Indian from non-Indian. Indian ethos is neither individualistic nor conflict-centered. The use of tradition is, for Indians, intertextuality.

Rip Van Winkle

Rip Van Winkle:

• Puer aeternus: eternal child, an older man whose emotional life has remained at an adolescent level.
• Thunder: Thunder is a loud noise associated with lightning. During a lightning flash, the air around the lightning gets very hot. In Rip Van Winkle, the thunder is caused by an old man in the sky playing nine-pins (a type of bowling). The sound of thunder is produced when the ball strikes the pins.
• Judith Fetterley: Female characters appear in all genres of literature, but the roles traditionally assigned to them rarely presented them in a favorable light. Women seldom appeared as protagonists; instead, their function was to support the hero in a variety of ways. Some readers might be familiar with stereotypes such as the schoolmistress, the saloon girl, the nurse, or even the murder victim. However, women, especially wives, were sometimes seen as oppressive, nagging, villainous figures. Fetterley declared that the story Rip Van Winkle is a strong example of how women were sometimes portrayed in American literature through misogyny.

The Scarlet Letter

The Scarlet Letter:

• Nina Baym: explores Hester's role as a mother and the way it empowers her and redefines her in the novel.

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson:

• Religion: She is interested in faith, in God, and in religion, but her poems never claim any understanding of the divine.
• Daisy: the daisy is not following the sun because of freedom—rejection of the submission of the woman to a man.
• Madness: superior, as divinity in all of us.