Topic Clusters

Topics and Continuing Themes

The NAAL website Topics pages are intended to help you make connections among literary works, try out comparisons, and keep important issues in mind as you read in each volume of NAAL. The NAAL period introductions and headnotes thoroughly explain cultural contexts and backgrounds. Reading a text attentively and sympathetically, and understanding the circumstances that produced it, helps readers to assemble a cultural history in which they have a personal stake. You can do this by developing and revisiting important general questions pertaining to a broad array of literary works and an expanse of historical time. How does a text become “literary,” and a candidate for special attention from readers centuries after it is written? What can readers find in such texts that tells them about the past and present of their culture, or provokes and expands their imaginations? What can these texts suggest to twenty-first-century readers about the experience of being human? The topics developed in the following pages expand upon these and other general questions to center your thinking as you read from specific historical periods.

Literature before 1700
First Encounters and Distant Mirrors

Stories of origins are important to us. Every human culture has tried to express its identity in terms of where it came from, and how it took shape. Modern revolutions in the biological and physical sciences have only heightened interest in beginnings, for such narratives energize the imagination, affirm values, and deepen a sense of personal and collective identity. In building a story of beginnings of American literature and culture, we must select from a welter of historical facts and speculations. We also must engage with works that might not seem “American” or “literary” in ways that satisfy every taste. From among these works, can we determine an ancestry for the American literature of today, or for the liveliest, riskiest writing produced on these shores during the intervening centuries?

In Literature to 1700, the available texts can be sorted into two general categories:

1. Works by indigenous peoples, translated by Europeans. These texts have been radically transformed with regard to language, culture, and historical context. In some cases these changes are intentional; in others they are the inevitable result of transporting a work of the imagination from one “world” to another. When a kachina figure is transplanted from a Hopi pueblo to a Boston museum, when a Salish ceremonial mask travels from a cedar lodge on the Northwest coast to a library in downtown San Francisco, these artistic elements undergo a metaphysical change, a change in what they represent as a result of being placed in a foreign context. The translated Native American narrative, moved by print from one place and time to another, undergoes a similar transformation.
2. Works by European explorers. These authors were deeply connected to the European cultures that sent them to the New World, yet also in a sense exiles from those cultures. Among the early explorers and conquistadors were many for whom “home” was a place grown strange, no longer a world of opportunity, safety, identity, and peace. The settlers of Massachusetts Bay had chosen a faith and a way of life that at various times in the seventeenth century made them hunted outcasts in the countries of their birth. To come so far for so long, and to face such peril, required a restless soul, or a conviction that uncharted seas and dangerous wilderness were a better choice than familiar landscapes back at home.

As the NAAL introductions explain, the oral culture of the American indigenous peoples placed special value on collective memory and a community experience of telling and listening. These were not texts written in private to be read privately, in the manner of modern poems or short stories. Instead, these narratives often played an important role in larger ceremonies, interacting with other spoken words, or with rituals that affirmed the uniqueness and importance of a whole people.

Though many of the creation stories and trickster tales were first encountered by Europeans during this period, it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that Euro-Americans, sometimes collaborating with native storytellers, transcribed these narratives with any accuracy or concern for differences in cultural context. As modern readers seeking the “American-ness” inherent in these texts, we have to be aware that they have come by circuitous routes, and might require an extra measure of imagination.

The letters and personal accounts of European wanderers present fewer challenges to the typical modern reader. Beginning with Columbus, they provide a chronicle of Spanish expeditions in Mexico, the North American Southeast, and what is now the Southwest. On the northern Atlantic coast, English narratives emerge in the seventeenth century from those small colonies that survived, with mixed success, in “Virginia,” a territory that originally encompassed much of the New England and Middle Atlantic regions. With the work of such authors as the prolific Samuel de Champlain, French writing developed on the continent in the trading posts and settlements along the St. Lawrence River. Dutch and German voices joined those of other Europeans as settlers from these countries made the Hudson River Valley their home.

General Issues and Questions

1. How does early nonfiction prose—travel accounts, letters, diaries—provide a mirror for our experience as Americans? To achieve an imaginative connection with these texts, should modern Americans consider them individually, or as a kind of chorus from a distant past?
2. To what extent does “reading” these works become an imaginative effort in itself? What do we need to do to bring to life an explorer’s letter, a factual journal or report, or an oral narrative of an adventure or ordeal? How does bringing such texts into the classroom or integrating them into a syllabus transform them?
3. As you read Columbus, Castillo, de Vaca, Harriot, Champlain, Smith, and the Native American trickster tales and creation stories, can you locate moments of “literary” interest similar to the modern sense of the word? Think about plot, characterization, complexity of theme—all common values in the creation of modern literature. In these early narratives, do you find moments or rhetorical strategies that you can talk about with regard to these values?
4. In reading American literature from the seventeenth century, notice how much attention is paid to texts written within a hundred miles of Boston Common. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the English had established settlements along the East Coast as far as Georgia; Spanish-speaking cities thrived in Florida and the Southwest; French colonies had developed along the St. Lawrence River; and powerful Native American peoples flourished in the Appalachians and the Piedmont woodlands. Why is attention typically focused on the literary culture of Puritan New England? What types of dramas unfold in these works that continue to hold interest?
5. From a modern perspective, one notable quality in the writing of Puritan New England—including its poetry, historical chronicles, and meditative and devotional prose—is its concern with sustaining an absolute integrity within the self, a condition in which the spoken or written word, the public deed, the private thought and act, and the system of belief are in perfect accord. Discontinuity among any of these practices would signify a state of sin.
   
   When Anne Bradstreet grieves for the worldly goods lost in “Upon the Burning of Our House,” she then chides herself for pettiness and covetousness, and her anger at her own weakness seems real. In her elegies for her grandchildren, we see her struggling hard to reconcile herself to Divine Justice and the inscrutable ways of Providence. In Edward Taylor’s “Upon Wedlock,” “Let by Rain,” “Huswifery,” and other poems about ordinary experience, the details, pleasures, and woes of daily life are subordinated to a contemplation of the condition of the soul. Quarrels within the self are acknowledged and voiced—but the abiding assumption is that such quarrels must be resolved and left behind if the soul is ever to receive divine grace.
   
   Think about some popular modern novels, stories, plays, films, or poems that treat the revelation of human nature—works in which someone’s “real” character is eventually revealed from beneath social facades. In these works, what are assumed to be the interesting and valuable dimensions of human identity? Do they favor inner peace, or inner conflict? If in today’s literary view unresolved crises and internal contradictions make characters credibly “human,” and the aura of enlightened serenity is a cover-up, how does that thinking compare with literary values in seventeenth-century Puritan New England?

Literature 1700–1820
Reason, Revolution, Romanticism

The vigor and sense of place that spawns interesting literature did eventually thrive in the Middle Colonies; we can see that energy and conviction in texts of Jefferson, Franklin, Freneau, Equiano, and others. In contrast to Puritan voices, Franklin comes across as quite modern: when he sees inconsistency in his own thinking, or a fault in his moral nature—usually having to do with his efficiency or his interactions with his fellow citizens—he pragmatically sets out to correct it; and if his success is incomplete, he seems unfazed. The condition of his soul (from a Puritan perspective) seems to matter little to him, both in his account of himself and during his many decades of happy, worldly achievement.
The Puritan temperament and the mind of the Enlightenment therefore seem opposites—the Puritan text being less accessible, and less empathetic to readers at the beginning of the twenty-first century. To enjoy these works, readers can make comparisons among them.

General Issues and Questions

1. What types of “misreadings” of Puritan ideas do you find in texts by American writers in the Age of Enlightenment, the Revolution, or the Early Republic? What characteristics of seventeenth-century New England thought do Franklin and his contemporaries overlook? Do these misunderstandings reflect a fundamental shift in intellectual and spiritual life?
2. How much does Puritan “integrity” matter to Franklin or Jefferson, and why? How do their prose styles and their understanding of character and the soul reflect that difference?
3. Franklin, de Crèvecoeur, Jefferson, Tyler, Stockton, Paine, and Equiano all seem at times to be struggling against certain social expectations and cultural habits prevalent in their times. For each writer, can you summarize those conventions, and how each resists them?
4. Describe the minority voices in the Puritan and Enlightenment eras. Are there
   qualities that unite them?
5. The political leaders of both Puritan New England and the America of Franklin and Jefferson were male; but there were eloquent women writers at work during these periods as well. Compare the ways in which these women view the world. Do you see temperamental or philosophical differences between the women and the men of the seventeenth and eighteenth century? Among the women writers, do you find resistance to male ways of seeing and of organizing the world? Choose a moment from Winthrop, Franklin, or Jefferson that seems particularly “male” in its perspective, then locate moments in Bradstreet, Rowlandson, Rowson, Stockton, Murray, Morton, or Wheatley that seem to reject or question that style or mentality.
6. On the World Wide Web or in a good textbook, look at an array of Anglo-American paintings from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. Especially look at:
   • American portrait paintings from Puritan New England. Note that there are few Puritan landscape paintings.
   • Eighteenth-century portrait paintings by John Singleton Copley or Joshua Reynolds, two popular American painters who favored portraits. These painters were contemporaries of Franklin, Jefferson, Wheatley, and Equiano. They often included elaborate landscapes as backgrounds in their portraits. Look carefully at these backgrounds.
   • Landscape paintings by Thomas Cole and the Hudson River School, which thrived in the early nineteenth century, when Romantic values spread across North America.

Compare the styles of the Puritan painters, the artists of the Enlightenment, and the American Romantics. Where do you see the greatest contrasts or boldest experimentation in the use of light and dark? Which painters seem happier with disorder and wildness in setting? Which seem to celebrate worldly life, and what kind of worldly life? Which seem to prefer symmetry and serenity in their compositions? Consider a parallel comparison between the narrative or expository styles of prose writers from the Puritan seventeenth century and the Age of Enlightenment, and between the Enlightenment prose writers and authors from the early decades of American Romanticism.