A brief outline of North American literature

Nomad Education

Description

Etude d'un film / Vocabulaire ; Etude d'un film / Méthodologie ; A brief outline of English literature ; A brief outline of North American literature ; A few quotations

Informations

• Publié par: Nomad_Education
• Date de parution: 01 janvier 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 5
• Langue: Français

Extrait

A brief outline of North American literature (1)

Pour pouvoir replacer les oeuvres étudiées dans leur contexte historique, voici l’essentiel des repères à retenir.

th th The 18 -19 centuries

•Benjamin Franklin wrote hisAutobiography(1791). It is according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica a «quintessentiallyAmerican life story».

•As the country expanded, the Frontier became a source of inspiration. James Fennimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans(1826) andThe Deerslayer(1841) deal with life on the Frontier.

•Transcendentalism was a philosophical and literary movement.

•Transcendentalists believed that all of creation is a whole which shares a common soul. People should rely on themselves (and not necessarily society or their government) and practise civil disobedience when it is necessary.

•Ralph Waldo Emerson explained these ideas in his essays and Henry David Thoreau described his life in the woods inWalden(1854).

•The poet Walt Whitman (1819-1892) was inuenced by Transcendentalism. His collectionLeaves of Grass(1855) has become a classic of American literature, although critics were very negative when it îrst came out.

•Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) wrote poems and short stories. He is said to have written the îrst detective story:The Murders in the Rue Morgue(1841).

•Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864): his most famous novel isThe Scarlet Letter.

•Herman Melville’s novelMoby Dick(1851) which tells the story of the hunting of a white whale has become a world classic.

•Harriet Beecher Stowe publishedUncle Tom’s Cabinas a series between 1851–52. This story is said to have helped the anti-slavery movement in the Northern states.

•Mark Twain’s novelsThe Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876),Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) are satires of life in the South at the time.

•Stephen Crane (1871-1900), Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) and Frank Norris (1870-1902) wrote naturalist novels, in which people’s lives are determined by their environment. Crane’s best known novel isThe Red Badge of Courage, Dreiser’s isSister Carrieand Norris’s isThe Octopus.

•Henry James’s «writing shows features of both 19th-century realism and naturalism and 20th-century modernism» (Encyclopaedia Britannica). His best-known novels areThe American (1877),The Portrait of a Lady(1881) andThe Turn of the Screw(1898).

•Most of Emily Dickinson’s poems were published after her death in 1886. She spent her life as a recluse, refusing to see anyone.

Spé LLCE Anglais / Terminale