Учебное пособие: History of American Literature

Washington Irving searched the ideal in the patriarchal surrounding of the colonists of the XVIII century & he created a poetical image of «old worldly» America; Fenimore Cooper & Herman Melville considered the ideal the free life of uncivilized nations of the islands of the Pacific or the Indians; S. Judd & I. Hippard searched for support in Christian socialism.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)

Edgar Allan Poe is certainly one of the best known and most popular of American writers. His stories are read by children, probed with the tools of psychoanalysis by critics, and transformed into films. His poems, notably «The Raven», «To Helen» and «Annable Lee», are widely anthologized. And his critical notion that a poem should be readable in a single sitting so as not to mute its single effect is a familiar critical principle. More importantly, Poe’s poetic theories, outlined in such pieces as «The Poetic Principle», «The Rationale of Verse» and «The Philosophy of Composition, had a profound influence on the French symbolist movement.

Before he became a famous poet and short – storey writer, Poe was known as a journalist and magazine editor. He wrote numerous reviews about works now forgotten while producing his own memerable tales and poems. And though he never realized his dream of founding a literary magazine of his own, be contributed to many, including those he edited. Aa a writer for popular periodicals like the «Broadway Journals» and Graham’s «Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine», and as an editor of literary periodicalssuch as the «Southern Literary Messenger» Poe came to understand very well the audiences who read his work. He aimed his work, as he wrote, «not above the popular, or below the critical, taste» turning the fictional conventions of his own time to odd account. In tales such as «Ligeia» and «The Fall of the House of Usher», for example he put his personal stamp on the gothic horror story. He remodeled the tale of exploration in works like «A Descent into theMaelstorm», and he developed the genre of the detective story, or «tale of racionation» as he called it, with such stories as «The Gold Bug», «The Murders in the Rue Morgue», and «The Purlioned Letter». Still another genre he touched on was science fiction with his fantastic story» The Balloon Hoax». As various as was Poe’s genius and as varied as were the fictional subgenres he worked in, one element of his work remains consistent: his concern with the workings of the human mind.

Writers as diverse as Bandelaire and Dostoevsky admired Poe’s work. Bandelaire, who translated many of Poe’s tales, in fact, acknowledged Poe’s influence by writing that if Poe hadn’t existed Bandelaire would have had to invent him. Dostoevsky was unstiuting in his praise of Poe’s revelations of minds at war with thenselves. Although Dostoevsky’s own explorations of extreme states of consciosness and his dramatic depictions of behavior honed by guilt are more ambitious and monumental than Poe’s sketches and tales, the Russian writer felt a kindship with Poe.

Poe’s life was as tormented as the minds of his stories narrators. He was born to itinerant actors in Boston. His father died when he was a year old and his mother a year later. Edgar was and his brother and sister were taken as foster children into the Rome of a Richmond tobacco merchant, John Allan. Poe was educated in England and at the University of Vifginia, where he was provided with insafficient funds for food, books, and clothing by John Allan. Living among wealthy young men, Poe resorted to gambling, wich further worsened his financial situation and contributed what was an already seriously strained relationship with his foster father, who disapproved of his literary ambitions. The upshot was that Poe withdrew from the university and was left to make his own way as an author.

In 1837 he moned his familyfrom Baltimore to New York, where he published his only full-length fictional work, «The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym». In 1840 he published his «Tales of the Grotesqu and Arabesque» (1840). Poe borrowed the terms «grotesque» and «arabesque» from the Romantic poet and novelist Sir Walter Scott, and meant them to suggest the terror associated with the bizarre and the beautiful associated with the poetic. He also meant to suggest that both elements were present in many stories in his collection.

«The Fall of the House of Usher» is among Poe’s most famous and most accomplished tales. The house that falls is both the literal Usher habitation and the family it signifies. The house also represents the mind of Roderick Usher. In its density of detail, bizarre events, and uncanny tone, the story suggest gothic fiction. In its psychological richness and fainted family history, it reaches back to Greek tragedy.

«The Cask of Amontillado» examplifies Poe’s genius at displaying a mad narrator whose intent is to convince his listeners of his sanity. Perhaps Poe’s best – known example of this type is the narrator of «The Tell – Tale Heart». But «The Cask of Amontilado» is an even richer story, with Poe pulling out all the stops in displaying multiple ironies while his narrator fels compelled to tell somebody of the perfect murder he committed fifty years before. The question is why he tells this tale after so many years.

In «The Purloined Letter» Poe gives way to his bent for stories of crime and punishment, this time from the outside point of view of the detective rather than from inside the criminals mind. Rather than considering what he would have done in like circumstances, the detective, Monsieur Dupin, must try to think the way the criminal thought, which is precisely what he does en route to to solving the case. The story celebrates Poe’s appreciation of the rational mind and contains a number of examples of riddles and games in which Poe delighted. It also ends with an elaborate puzzle built on a complex literary allusion, which contains the key Poe uses to unlock the inticacies of the story’s plot.

Poe’s fictional performances delighted audience in his own time continue to engage and intrigue readers today. Even though his style is ornate and his language far from colloquial, he remains a most readable writer, largely because he builds suspense, creates atmosphere, and probes the psychological complexities of his characters’ minds and hearts. If it is the horror of his stories that first draws readers in, it is Poe’s psychological richness and his control of tone that continue to bring them back for repeated readings of some inmatchable stories.

The Transcendentalists

Transcendentalism emerged in the 30ies. This time witnessed noticeable sharpening of capitalist contradictions. People began their strikes, workers uprising and unions helped the appearance of romanticists, who stood agains mercantalism. There began chasses after dollars. The new literary trend leaked upon the aesthetics of romanticism and it was a new branch of romanticism.

In 1836 there was founded «Transcendentalist Club» at the head of which stood Ralph Waldo Emerson. The members of the Club were Henry David Thorean (1817–1862), Teodore Parker, George Reeply, Amos Alcolt, Elizabeth Pibody, Margaret Fuller (1810–1850) and others.

Transcendentalism is a specific American philosophical and literary trend.

To transcend something is to rise above it, to pass beyond its limits.

Transcendentalism is based on the belief that the most fundamental truths about life and death can be reached only by senses. The transcendentalism believed that each and every man and woman living as a true individual, free from restrain dogma and dull habits of thought, could know something spiritual reality but could not know it through logic or the data of the senses.

Transcendentalists did not have a strict doctrine or code. This trend is more a tendency, an attitude, than it is a philosophy.

Nature played an impotant role in the trenscendentalist view. Nature was divine, alive with spirit, the human mind could read nature, find truths in it. To live in harmony with nature, to allow one^s deepest intaitive being to communicate with nature, was a source of goodness and inspiration.

The trnscendentalists believed that deep intaition of a stiritual reality is available to us only if we allow ourselves to be individuals, and Transcentalist writing places a strong emphasis on individualism.

Trenscendentalists assert that the powers of the individual mind and soul are equally available to all people. These powers are not dependent upon wealth or background or education. We all have a potential equality as spiritual beings, and the divinity within each of us can be realized by the learned minister and the scholar. For Emerson every person can be a kind of poet, realising individual imaginative power.

Society, with its emphasis on material succes, is often seen as a source of corruption.

The tone of transcendentalism writing is often optimistic and aspiring. It frequently suggests that the individual, in hormony with the divine universe, can transform the world. The New England movement, as represented by Emerson and others, has characterized by the absence of a forcual system of thought, the exeltation of the spiritual in a general sense over the material, and the immanence of the divine all the creation, especially as set forth in Emerson’s «Oversoul». Transcendentalists state that only practice, experience, the surrounding world form a person. They thought that a man is by birth inherent in undestending truth and errors, good and evil and that these ideas transcendental, i.e. they come to a man without experience. But the transcendentalists condemned the moral and the practice of bourgeois America, its ideals. Transcendentalism became a kind of a protest form of American intellegentia against aethetically pushing sides of capitalist progress in the USA.

Transcendentalists thought that the society would develop homoniously, if evry person did his best. At the same time the transcendentalists were anxious about the corruption of the American society, wallowed in mercenary calculations, which ignored spiritual interestes.

Rejecting Calvinism and the materialism of society, Emerson and Thoreau asserted their beliefs in deism, in individualism and self-reliance, and in the for national literature. These ideas, most clearly expressed in Emerson’s «Nature» (1836) or «Self-Reliance» (1841) and in Thoreau’s «Walden» (1854) or «Civil Disobedience» (1848), directly influenced three groups of writers:

The writers of the «American Renaissance», Hawthorne, Poe and Melvill, whose symbolic and imaginative works are however more pessimistic, dealing with the individual caught between his own values and those of society, (cf. Edgar Allan Poe’s «Tales»; Nathaniel Hawthrone’s «The Scarlet Letter» (1850) or «The House of the Seven Gables» (1851); Herman Melville’s «Moby Dick» (1851).

Walt Whitman, the prophet and seer, the believer in democracy, in the vitality of man and in the necessary emergency of an American poetry («Leaves of Grass», 1855).

The Schoolroom or Household Poets, Longfellow, Lowell and Whittier, so called because of the tremendous popularity of their works which were read at home and in school. They often used historical themes, folk materials, and traditional forms such as the ballad (e.g. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s «Evangeline», 1847, or «The Song of Hiawatha», 1855); John Greenleaf Whitter’s «Snow-Bound: A Winter Idyll» (1866); James Russell Lowell’s «The Biglow Papers» (1846–1848), and «A Fable for Critics» (1848).

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

Ralph Waldo Emerson’s life was rather quiet and well ordered, but it was full of ideas. Emerson was born in Boston. He attended Harvard University, studied theology. In 1829 he became a Unitarian minster. He made a trip to Europe after the trip he settled in the village of Concord, Massachusetts. At Concord he became a member of the Transcendental Club. It was at Concord that Emerson composed his first book, treatise «Nature» (1836). His address called «The American Sholar» (1837) has been an inspiration to generations of young Americans. Emerson achieved national fame after his «Essays» in 1841. Then came «Essays: Second Series» (1844), «Representative Men» (1849) and «The Conduct of Live» (1860).

When he was a young man, Emerson began writing what he called his «Savings Bank» the remarkable journals and notebooks that were not published in full until almost a centure after his death. We read in those writings his daily thoughts and observations. He traveled widely throughout the coutry, delivering lectures in a rich and beautiful voice. His optimism, his believe in the vast possibilities of mind and spirit suited the American nation.