american renaissance

Question 1

american renaissance

Answer 1

• first major era of american (fictional) literature
• rebirth of culture
• 1830s-50s
• most represented era in AM lit besides 1920s-30s

Question 2

washington irving

Answer 2

• before american renaissance
• first american to earn international reputation in literature, deemed international author by sir walter scott, a scottish author
• from upstate NY, most of his stories were set there
• copied brit lit because it was what most europeans considered acceptable, but stories that made him famous in his era are no longer his most famous

Question 3

irving’s stories

Answer 3

• the sketch book (1819), book of short stories
• the legend of sleepy hollow
• rip van winkle

Question 4

herman melville’s stories

Answer 4

• moby-dick, whale bites whalers leg off, captain becomes obsessed w/getting revenge and after they find the whale again it sinks the ship and everyone dies except the narrator, dangers of revenge/obsession
• benito cereno, slave revolt on slave ship where slaves fool spanish captain into thinking they’re in charge while they steal their ship

Question 5

nathaniel hawthorne

Answer 5

• the scarlet letter
• the house of the seven gables
• the blithedale romance, making people working on communal farm look bad
• twice-told tales
• held grudges and was regarded as best american writer but didn’t sell well

Question 6

ralph waldo emerson

Answer 6

• fan of nature, self reliance, and the over-soul
• nonfiction

Question 7

harriet jacobs

Answer 7

• incidents in the life of a slave girl
• escaped slavery and lived in crawlspace for 7 years

Question 8

frederick douglass

Answer 8

• narrative of frederick douglass and escaped slave written by himself, my bondage and my freedom

Question 9

henry david thoreau

Answer 9

• student of emerson, believed in nature like him
• influenced gandhi who influenced MLK
• resistance to civil gov

Question 10

walt whitman

Answer 10

• leaves of grass
• not very deep

Question 11

margaret fuller

Answer 11

• the great lawsuit
• didactic (moral meaning, intending to teach), not artistic
• feminism

Question 12

romanticism

Answer 12

• preached emotions and personal connections with nature, revolt against scientific rationalism of the enlightenment and the industrial revolution
• in europe and america
• emphasizes how you are formed by the world around you

Question 13

transcendentalism

Answer 13

• branch of romanticism
• emerson as leader, thoreau, fuller, kind of whitman
• emphasizes individuals’ experiences with world, transcending physical bounds
• believed people are inherently good and that society should let them be good, not stop them from being bad
• embraced being trusting and letting people put themselves on path to enlightenment

Question 14

the over-soul

Answer 14

• shared universal soul that everyone’s individual soul is connected to
• transcends physical world
• nature symbolizes spiritual world

Question 15

samuel taylor coleridge

Answer 15

• british poet, essayist, abolitionist
• emerson copied his writing

Question 16

intersubjectivity

Answer 16

• deep intermixing between 2 consciousnesses in a way that changes one or both of them
• things are changed by environment, unlike today where people believe you reveal who you truly were the whole time
  ex. frederick douglass’s encounter with covey changed him into the escaped slave

Question 17

rip van winkle

Answer 17

• rip’s unchanging lifestyle with dutch origins represents calm of dutch
• when he gets back and the town is changed, that is representative of industrialization

Question 18

legend of sleepy hollow

Answer 18

• dutch residents of sleepy hollow (tarry town, to delay/linger) are calm and peaceful
• ichabod crane is new english, skinny and famine-like, represents endless hunger and he imagines eating all the food on the van tassel farm and selling the farm to move west
• van tassles are content with what they have
• bron van brunt represents dutch lifestyle, what katrina chooses, rooster protects barn like how he protects her
• gunpowder the horse = industrialization

Question 19

the purloined letter

Answer 19

• edgar allen poe
• dupin is changed by his connection to the minister and his revenge is a result of the minister’s actions, not of dupin’s
• dupin understands how minister thinks and where he’d hide letter
• “so baneful a scheme, if not worthy of atreus, is worthy of thyestes”

Question 20

the fall of the house of usher

Answer 20

• edgar allen poe
• close connections can be negative
• intersubjectivity of siblings and house/family, family was too connected to each other (incest) and house
• when family fell, house fell

Question 21

the minister’s black veil

Answer 21

• nathaniel hawthorne
• lack of connectivity and face to face connection
• everyone wears veil, nobody shows their true self

Question 22

the birthmark

Answer 22

• nathaniel hawthorne
• negativity of trying to change person into perfection by taking away what makes them a person, destroying them
• artificial vs nature
• georgiana and birthmark are imperfect, aminadab is rugged and represents the imperfect reality of nature
• alymer blocks out sun from his lab, blocks out nature and sees georgiana as experiment, disconnected from her as a person

Question 23

bartleby the scrivener

Answer 23

• herman melville
• anti industrialization/wallstreet, rise of ny and lifeless jobs made people soulless and disconnected from each other
• bartleby had no light from nature because building blocked window, growth of wallstreet/industrialization inferes with connection and nature