Pre-revolutionary southern literature was aristocratic and secular, reflecting the dominant social and economic systems of the southern plantations. Early English immigrants were drawn to the southern colonies because of economic opportunity rather than religious freedom.
Although many southerners were poor farmers or tradespeople living not much better than slaves, the southern literate upper class was shaped by the classical, Old World ideal of a noble landed gentry made possible by slavery. The institution released wealthy southern whites from manual labor, afforded them leisure, and made the dream of an aristocratic life in the American wilderness possible. The Puritan emphasis on hard work, education, and earnest earnestness was rare — instead we hear of such pleasures as horseback riding and hunting. The church was the focus of a genteel social life, not a forum for minute examinations of conscience.
Southern culture naturally revolved around the ideal of the gentleman. A Renaissance man equally good at managing a farm and reading classical Greek, he had the power of a feudal lord.
William Byrd (1674-1744)describes the gracious way of life at his plantation, Westover, in his famous letter of 1726 to his English friend Charles Boyle, Earl of Orrery: “Besides the advantages of pure air, we abound in all kinds of provisions without expense (I mean we who have plantations). I have a large family of my own, and my doors are open to everybody, yet I have no bills to pay, and half-a-crown will rest undisturbed in my pockets for many moons altogether. Like one of the patriarchs, I have my flock and herds, my bondmen and bondwomen, and every sort of trade amongst my own servants, so that I live in a kind of independence on everyone but Providence”.
William Byrd epitomizes the spirit of the southern colonial gentry. The heir to 1,040 hectares, which he enlarged to 7,160 hectares, he was a merchant, trader, and planter. His library of 3,600 books was the largest in the South. He was born with a lively intelligence that his father augmented by sending him to excellent schools in England and Holland. He visited the French Court, became a Fellow of the Royal Society, and was friendly with some of the leading English writers of his day, particularly William Wycherley and William Congreve. His London diaries are the opposite of those of the New England Puritans, full of fancy dinners, glittering parties, and womanizing, with little introspective soul-searching.
Byrd is best known today for his lively History of the Dividing Line, a diary of a 1729 trip of some weeks and 960 kilometers into the interior to survey the line dividing the neighboring colonies of Virginia and North Carolina. The quick impressions that vast wilderness, Indians, half-savage whites, wild beasts, and every sort of difficulty made on this civilized gentleman form a uniquely American and very southern book. He ridicules the first Virginia colonists, “about a hundred men, most of them reprobates of good families,” and jokes that at Jamestown, “like true Englishmen, they built a church that cost no more than fifty pounds, and a tavern that cost five hundred.” Byrd’s writings are fine examples of the keen interest southerners took in the material world: the land, Indians, plants, animals, and settlers. Journey to the Land of Eden: in the Year 1733; Progress to the Mines: in the Year 1732.
Robert Beverley (c. 1673-1722), another wealthy planter and author of The History and Present State of Virginia (1705, 1722) records the history of the Virginia colony in a humane and vigorous style. Like Byrd, he admired the Indians and remarked on the strange European superstitions about Virginia — for example, the belief “that the country turns all people black who go there.” He noted the great hospitality of southerners, a trait maintained today.
Humorous satire – a literary work in which human vice or folly is attacked through irony, derision, or wit – appears frequently in the colonial South. A group of irritated settlers lampooned Georgia’s philanthropic founder, General James Oglethorpe, in a tract entitled A True and Historical Narrative of the Colony of Georgia (1741). They pretended to praise him for keeping them so poor and overworked that they had to develop “the valuable virtue of humility” and shun “the anxieties of any further ambition.”
The rowdy, satirical poem “The Sotweed Factor” satirizes the colony of Maryland, where the author, an Englishman named Ebenezer Cook, had unsuccessfully tried his hand as a tobacco merchant. Cook exposed the crude ways of the colony with high-spirited humor, and accused the colonists of cheating him. The poem concludes with an exaggerated curse: “May wrath divine then lay those regions waste / Where no man’s faithful nor a woman chaste.”
In general, the colonial South may fairly be linked with a light, worldly, informative, and realistic literary tradition. Imitative of English literary fashions, the southerners attained imaginative heights in witty, precise observations of distinctive New World conditions.
Important black writers like Olaudah Equiano (Gustavus Vassa) (c.1745-c.1797)and Jupiter Hammon emerged during the colonial period. Equiano, an Ibo from Niger (West Africa), was the first black in America to write an autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789). In the book – an early example of the slave narrative genre – Equiano gives an account of his native land and the horrors and cruelties of his captivity and enslavement in the West Indies. Equiano, who converted to Christianity, movingly laments his cruel “un-Christian” treatment by Christians – a sentiment many African-Americans would voice in centuries to come.
The black American poet Jupiter Hammon (c. 1720-c. 1800), a slave on Long Island, New York, is remembered for his religious poems as well as for An Address to the Negroes of the State of New York (1787), in which he advocated freeing children of slaves instead of condemning them to hereditary slavery. His poem “An Evening Thought” was the first poem published by a black male in America.
In addition some words should be mentioned about the economic condition of a new country. While religious and political freedom may have not have been won automatically by all the new settlers, very little stood in their way to economic success. The raw materials that America seemed to have an endless supply formed the basis of a thriving economy. Rice, corn, wool, sugar, tobacco and cotton were soon satisfying the demands of a growing internal market and being exported to the much bigger market in the mother country, England. The English government was well aware of how important America was as a source of raw materials, and tried in every way it could to have a monopoly on all goods produced there. To this end the Navigation Acts were passed in 1660. Under their terms, all goods had to be transported in English ships and three quarters of the crew had to be English.
At first, the colonies were quite happy to accept the English monopoly of trade because it guaranteed Ihem a secure market. As the eighteenth century progressed, however, the imposition by London of taxes on American goods led many colonists lo believe that, if their economy was to develop fully, they would have to break Lhe link with England, in 1773, as a protest against the tax on tea, a group of colonists dressed as Indians forced their way onto a ship in the port of Boston and threw its cargo of tea into the sea. The incident came to be known as the Boston Tea Party,and was part of a growing tide of discontent that would lead to war.
Thus, we can conclude that:
1) since the first Americans were explorers and settlers, adventurers and idealists who crossed the ocean in search of new opportunities or to escape poverty and intolerance, their writings were matter-of-fact accounts of life in America, which explained colonisation to englishmen back in the homeland. An example of this form of writing is John Smith 's A True Relation of Virginia, which is widely recognised to be the first example of American literature. The early years of colonisation produced a mass of utilitarian writings including biographies, accounts of voyages, diaries, sermons and pamphlets. Much of the material addressed the problems of Church and State;
2) the early years of colonisation produced a mass of utilitarian writings including biographies, accounts of voyages, diaries, sermons and pamphlets. Much of the material addressed the problems of Church and State. There were few examples of fiction, poetry or drama. Anne Bradstreet of Massachusetts published some lyrical poems of high literary quality (1650) and Edward Taylor, who was born in England but lived in Boston, wrote some poetry in the style of John Donne and the metaphysical poets;
3) all seventeenth-century American writings were, both in content and form, similar to English literature of the same period.
PROJECT TASKS
1. Answer the following questions:
· What are the peculiarities of the Colonial literature?
· What are the main genres of the Colonial literature?
· Who are the main representatives of that period of American literature?
· What are the main themes of the Colonial period?
2. Prepare the following topic, summarizing the given information:
· American literature of the Colonial Period: its representatives, peculiar features, genres.
Fulfill Test №3.
Test №3
The test consists of the task which requires 3 minutes to solve it. Choose the right answer and tick it in the blank form.
| Match the following names and items with the correct descriptions. Letters may be used once, more than once, or not at all: | |
| a) William Bradford | 1. This work was directed toward those out of God’s grace (the unsaved) |
| b) Jonathan Edwards | 2. A synonym for this term is minister or one who studies God |
| c) Olaudah Equiano | 3. This work told of fierce storms blowing the Puritans off course. |
| d) Mary Rowlandson | 4. This work’s genre is a history – a factual work that does not include personal information. |
| e) the Mayflower | 5. This author is a Puritan theologian, philosopher, and writer. |
| f) William Byrd | 6. This work portrayed the way slaves slept at night on board ships and the insanity living conditions. |
| g) Of Plymouth Plantation | 7. This work’s genre is a poem. |
| h) “Upon the Burning of Our House” | 8. This author is the first great black autobiographer. |
| i) “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” | 9. Which work does the following question come from? “I blessed His name that gave and took.” |
| k) The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano | 10. She is the first American poet. |
| 11. His wife jumped or fell overboard the Mayflower. | |
| 12. One half of the people described in this work died the first winter. | |
| 13. Which work has the following quotation? “The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string” | |
| 14. This author traveled by slave ship to Barbados. | |
| 15. This author was re-elected thirty times as governor. |
Literature
1. Darrett Rutman, Winthrop's Boston (Chapel Hill, 1965).
2. David Grayson Allen, In English Ways: The Movement of Societies and the Transferal of English Local Law and Custom (Chapel Hill, 1981).
3. David T. Konig, Law and Society in Puritan Massachusetts (1979)
4. Edmund S. Morgan, ed., The Founding of Massachusetts: Historians and the Sources (Indianapolis, 1964
5. Edmund S. Morgan, Puritan Dilemma: The Story of John Winthrop (New York, 1958).
6. http://emp.byui.edu/MarrottR/101_HutchinsonAnne_wikip.pdf.
7. http://www.annehutchinson.com.
8. http://www.hks.harvard.edu/fs/phall/03.%20winthrop,%20Christian%20Cha.pdf.
9. Loewen J.W. Lies My Teacher Told Me // http://www.brotherhooddays.com/forgottenheroes.html.
10. Miller P. Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 1630-1650 (New York, 1970).
11. Miller P. The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (Boston, 1953).
12. Perry Miller, Errand Into the Wilderness (Boston, 1956).
13. Samuel Eliot Morison, Builders of the Bay Colony (Boston, 1930).
14. The Old Navigator, Christopher Columbus // http://www.brotherhooddays.com/HEROES.html.
15. Thomas D.H. Skull Wars // http://www.brotherhooddays.com/forgottenheroes.html.
16. Vanspanckeren K. Outline of American Literature. Revised Edition // U.S. Department of State / Bureau of International Information Programs // http://usinfo.state.gov, 1994. – 177 p. – Pp. 3-13.
17. Winthrop Papers, multivolume (Boston, 1929 -).
MODULE 4
REVOLUTIONARY PERIOD,
ENLIGHTENMENT
MODULE 4
