Comparative Texts Flashcards
Richard Wright’s Native Son
1940 - Naturalism
The story of the 20-year-old Bigger Thomas, and African-American use living in utter poverty on Chicago’s South side in the 1930s, who end up accidentally smothering a rich white girl going on to commit more crimes to hide it.
While not apologising for Biggers crime, Wright portrays systemic inevitability behind them, and the cruel way African Americans were treated.
Ernest Hemingway’s A farewell to arms
1929 – modernism
Set during the Italian campaign of WWI, it’s a 1st person account of an American, Frederick Henry, serving as a lieutenant in the ambulance corps of the Italian Army. The novel conveys clear disillusionment with war and characteristics of the lost generation.
Kate Chopin’s The Story of an Hour
1984 – social realism.
Louise Mallard, hears that her husband is dead, and when she discovers that he is alive after all, she dies of shock. Featuring a female protagonist who feels liberation at the news of her husband’s death, “The Story of an Hour” was controversial by American standards of the 1890s.
F.Scott Fitzgerald’s A Diamond as Big as the Ritz
1922 – realism
Novella about John T Unger, a MC boy, visiting an extremely wealthy family for the summer who still have slaves and murder all that have visited to protect their fortune.
Fitzgerald portrays the wealthy as delusional and animalistic.
William Faulkner is a rose for Emily
1930 – southern Gothic.
The short story focuses on Emily Grayson, an upper-class woman in the south, who ends up killing her husband and sleeping next to him for years. The story highlights the corrupt antebellum error, shows the past is not as romantic as America portrays it
Zora Neale Hurston is their eyes were watching God
1937 – at Harlem renaissance.
Protagonist Janie Crawford is ripening from a vibrant, but voiceless, teenage girl into a woman with her finger on the trigger of her own destiny.
It also portrays the reality of black communities and how women were treated.
Nathanial Hawthorne is the Scarlet letter
1850 – romanticism.
Set in puritan Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1642 - 1649, protagonist Hester Prynne who conceives a daughter through an affair, and struggles to create a new life of repentance and dignity.
The book explores the use of legalism, Fin, gender, and guilt
Coventry Patmores Angel in the house
- Popular Victorian image of the ideal wife/woman came to be “the Angel in the House”
- expected to be devoted and submissive to her husband.
- passive and powerless, meek, charming, graceful, sympathetic, self-sacrificing, pious.
- above all–pure.
James Truslow Adam’s “The Epic of America”
coined the term the “American Dream”
Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Women”
- Liberal feminist
- went against John Locke
- women are not naturally inferior to men but appear to be only because they lack education.
Charles Darwin’s “Origin of the Species”
- Social Darwinism
- Survival of the fittest
- Naturalism
