Topic 46 – Historic configuration of the united states: from independence to secession war. Reference novels: the scarlet letter and the red badge of courage.

OUTLINE

1. INTRODUCTION.

1.1. Aims of the unit.

1.2. Notes on bibliography.

2. A HISTORICAL BACKGROUND FOR THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE: FROM COLONIAL AMERICA TO THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE ( 1607- 1776).

2.1. The seventeenth-century Great Britain: p olitical background.

2.2. Colonial America:a political history.

2.1.1. Earlier non-British colonies .

2.1.2. British colonists: the thirteen colonies.

2.1.2.1. New England colonies.

2.1.2.2. Middle colonies.

2.1.2.3. Southern colonies.

2.1.3. The British colonies: from union to revolution.

2.3. The Declaration of Independence (1776).

3. A HISTORICAL DEVELOPM ENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: FROM THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE TO THE CIVIL WAR.

3.1. The War of Independence (1778).

3.1.1. The aftermath of the war: main consequences.

3.1.1.1. Social consequences.

3.1.1.2. Economic consequences.

3.1.1.3. Political co nsequences.

3.1.2. Before the Civil War.

3.2. The Civil War (1861- 1865).

3.3. The aftermath of the Civil War (1865- 1901).

4. MAIN REFERENCE NOVELS: THE SCARLETT LETTER AND THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE.

4.1. From Colonial Literature to the Declaration of Independence: Early A merican Literature.

4.1.1. The literature of exploration.

4.1.2. Literature in New England.

4.1.2.1. Poetry.

4.1.2.2. Prose.

4.1.3. Literature in Middle and Southern colonies.

4.2. From the War of Independence to the Civil War: Revolutionary Writers.

4.2.1. Poetry.

4.2.2. Prose: The Scarlett Letter .

4.3. From the Civil War onwards: The Red Badge of Courage .

5. EDUCATIONAL IMPLICATIONS IN LANGUAGE TEACHING.

6. CONCLUSION.

7. BIBLIOGRAPHY.

1. INTRODUCTION.

1.1. Aims of the unit.

The present unit, Unit 46, aims to provide a useful introduction to the historical development of the United States of America from the War of Independence to the Civil War so as to examine the link between the changing social, economic, political, cultural and technological conditions of this period and the colonial literature of nineteenth-century in America, namely represented by two reference novels : The Scarlett Letter and The Red Badge of Courage.

As we shall see, these two novels were both shaped by and reflected the prevailing ideologies of the day, which means that they are a reference point in which social, economic, cultural, technogical and political allegiances are placed very much to the fore. Actually, The Scarlett Letter (1850) reflects the situation within the previous years to the Civil War (1861-1865) whereas The Red Badge of Courage (1893) reflects its aftermath. All in all, this is reflected in the organization of the unit. So, we shall present our study in five main chapters (since bibliographical references will not be included as a chapter).

In order to provide a whole account of the historical development of the United States of America from the War of Independence (1778) to the Civil War (1861), it is essential to build up a picture of the situatio n before 1778 which, not only takes us back nearly one century and a half , but also moves us between two continents: America and Europe, that is, between the New World Colonies (New England) and England. This backward-and-forward movement will give us a quick glimpse of two major historical events: the colonization of America (as the source) and the English Civil War (as the final result). This part of American history is just a part of a larger history, of religious and political struggle, of migration, and of seventeenth and eighteenth-century life.

So, on reviewing the political background of the United States, we shall divide our study in three main sections which correspond to three main periods: (1) from Colonial America (the colonization of America) to the Declaration of Inde pendence (1492-1776), (2) from the War of Independence to the Civil War (1778-1861), and finally (3) from the Civil War to President Roosevelt (1860-1901), which coincides with the end of nineteenth century. Yet, we shall namely concentrate on the first period to provide a historical and political background to the War of Independence whereas the two latter aim at examining the main events that took place between the Independence War and the Civil War so as to provide an appropriate background for the already mentioned reference novel.

Chapter 2 namely analyses the period from Colonial America (the colonization of America) to the Declaration of Independence (1607- 1776) so as to provide a historical background for the War of Independence. So, we shall consider (1) the political background of the seventeenth-century Great Britain so as to establish a basis for the political struggle that led to the War of Independence in the United States. Therefore, on reviewing the political history of the United States, special attention must be paid to New England, since both names are attached due to the great importance of the latter as the birthplace of American democracy. Then, we shall analyse (2) the political history of

Colonial America regarding (a) earlier non-Brit ish colonies, and (b) the thirteen British colonies,

including (i) New England colonies, (ii) Middle colonies, and (iii) Southern colonies; (c) the British colonies from their unity to revolution, and (3) the Declaration of Independence (1776).

Chapter 3 will review the historical development of the United States of America from the War of Independence (1778-1783) to the Civil War (1861-1865), as well as the aftermath up to President Roosevelt (1901). Once we have established the social and political background of this period, we will be ready to establish the link to the literary background, in an attempt to understand the context in which the two novels under study are set up. So, we shall review (1) the War of Independence (1778-1783) regarding (a) its aftermath in terms of (i) social, (ii) economical, and (iii) political consequences which shall lead us to the situation (b) before the Civil War, and finally, (2) the Civil War (1861-1865) and (3) the aftermath of the Civil War up (1865-1901).

In Chapter 4, we shall provide an overview of the literary background of this period with the aim of going further into its main literary productions and, in particular, into the two reference novels under study: The Scarlett Letter and The Red Badge of Courage. As we shall see, these two novels were both shaped by and reflected the prevailing ideologies of the day, which means that they are a reference point in which social, economic, cultural, technogical and political allegiances are placed very much to the fore. We shall namely review the development of history and literature in similar periods on the basis of the most outstanding literary hallmark, which will provide a useful introduction to the various relationships between the imaginative literature of America between

1776 and 1865 (and its aftermath) and changing social, economic, political, cultural and technological conditions within this period. Actually, The Scarlett Letter (1850) reflects the situation within the previous years to the Civil War (1861-1865) whereas The Red Badge of Courage (1893) reflects its aftermath.

So, in order to analyse the literary background we shall divide our study in three main sections which correspond to three main historical periods (as stated above): (1) from Colonial Literature to the Declaration of Independence (1492- 1776), where we review (a) the literature of exploration, (b) the literature in New England regarding (i) poetry and (ii) drama; and (c) literature in Middle and Southern colonies. The second block refers to the period (2) from the War of Independence to the Civil War (1778-1861), in which we analyse (a) poetry and (b) prose, where we find Hawthorne’s The Scarlett Letter ; and finally, we address the period (3) from the Civil War onwards (1860-1901), where we find Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage in fictional prose.

Chapter 5 will be devoted to the main educational implications in language teaching regarding the introduction of this issue in the classroom setting. Chapter 6 will offer a conclusion to broadly overview our present study, and Chapter 7 will include all the bibliographical references used to develop this account of the United States’ History and Literature.

1.2. Notes on bibliography.

An influential introduction to the historical and literary background of the United States of America from the War of Independence to the Civil War, is based on Thoorens, Panorama de las literaturas Daimon: Inglaterra y América del Norte. Gran Bretaña y Estados Unidos de América (1969); White, The Horizon Concise History of England. American Heritage (1971); Rogers, The Oxford Illustrated History of English Literature (1987); Albert, A History of English Literature (1990); Speck, Literature and Society in Eighteenth -Century England: Ideology Politics and Culture (1998); Alexander, A History of English Literature (2000); Ward & Trent, The Cambridge History of English and American Literature (2000); Ward & Trent, The Cambridge History of English and American Literature (2000); Allan Neilson, Lectures on the Harvard Classics (2001).

The background for educational implications is based on the theory of communicative competence and communicative approaches to language teaching are provided by the most complete record of current publications within the educational framework is provided by the guidelines in B.O.E. (2004) for both E.S.O. and Bachillerato; and the Council of Europe, Modern Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. A Common European Framework of reference (1998).

2. A HISTORICAL BACKGROUND FOR THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE: FROM COLONIAL AMERICA TO THE DECLARATION OF INDEPENDENCE (1607-1776).

2.1. The seventeenth-century Great Britain: political background.

The seventeenth century has its starting point in the death of Elizabeth I (1603) and the accession of James I to the crown. This period, known as the Stuart Age (1603-1713) and also called the Jacobean Era, the age of Cromwell and the Restoration, is characterized by crisis, civil wars, the

Commonwealth and the Restoration. Similarly, the United States of America were seen as a place

where to hide from political crisis in England.

The political background is to be framed upon the Stuart succession line, thus under the rule of James I (1603-1625); his son, Charles I (1625-1642), who ruled until civil war broke out in 1642; then Cromwell (1642-1660), until monarchy was restored by Charles II (1660-1685); this was followed by his brother, James II (1685-1689) who, in 1668, fled before his invading son- in- law, the Dutchman William of Orange became William III. Then William and Mary II (1689-1707) were succeeded by Mary’s sister, Queen Anne (1702-1713).

This period is traditionally divided into two by the outbreak of the Civil War in 1642 and the temporary overthrow of the monarchy. Yet, although 1642 is considered to be a starting point in this period, there are other key events and key figures which (directly and indirectly) would prepare the ground for us to understand the general conditions of the eighteenth century, and in particular, of the literary situation (regarding the supression of theatre and the ris e of the novel). Thus, these key events are headed by:

1. The figure of James VI, King of Scots (son of Mary, Queen of Scots), who succeeded as James I, King of England is considered to be the starting point of this period (1603-1625). Therefore, he achieved that two crowns were unified, but not the governments of England and Scotland. So, to mark the union of the crowns, a new symbol was designed superimposing the red cross of St George on the white cross of St Andrew. Yet, a closer union of the nations parliaments was rejected by the commons and abandoned after 1607. Eventually, compromise between the crown and Parliament finally achieved a balanced government and the two kingdoms of England and Scotland became joined in the 1707 Act of Union.

One of James I’s first acts of foreign policy was to bring the long war with Spain to an end. Although this greatly helped the English treasury and also James’s reputation (as rex pacificus), the policy was, in part, unpopular because peace meant that both the English and the Dutch had to acknowledge the Spanish claim to a monopoly of trade between their own South American colonies and the rest of the world.

2. Charles I (1625-1649); James I’s son, became King of Great Britain and Ireland on his father’s death from 1625 to 1642, but soon friction between the throne and Parliament began almost at once. The Parliaments of 1625 and 1626 refused to grant funds to the King without redress for their grievances, but Charles, unable to work with Parliament, responded by dissolving the parliaments and ordering a forced loan. For eleven years, Charles ruled without parliament, a period described as ‘the Eleven Years’ Tyranny’, which led to civil war and his eventual judicial execution in 1649 (called a ‘regicide’).

3. This is the reason why we may note that in the succession line, there is an eighteen-year interval between reigns (1642- 1660), called Interregnum, when first Parliament and Oliver

Cromwell established themselves as rulers of England. Yet, this execution changed England

in such a way that after Charles and Cromwell, any regime, monarchical or republican was not trusted. Cromwell, a Puritan leader of the Parliamentary side of the Civil War, declared England a republic, or the so-called ‘Commonwealth’, in 1649 until the colla pse of Cromwell’s Commonwealth and the restoration of Charles II in 1660.

4. Hence In 1660, parliament accepted the restoration of the monarchy along with Charles II’s promise in the form of the ‘Declaration of Breda’ so as to establish a general amnesty and freedom of conscience. Charles (1660-85), who was already King in Scotland since 1651, was proclaimed King of England on 8 May 1660. Charles’s desire to become absolute caused him to favour Catholicism for his subjects as most consistent with absolute monarchy, but his plans to restore Catholicism in Britain led to war with the Netherlands between 1672-74, in support of Louis XIV of France. Yet, after 1660, Christianity was less explicit in polite writing. On his part, Charles II concealed his Catholicism and, when his brother James II tried to restore an absolute monarchy, it was his Catholic appointments that were unacceptable (Alexander, 2000).

5. Moreover, shortly afterwards, a devastating plague (The Black Death) swept through the country in 1665. Already early in the century, the population would already have been weakened by an exceptionally hard winter during which the River Thames had frozen. In spring that year, parishes began to report deaths attributable to the bubonic plague. By November 1665, when the epidemic ceased in the cold weather, the lives of over 100,000 people had been lost.

6. In addition, the Black Death was followed by the Great Fire of London and, as a result, all levels of society were affected, thus population, economy, government and, for our purposes, literature, too. In September 1666, a fire broke out at night in a baker’s shop and quickly became uncontrollable due to a high wind. The fire lasted four days and destroyed two thirds of the city within the walls, so the heritage of centuries was reduced to ashes.

7. Regarding economic changes in the late seventeenth century, one of the most relevant events was the foundation of the Bank of England in 1694. As mentioned above, the continental wars of James II (1685-1689) and William of Orange, known as William III (1689-1707), were really expensive. As a result, England was forced to raise a considerable national debt. In 1694, the Scotsman William Paterson founded the Bank of England to assist the crown by managing the public debt, and eventually it became the national reserve for the British Isles. Yet, in 1697, any further joint-stock banks were forbidden just to secure its position of prominence in England.

8. London society also underwent changes, for instance, “tea, coffee and chocolate were drunk in places of public recreation, and horse-racing became a fixture in a social calendar. It became ‘civilized’ for men to be agreeable, not to converse on religion and politics, and to speak gallantly of the fair sex”(Alexander, 2000:154).

All these events contributed to the most influential change of the seventeenth century, that of

population. Whereas for the first half of the century the population continued to grow and, as a result, there was pressure on food resources, land and jobs, and increased price inflation, the late seventeenth century saw the easing, if not the disappearance of these problems. Family-planning habits started to change and new methods of farming increased dramatically. From the 1670s, England became an exporter as opposed to a net importer of grain. The seventeenth century is also probably the first in English history in which more people emigrated than immigrated, hence the period of American colonization.

2.2. Colonial America: a political history.

The political history of Colonial America will make us comprehend the preparation of the whole people for the radical change of government they were so soon to undergo in British colonies, and the strong spirit of democracy which stood behind the labors of congresses and conventions and gave the cue to the work which they were to perform. We namely aim to offer a brief account of this political evolution from the works of historians as an essentia l preliminary to the next chapter, where we shall analyse how the United States of America was founded in 1776 from British colonies along the Atlantic Coast of North America.

2.2.1. Earlier non-British colonies.

Before British colonists reached the Atlantic Coast of North America, other non-British colonies did it much earlier. For instance:

1. On October 9, 1000 part of North America was discovered accidentally and was given the name of Vinland (Wineland) by the Viking Leif Eriksson , who established there a short- lived colony.

2. Nearly five hundred years later, Portugal, which was a leading country in the European exploration of the world, began charting the far shores of the Atlantic Ocean before Spain began. Yet, Portuguese explorers ( Pedro Alvares Cabral) landed in American coasts (Porto Seguro, Brazil) on April 22, 1500, eight years later than Spain did.

3. In 1492, Christopher Columbus brought this land to Europe’s attention on behalf of Spain, the main colonial power of the day, which focused its efforts on the exploitation of the gold-rich empires of southern Mexico (the Aztec) and of the Andes (the Inca). Portugal, then, was limited by the Treaty of Tordesillas to the lands east of Brazil. Yet, after them no serious colonization efforts were made for decades, until England, France, and Spain began to claim and expand their territory in the New World.

4. Moreover, other explorers came from France. In fact, the first French attempt at

colonization was in 1598 on Sable Island (southeast of present Nova Scotia). This colony went unsupplied and its twelve survivors returned to France in 1605. The next and first successful colony was Acadia founded in 1603 with its town of Port Royal, now Annapolis.

5. Also, during the 17th century, Dutch traders established trade posts and plantations throughout the Americas. However, Dutch settling in North America was not as common as other European nations’ settlements. Many of the Dutch settlements had been abandoned or lost by the end of the century, with the exception of the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba, which remain Dutch territory until this day, and Suriname, which became independent in

1975.

6. We also find explorers from Denmark, who started a colony on St Thomas in 1671, St John in 1718, founded colonies in Greenland in 1721, which is now a self -governing part of the Kingdom of Denmark. During the 18th century, the Virgin Islands in the Caribbean Sea were divided into two territorial units, one English and the other Danish, which were also used as a base for pirates.

7. Other countries followed such as Russia, whose explorers discovered Alaska in 1732.

2.2.2. British colonists: the thirteen colonies.

Therefore, we distinguish two types of earlier colonies: non-Br itish and British; whereas the first group name ly include s Viking, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Dutch and Danish colonists, the second group is formed by Anglosaxons. Moreover, non-British colonies, namely French and Dutch, were founded on aristocratic principles and strove vigorously to gain liberal institutions. Following Daimon (1969), had their political circumstances been different in Europe, they could have also gained the control of the continent. Yet, Holland was quite wealthy and had few immigrants , and France had a great number of immigrants but was not interested in the snow land. Yet, the struggle for control of this land would continue for more than a hundred years.

The thirteen British colonies of America were formed under a variety of differing conditions. The settlement of Virginia was the work of a company of London merchants, that of New England of a body of Puritan refugees from persecution. Most of the other colonies were formed through the efforts of proprietors, to whom the king had made large grants of territory. None of them were of royal or parliamentary establishment ( the nearest to this being the colony of New York, which was appropriated from its Dutch founders by the king’s brother) and therefore, the government of the mother-country took no part in the original formation of the government of the colonies, except in the somewhat flexible requirements of the charters granted to the proprietors.

The earliest of these, that of Virginia, was under the supreme government of a council residing in

England and appointed by the king, who likewise appointed a council of members of the colony, for

its local administration. Thus all executive and legislative powers were directly controlled by the

king, and no rights of self-government were granted the people. Virginia formed the only British colony in America of which the monarch thus retained the control.

We shall approach the division of colonies by their geographical location, and not on their order of settlement. Yet, we shall remind our readers that the first colonies were those of Jamestown (1607) and Plymouth (1620), established respectively by John Smith and the Pilgrims.

2.2.2.1. New England colonies.

New England colonies are made up by Rhode, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Massachusetts, but we shall namely concentrate on the latter one due to its historical relevance. We must take into account that New England was the next successful English colony established after that of Jamestown. It was settled by two groups of of religious dissenters who escaped religious persecution in England: the Pilgrims and the Puritans.

Both of them demanded church reform and elimination of Catholic elements remaining in the Church of England. Yet, whereas the Pilgrims wanted to leave the Church of England, the Puritans wanted to reform it by setting an example of a holy community thorugh the society they were to build in the New World (this is relevant information for The Scarlett Letter).

1. The Pilgrim Fathers: Plymouth colony (1620).

In August 1620 a group of men and women left England on the deck of the Mayflower from the Port of Plymouth to the New World. On board there was a group known as the Pilgrim Fathers, or the Pilgrims, who were attempting to escape religious persecution in their country, England. Before they landed in North America on 21 December in Massachusetts (although they had been aiming for Virginia), they wrote a declaration called the Covenant, which is considered to be a draft of the Constitution of the United States.

2. The Puritans: Massachusetts Bay Colony (1629).

The second group (around 400 people), the Puritans, aimed to reform the Anglican Church by creating a new, pure church in the New World, where they created a deeply religious, socially, and politically innovative culture that still lingers on in the modern United States. Though they fled from religious repression in England , they did not seek to establish toleration in America, but the Puritan social ideal of the “nation of saints”, an intensely religious, thoroughly righteous community that would serve as an example for all of Europe and stimulate mass conversion to Puritanism.

Politically, Puritan society was by no means a democracy nor a theocracy since officials had no responsibilit y to the people since their function was to serve God by best oberseeing

the moral and physical improvement of the community. Socially, the Puritan society was

tightly knit where no one was allowed to live alone for fear that their temptation would lead to the moral corruption of all of Puritan society. Although some characterize the strength of Puritan society as repressively communal, others point to it as the basis of the later American value on civic virtue, and an essential foundation for the developme nt of democracy.

2.2.2.2. Middle colonies.

The rest of British colonies in America followed after Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay, consisting of Middle colonies, such as New York, Pennsylvania, the three counites of Delaware, and Maryland, which were namely characterized by a wide diversity, both religious, political, economic, and ethnic.

2.2.2.3. Southern colonies.

Southern colonies include Maryland, Virginia, Georgia and the two Carolinas (north and south). The Carolinas were created by a group of English Lords who wanted a new colony in the south become profitable like that of the north. In the south it was Georgia, which was a key contested area namely established on strict moralistic principles, where slavery was forbidden as well as alcohol and other forms of immoral attitudes. However, the colonists were unhappy about the puritanical lifestyle, and complained that their colony could not compete economically with the Carolina rice plantations. Georgia initially failed to prosper, but once the restrictions were lifted it became as prosperous as the Carolinas.

Yet, the most important to mention is Virgina colony, which is considered to be the first permanent settlement in North America under the name of the English colony of Jamestown (1607), was the first English colony in America to survive and become permanent and become later the capital of Virginia and the site of the House of Burgesses. Virginia was named upon Elizabeth I of England, the “Virgin Queen”. Jamestown colony It supported itself through tobacco farming and the venture was financed and coordinated by the London Virginia Company (a joint stock company) , which hoped to follow in the footsteps of the Spanish colonists by finding gold. A lack of social bonds in the community was to be felt in the fact tha t all the initial colonists, and most of the additional colonists, were male. Without wives or children to protect, the colonists had little incentive to protect their settlement or work towards its long-term growth.

The settlement was struck by severe droughts in centuries and as a result, only a third of the colonists furvived the first winter, and even, source documents indicate that some turned to cannibalism. Yet, the colony survived in large part to the efforts of John Smith, whose moto was

‘No work, no food’. He put the colonists to work, and befriended Pocahontas, daughter of Chief

Powhatan, who supplied the colony with food.

But the main causes of social decentralization were soon to be noticed. As the colony of Virginia was so heavily influenced by the cultivation of tobacco and the ownership of slaves, in 1619 large numbers of Africans were brought to this colony into the slave trade. Thus, individual workers on the plantation fields were usually without family and separated from their nearest neighbors by miles. This meant that little social infrastructure developed for the commoners of Virigina society, in contrast with the highly developed social infrastructure of colonial New England.

2.2.3. The British colonies: from union to revolution.

By this time, the English colonie s were thirteen: Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia. Although all these British colonies were strikingly different, throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries several events took place and brought relevant changes in the colonies: whereas some of the them sprung from their common roots as part of the British Empire, others led up to the American Revolution, and to the final separation from England.

Although there was general properity in the Middle and Southern colonies, as well as social and political struggle, they had to face the arrival of loads of immigrants from Europe. Their economy, based on the production of rice, indigo and naval stores, was booming in contrast to the hostile attitude of Indians at the frontier. In the upper south, Virginia and Maryland’s tobacco prices were falling and crop failures became very usual. Yet, in New England, the social and political atmosphere was quite calm, but not the economy since the Sugar Act imposed taxes and new commercial regulations on them. Let us examine the main causes which led the thirteen colonies to revolution.

The first of those events was the Great Awakening, which unified the colonies in religious terms. This was a Protestant movement which took place in the 1730s and 1740s and began under the figure of Jonathan Edwards, a powerful Massachusetts speaker and attracted a large amount of followers. Two new movements appeared from his ideas, the colonies called themselves the New Lights, and those who did not were called the Old Lights. The result was the establishment of a number of universities, now counted among the Ivy League, including Kings College (now Columbia University) and Princeton University. The Great Awakening may also be interpreted as the last major expression of the religious ideals on which the New England colonies were founded. Religiosity had been declining for decades, in part due to the negative publicity resulting from the Salem witch trials.

The second event relates to the French and Indian War (1754-1763), which meant the

American extension of the general European conflict known as the Seven Years’ War. The war takes its name from the Iroquois confederacy, which had been playing the British and the French against each other successfully for decades. Eventually, in the Treaty of Paris (1763), France surrendered its vast North American empire to Britain. During the war the thirteen colonies’s identity as part of the British Empire was made truly apparent, as British military and civilian officials took on an increased presence in the lives of Americans.

The war also increased a sense of American unity in men who might normally have never left their colonies to travel across the continent, and fighting alongside men from decidedly different. Both the British and colonists triumphed jointly over a common foe and their loyalty to the mother country was stronger than ever before. However, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom at the time (William Pitt), decided to wage the war in the colonies with the use of troops from the colonies and tax funds from Britain itself, which was a successful wartime strategy. Therefore, the British, the most heavily taxed of any in Europe, pointed out angrily that the colonies paid little to the royal coffers. This dispute was to set off the chain of events that brought about the American Revolution.

The military struggle, indeed, was preceded by a long and fierce political contest, of which it formed the inevitable conclusion. For this contest the people of Americ a had been prepared, not by their years of war, but by their years of peace, for the whole political history of the American colonies is a history of instruction in the principles of democracy, and the republic of the United States was only in an immediate sense the work of the men of the Revolution, but in its fullest sense was the work of the colonists of America from their first entrance upon the trans-Atlantic shores.

The Royal Proclamation (1763).

The Royal Proclamation was a prohibition against settlement west of the Appalachian Mountains, on land which had been recently captured from France. In issuing this decree, the government was no doubt influenced by disgruntled taxpayers who did not wish to bankroll the subjugation of the native people of the area to make room for colonists. Yet, for most Americans, it seemed unnecess ary to accept an unproductive piece of legislation stated by a far-away government that cared little for their needs , although Parliament had generally been preoccupied with affairs in Europe, and let the colonies govern themselves. The policy change would continue to arouse opposition in the colonies over the next thirteen years and through a series of measures, which were to be named as acts.

The Sugar Act (1764).

Hence, this act put a three-cent tax on foreign refined sugar and increased taxes on coffee, indig o, and certain kinds of wine, and it banned importation of rum and French wines. Not only had affected taxes to a certain part of the population (including merchants), but also

were they enacted without the consent of the colonists. This was one of the first instances in

which colonists wanted a say in how much they were taxed. The Stamp Act (1765-1766).

Another act that followed was the Stamp Act, which was carried out by the British

Parliament to tax activities in their American colonies. The Act was passed by the parliament on March 22, 1765 and was to be effective November 1. The act met with great resistance in the colonies and was finally repealed on March 18 , 1766. It increased American concerns about the intent of parliament, and added to the growing separatist movement that twelve years later would result in the American Revolution.

Quartering Act (1765-1774).

As a result, the British Parliament passed at least two laws, known as the Quartering Act. The first one became law on 24 March 1765, and provided that Britain would house its soldiers in America first in barracks and public houses. Yet, if soldiers outnumbered the housing available, he would quarter them in other types of housing (inns, livery stables, ale houses, victuallinghouses, and the houses of sellers of wine) requiring any inhabitants to provide the soldiers with food, alcohol and utensils on not paying any thing for the same. The second Quartering Act (also called the Intolerable Acts , the Punitive Acts or the Coercive Acts) was quite similar in substance to the Quartering Act of 1765. It was settled on 2 June 1774, and was one of the measures that were designed to secure Britain’s jurisdiction over her American dominions.

Declaratory Act (1766).

The Declaratory Act was established to secure the dependency of his Majesty’s dominions in America upon the crown and parliament of Great Britain. This act states that American colonies and plantations are subordinated to, and dependent upon the imperial crown and parliament of Great Britain; and that the King’ majesty as full power and authority to make laws and statutes of sufficient force and validity to bind the colonies and people of America, subjects of the crown of Great Britain.

Townshend Revenue Act (1767).

The Townshend series of laws named for Charles Townshend, British Chancellor of the Exchequer (Treasurer), placed new taxes on glass, lead, paints, paper, and tea. Therefore, colonial reaction to these taxes was the same as to the Sugar Act and Stamp Act, and Britain eventually repealed all the taxes except the one on tea. In response to the sometimes violent protests by the American colonists, Great Britain sent more troops to the colonies.

Tea Act (1773).

Another act, the Tea Act, gave a monopoly on tea sales to the East India Company. In other words, American colonists could buy no tea unless it came from that company. Why? Well,

the East Indian Company wasn’t doing so well, and the British wanted to give it some more

business. The Tea Act lowered the price on this East India tea so much that it was way below tea from other suppliers. But the American colonists saw this law as yet another means of “taxation without representation” because it meant that they could not buy tea from anyone else (including other colonial merchants) without spending a lot more money.

The Boston Tea Party (1773).

Their response was to refuse to unload the tea from the ships in Boston, a situation that led to the Boston Tea Party in 1773. Angry and frustrated at a new tax on tea, American colonists (calling themselves the Sons of Liberty and disguised as Mohawk Native Americans) boarded three British ships (the Dartmouth, the Eleanor, and the Beaver) and dumped 342 whole crates of British tea into Boston harbor on December 16, 1773. Similar incidents occurred in Maryland, New York, and New Jersey in the next few months, and tea was eventually boycotted throughout the colonies. The Boston Tea Party was an amusing and symbolic episode in American history, an example of how far Americans were willing to go to speak out for their freedom.

Coercive Acts (1774).

As a result, this amusing and symbolic episode in the American Colonies of Boston and Massachusetts was defined as Intolerable Acts (also called the Coercive Acts or Punitive Acts) by the English. The Coercive Acts were a series of laws passed by the British Parliament in 1774 in response for the growing unrest of the colonies which included: the Quartering Act, the Quebec Act, Massachusetts Government Act, the Administration of Justice Act, and the Boston Port Act.

The punitive effect of these laws generated a reaction in a great and growing sympathy f or the colonists of Massachusetts, encouraging the neighbouring colonies to band to together which would help lead to the American Revolutionary War.

In 1775 , under George III’s reign, the British North American colonies revolted in Massachusetts due to the previous frustration with the British crown practices, and namely to their opposition to British economic explotiation and also their unwillingness to pay for a standing army. Anti-monarchist sentiment was strong, as the colonists wanted to participate in the politics affecting them.

2.3. The Declaration of Independence (1776).

The next year, representatives of thirteen of the British colonies in North America me t in Philadelphia and declared their independence in a remarkable document, the Declaration of Independence. The committee had intrusted that task to Thomas Jefferson, who, though at that time

only thirty-three years of age, was chosen for two main reasons: first, because he was held to

possess a singular felicity in the expression of popular ideas and, second, because he represented the province of Virginia, the oldest of the Anglo-American colonies.

Jefferson, having produced the required document, reported it to the House on the 28th of June, where it was read, and ordered to lie on the table. After the conclusion of the debate on the resolution of independence on 2nd July, the Declaration was passed under review. During the remainder of that day and the two next, this remarkable production was very closely considered and shifted, and several alterations were made in it, namely the omission of those sentences which reflected upon the English people, and the striking out of a clause which severely reprobated the slave-trade.

The debate on the proposed Declaration came to a termination two days later, on the evening of the

4th of July. The document was then reported by the committee, agreed to by the House, and signed by every member present, except General D ickinson. The signature of New York was not given till several days later, and a New Hampshire member, Matthew Thornton, was permitted to append his signature on November 4 (four months after the signing). With the help of their French allies they were eve ntually able to win the American Revolutionary War against Great Britain, settled by the Treaty of Paris (1783).

So, we can say that the United States of America was founded in 1776 from British colonies along the Atlantic Coast of North America and was declared to be independent in 1778.

3. A HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: FROM THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE TO THE CIVIL WAR.

3.1. The War of Independence (1778-1783).

The War of Independence, also known as the American Revolution, was first regarded as a civil war against Britain, but when other countries entered the confrontat ion, namely France (1778), Spain (1779) and the Netherlands (1780), it became an international war. Initial confrontations were

mixed (the British being successful at Brandywine but suffering badly at Saratoga), but the situation

improved for the colonists when these three countries utilized the opportunity caused by the confrontation to declare war on Britain as well. Eventually, by 1782, the British campaign was crumbling.

The British Parliament demanded an end to the war, largely due to its high expense s. The Prime Minister, now Lord North, resigned and, on 3 September 1783, treaties were signed at Versailles. Britain retained Canada and the West Indian Islands but the thirteen rebellious states were formally recognised as the United States of America. On the other hand, France retained their West Indian Islands and were given Tobago in addition, and Spain recovered Florida after twenty years of British control (but later sold it to the Netherlands).

3.1.1. The aftermath of the war: main consequences.

Therefore, the aftermath of the war was particularly felt in the national division of the states due to the political struggle over slavery and the spread into new territories (the West). Hence, the North representing the modern, industrial, and business-minded states versus the South, which represented the cultures, colonial and aristocratic states. Yet, in general, the main consequences following the loss of the American colonies were to be noticed at all levels. For instance:

3.1.1.1. Social consequences.

In social terms, the United States exerted an irresistible attraction on visitors and therefore, immigrants, namely from Germany and Ireland. Between the 1830s and 1840s, population grew at an amazing rate attracted by an efficient network of economic and cultural richness in the new land. The German did well whereas the Irish immigrants were not rich enough to buy land. Hence they had to take the menial and unskilled labour needed by the expanding economy, and as a result, they suffered discrimination in towns and cities (their discrimination is compared to the free blacks in the North).

Another important issue to be highlighted is that of Northern blacks. Since they possessed theoretical freedom, they suffered discrimination at all social levels (politics, employment, education, religion, and even in cemeteries). Yet, their situation improved between the 1830s and

1850s under the Age of Reform, where a great variety of ideals and movements flourished in favor

of women’ rights, pacifism, abolition of imprisonment, capital punishment, improving working classes conditions, and a better education, among others. Yet, a vast majority of Americans did not support these changes. The Reform reflected the sensibility of a small number of people.

3.1.1.2. Economic consequences.

Economically, after the War of Independence two different economic models towards capitalism developed, thus represented by North and South ideals. On the one hand, the North, supported by the Middle West, based its economy on industry and farming in order to set up tariffs to protect themselves against rival European products; on the other hand, the South, namely aristocratic, based its economy on cotton production in big plantations, and therefore, free trade of slaves. Slavery did not exisst in the Northern states, so the North found it difficult to accept the attitude of the South.

3.1.1.3. Political consequences.

Political consequences were felt in Britain and in the American colonies. Let us examine the most relevant events in both parts.

In in the British Empire, there was an increasing interest in the east. The East India Company had long been the main agent of Imperial expansion in southern Asia and exercised many governmental functions. Although the company maintained sole responsibility for trade and patronage, in 1784 under the India Act, a Board of Control was established to oversee the revenue, administration and diplomatic functions of the company as well as the aspects of its military expansion.

Yet, the new target of Britain was not only the East, but also the colonisation of the Antipodes so as to establish penal colonies (1788). The colonisation of Australia and New Zealand began with the desire to find a place for penal settlement after the loss of the original American colonies. The first shipload of British convicts landed in Australia in

1788, on the site of the future city of Sydney¹.

Regarding the American colonies, the resolution on the settlement in the West was to be realized by a Federal government, which was established according to the interests of the North states. Until 1789, the United States was governed by the Articles of Confederation, which created an extremely weak central government. The United States had no power to levy taxes; for income, it relied essentially on money from the states. In addition, the government of the United States had no central executive branch, making its already weak government further divided and lacking strong leadership. The government of the United States under the Articles was also weak with regards to foreign affairs, and during th is period Britain and Spain treated the United States like a third-rate power.

Therefore, since the South was afraid of a possible centralized government, they started to think about the possibility of breaking with the Union and replaced the Articles of

¹The majority of these convicts were young men, many of whom had committed only petty crimes. New

South Wales opened to free settlers in 1819. By 1858, transportation of convicts was abolished.

Confederation with a stronger central government. Those who advocated the creation of

such a government took the name Federalists, and quickly gained supporters throughout the nation. The most well- known Federalists include Alexander Hamilton, James Madison , and John Jay. These were the main contributors to the Federalist Papers, a series of 85 essays which served in many ways as seminal documents for the new United States that was to come.

The Constitution of the United States was adopted as a direct response to the Articles of Confederation and as a result, a strong executive branch was created for the first time to give the government the power to tax. After the first elections then the old nationalists (Federalists) took the power. Moreover, the Federalists gained a great deal of prestige and

advantage when George Washington joined their cause².

3.1.2. Before the Civil War.

The Constitution then had been able to regulate conflicts of interest and conflicting visions for the new, rapidly expanding nation. But from 1820 to 1860 many other factors had changed, thus the rise of mass democracy in the North, the breakdown of the old two-party system, the increasingly virulent and hostile sectional ideologies (especially that of “free labor” in the North), the acquisition of new lands in the West in the 1840s and slavery in the south, which would catapult the nation into civil war. With the emergence of the United States Republican Party , the nation became the first major sectional political party, by the mid-1850s.

There is little question that the salient issue in the minds of the public and popular press of the time, and the histories written since, was the issue of slavery. Slavery had been abolished in most northern states, but was legal and important to the economy of the Confederacy, which depended on cheap agricultural labor. State sovereignty (for the South) and preservation of the Union (for the North) have both also been cited as issues, but both were reflections of the slavery issue.

The political atmosphere before the Civil War was therefore, one of unremitting crisis. The underlying problem was that the United States had been on the whole a country, but not a nation and hence, the major functions of government (education, health, transport) were carried out at a state or local level. Yet, an enduring manifestation of hostility toward the nationalizing tendencies in American life was the reassertion of strong nationalistic feelings threatened by the West.

There were several points of view from West, East, North and South. On the one hand, the West developed a strong sectional feeling, blending its sense of uniqueness and the feeling of having been

²Antifederalists, such as Patrick Henry and George Mason, were opponents of the plan for stronger government, who feared that a government with the power to tax would soon become as despotic and corrupt

as Great Britain had been only decades earlier.

exploited by the businessment of the East and, on the other hand, the East reasserted his national

feeling. Moreover, the South persisted on Negro slavery, which had already been abolished or prohibited in all other parts of the United States. So, people from the South stated an elaborate pro- slavery argument on defending their institutions on biblical, economic, and sociological grounds. On the contrary, the North reaffirmed its position towards industry and against slavery, and made a great effort to change the South’s point of view.

In fact, George Washington received every electoral vote and became president, and only a handful of Anti-federalists were elected to Congress. When Washington determined not to continue, president John Adams was elected president, and in turn, Jefferson (a republican) in 1800, and James Madison in 1809. Britain and France were forced by Madison to respect the commercial restraints in the seas, but the efforts were futile. Britain periodically humiliated the small American navy by seizing American ships.

By 1812, American relations with Britain did not improve. Rather, a popular clamour for war began to arise, namely due to the frustration and desire to redeem the national honour, and eventually, America declared the war against England in 1812. Two years later (1814), the Americans defeated England in 1814 and peace was reestablished in the United States by James Monroe (former secretary of state and president in 1816). This period was to be known as the “Era of Good Feeling”.

By 1860, the American society underwent both a sectional confrontation and an economic revolution.depression, sharpened by economic and class divides, realigning the interplay of race, class, and political ideology. In other words, the realignment of cleavages and cooperation among geographical, social classes, and party affiliations in politics between the depression of 1857 and the election of 1860 led to the election of a president so objectionable to Southern slave-owing interests that it would trigger Southern secession, and consequently a war to save the integrity of the Union.

Hence, in 1860 the presidential election of Abraham Lincoln took place in an atmosphere of great tension and was not received in the same way in the North and South. In the South, Lincoln’s election was taken as the signal for secession and South Carolina became the first state to withdraw from the Union. This time they were determined and soon, other states followed their proposal. In

1861, in February 4, six Southern states sent representatives to establish a new independent government, but Lincoln was not in favour of the Union to be divided. Then, in his inaugural address, his speech closed with a plea for restoration of the bonds of union. The South, particularly South Carolina, ignored the plea, and on April 12, the South fired upon the Federal troops stationed at Fort Sumter in the Charleston, South Carolina until the troops surrendered.

3.2. The Civil War (1861-1865).

The Civil War has been also called the main American social revolution, a watershed in the rise of modern industrial society in the United States and as the result of free-labor industrial capitalism, and the resolution of sectional conflict in the North. This war was fought between the northern states , popularly referred to as the “Union,” the “north,” or the “Yankees,” and the seceding southern states, commonly referred to as the Confederate States of America, the “Confederacy.” the “south,” or the “rebels.”

As stated above, the Civil War started with Lincoln’s victory in the presidential election of 1860, which triggered South Carolina’s secession from the Union. By February 1, 1861, six more Southern states had seceded. On February 7, the seven states adopted a provisional constitution for the Confederate States of America. The remaining southern states as yet remained in the Union, and less than a month later, on March 4, 1861, Abraham Lincoln was sworn in as president of the United States.

Since then a march of Union troops under the command of the Confederate force was built up by July 1861 at Manassas, Virginia . The first battle is known as the First Battle of Bull Run (or First Manassas), whereupon they were forced back to Washington, DC by Confederate troops under the command of Generals Joseph E. Johnston and P.G.T. Beauregard. Alarmed at the loss, the United States Congress passed the Crittenden-Johnson Resolution on July 25 of that year in an attempt to prevent more slave states from leaving the Union. Also, it stated that the war was being fought to preserve the Union and not to end slavery.

Subsequent encounters took place and the first victory of the war was under the Union flag under the figure of Ulysses S. Grant , who captured Fort Henry, Tennessee on February 6, 1862. Later on in September 5, the Confederates made its first invasion of the North under the rule of General Lee, who led 55,000 men of the Army of Northern Virginia across the Potomac River at White’s Ford near Leesburg, Virginia into Maryland. Then, on September 17, 1862, Lee’s army, checked at last, returned to Virginia. Yet, the war’s turning point was made by George Meade , who stopped Lee’s invasion of Union-held territory at the Battle of Gettysburg between 1-3 July 1863, inflicting 28,000 casualties on Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia , and again forcing it to retreat to its state.

In general terms, while the Confederate forces had some success in the Eastern holding on to their capital, fortune did not smile upon them in the West. Confederate forces were driven from Missouri early in the war. The Union’s key strategist and tactician Ulysses S. Grant, won victories at Fort Donelson, Battle of Shiloh, Vicksburg, Mississippi, and Chattanooga, Tennessee, driving Confederate forces out of Tennessee. Grant ’s aim was to defeat the Confederate forces and bring an end to the war.

At the beginning of 1864, Grant was given command of all Union armies in the East, who attempted to defeat Lee and fought several battles during that phase of the Eastern campaign: the Battle of the Wilderness, Spotsylvania Court House, and Cold Harbor. Grant was tenacious and

kept pressing the Army of Northern Virginia under the command of Robert E. Lee. He extended the

Confederate army, pinning it down in the Siege of Petersburg and, after two failed attempts, he finally found a commander, Philip Sheridan, who could clear the threat to Washington DC from the Shenandoah Valley.

Yet, the North superiority was in the air. The main advantages widely believed to have contributed to the Union’s success include the North’s strong, industrial economy; the North’s strong compatible railroad links (and the South’s la ck thereof); the North’s larger population; the North’s possession of the United States’ merchant marine fleet and naval ships; the North’s established government; the North’s moral cause given to the war by Abraham Lincoln (the Emancipation Proclamation); and last but not least, the recruitment of black men, including many freed slaves, into the Union Army after the Emancipation Proclamation was approved.

On 9 April 1865 Lee surrendered his Army of Northern Virginia at Appomattox Court house. The Battle of Palmito Ranch, fought on May 13 , 1865, in the far south of Texas was the last land battle of the war and ended with a Confederate victory. All Confederate land forces had surrendered by June 1865 whereas Confederate naval units surrendered as late as November of 1865.

3.3. The aftermath of the Civil War (1865-1901).

The aftermath of the Civil War is namely represented by the Emancipation Proclamation, which was supposed to free all slaves who were in territory under Confederate control at the time of the Proclamation. Yet, slaves were not freed in t he remaining states and parts of the Confederacy until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment by third quarters of the states, which did not occur until December of 1865. A good deal of ill will among the Southern survivors resulted from the destruction inflicted on the South by the Union armies as the end of the war approached, the resulting shift of political power to the North, and the Reconstruction program instituted in the South by the Union after the war’s end.

4. MAIN REFERENCE NOVELS: THE SCARLETT LETTER AND THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE.

In chapter 4, we shall provide an overview of the literary background of this period with the aim of going further into its main literary productions and, in particular, into the two reference novels under study: The Scarlett Letter and The Red Badge of Courage. As we shall see, these two novels

were both shaped by and reflected the prevailing ideologies of the day, which means that they are a

reference point in which social, economic, cultural, technogical and polit ical allegiances are placed very much to the fore.

We shall namely review the development of history and literature in similar periods on the basis of the most outstanding literary hallmark, which will provide a useful introduction to the various relatio nships between the imaginative literature of America between 1776 and 1865 (and its aftermath) and changing social, economic, political, cultural and technological conditions within this period. Actually, The Scarlett Letter (1850) reflects the situation within the previous years to the Civil War (1861-1865) whereas The Red Badge of Courage (1893) reflects its aftermath.

These periods correspond respectively to Early American Literature (colonial period), revolutionary writers (romantic period) and the rise of realism in literature (the aftermath of the war). In each section we shall approach the main literary movements and, in particular, main literary forms regarding authors and works, thus (i) poetry, (ii) drama, and (iii) prose and, therefore, main novelists (it is in this latter category that we shall find our two main authors later).

4.1. From Colonial Literature to the Declaration of Independence: Early American Literature.

4.1.1. The literature of exploration.

The literature of exploration reflects the main events of that period in its literary productions . Thus, as mentioned earlier, the earliest explorers of America were not English, Spanish, or French, but Scandinavian, and arrived in the first decade of the 11th century, almost 400 years before the next recorded European discovery of the New World. Yet, the first known and sustained contact between the Americas and the rest of the world began with Columbus, funded by the Spanish rulers Ferdinand and Isabella.

A Spanish prose-writer, Bartolomé de las Casas, is the richest source of information about the early contact between American Indians and Europeans, and therefore, of their literature. He transcribed Columbus’s journal, and late in life wrote a long, vivid History of the Indians criticizing their enslavement by the Spanish. Columbus’s Epistola was printed in 1493, where he recounted the

trip’s drama to America (the terror of his men to the unknown, the near-mutiny, the first sighting of

land).

However, the literature of the period paints the first America colonies in glowing colors as the land of riches and opportunity, and thanks to it, accounts of the colonizations became world-renowned. The first exploration (1585) was carefully recorded by Thomas Hariot in A Briefe and True Report of the New-Found Land of Virginia (1588) whose book was quickly translated into Latin, French, and German. The main records about Jamestown colony (1607) still remain in the writings of Captain John Smith, who was an incurable romantic, and to whom we owe the famous story of the Indian maiden, Pocahontas . Whether fact or fiction, the tale is ingrained in the American historical

imagination ³.

The seventeenth century brought about a second wave of permanent colonists, that is, pirates, adventurers and explorers who took home their wives, children, farm implements, and craftsmen’s tools. At first the early literature of exploration was namely made up of diaries, letters, travel journals, ships’ logs, and reports of the explorers, who wrote to their financial backers (European rulers, joint stock companies, mercantile companies), but gradually they were supplanted by records of the settled colonies. Because England eventually took possession of the North American colonies, the best-known and most-anthologized colonial literature is English. So, although the story of literature is based on the English accounts, it is important to realize its richly cosmopolitan beginnings.

Among the most relevant authors of the period we include Robert Beverley, William Bradford, Anne Bradstreet, William Byrd, Jonathan Edwards, Olaudah Equiano (Gustavus Vassa), Jupiter Hammon, Cotton Mather , Mary Rowlandson, Samuel Sewall, Edward Taylor, Michael

Wigglesworth, Roger Williams, and John Woolman, among others.

4.1.2. Literature in New England.

It is relevant to remind the reader that the literature of New England was namely influenced by the Puritans, since no other colonists in the history of the world were as intellectual as them. Actually, between the 1630s and the 1690s , there were as many university graduates in New England (the northeastern section of the United States) as in the mother country (Britain). They wanted education because their main aim was to understand and execute God’s will as they established their colonies throughout New England.

Then, the Puritan literary movement was linked to the worshipping of God and of the spiritual dangers that the soul faced on Earth, that is, a constant battle between the forces of God and the

³The story recounts how Pocahontas, favorite daughter of Chief Powhatan, saved Captain Smith’s life when he was a prisoner of the chief. Later, when the English persuaded Powhatan to give Pocahontas to them as a

hostage, her gentleness, intelligence, and beauty impressed the English, and, in 1614, she married John Rolfe,

forces of Satan, a formidable enemy with many disguises. Their definition of good writing was

from complex metaphysical poetry to homely journals and crushingly pedantic religious history, and regarding the style or genre, certain themes remained constant, for instance, life seen as a test; failure le ading to eternal damnation and hellfire, and success to heavenly bliss.

Scholars have long pointed out the link between Puritanism and capitalism since both rest on ambition, hard work, and an intense striving for success. In recording ordinary events to reveal their spiritual meaning, Puritan authors commonly cited the Bible, chapter and verse. History was a symbolic religious panorama leading to the Puritan triumph over the New World and to God’s kingdom on Earth.

Puritan minds poured their tremendous energies into nonfiction and pious genres: poetry, sermons, theological tracts, histories, intimate diaries and meditations records on the rich inner lives of this introspective and intense people in the new land. Yet, undoubtely the great model of writing was the Bible, in an authorized English translation that was already outdated when it came out. The age of the Bible, so much older than the Roman church, made it authoritative to Puritan eyes.

There is not much literary production in early colonial literature, but we shall mention the most outstanding authors and works. Thus regarding prose, we include: William Bradford (1590-1657), Mary Rowlandson (c.1635-c.1678), Cotton Mather (1663-1728) , Roger Williams (c. 1603-1683); regarding poetry, we include: Anne Bradstreet (c. 1612-1672), Edward Taylor (c. 1644-1729), Michael Wigglesworth (1631-1705), and Samuel Sewall (1652-1730); regarding drama, no works nor authors are to be mentioned, so we shall not mention them.

4.1.2.1. Poetry.

Anne Bradstreet (c. 1612-1672).

Anne Bradstreet is to be included within poetry production, and regarded as the first woman who published an American book, though the book was published in England, given the lack of printing presses in the early years of the first American colonies. Born and educated in England, and daughter of an earl’s estate ma nager, she married the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In opposition to the epoch literary movement, she preferred her long, religious poems on conventional subjects such as the seasons, inspired by English metaphysical poetry. Thus, her book The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) and To My Dear and Loving Husband (1678)

show the influence of Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, and other English poets as well.

_Edwar_{d Taylor (c. 1644-1729).}

an English gentleman. The marriage initiated an eight-year peace between the colonists and the Indians,

ensuring the survival of the struggling new colony (VanSpanckeren, 2004).

Edward Taylor was born in England and is framed within the label of poets. He was a

teacher who sailed to New England in 1668 rather than take an oath of loyalty to the Church of England. He studied at Harvard College, and studied Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. Modest, pious, and hard-working, Taylor never published his poetry, which was discovered only in the 1930s. His best works include a variety of verse: funeral elegies, lyrics, a medieval debate, and a 500-page Metrical History of Christianity (a history of martyrs).

Michael Wigglesworth (1631-1705).

Michael Wigglesworth was also born in England and educated at Harvard. He became Puritan minister who practiced medicine. He is the third New England colonial poet whose main work includes The Day of Doom (1662), a long narrative that often falls into doggerel, this terrifying popularization of Calvinistic doctrine was the most popular poem of the colonial period. Like most colonial literature, the poems of early New England imitate the form and technique of the mother country, though the religious passion and frequent biblical references, as well as the new setting, give New England writing a special identity. Isolated New World writers also lived before the advent of rapid transportation and electronic communications. As a result, colonial writers were imitating writing that was already out of date in England.

Samuel Sewall (1652-1730).

Samuel Sewall was born in England, graduated from Harvard, and made a career of legal, administrative, and religious work. He namely wrote religious poetry full of Biblic al references as historical and secular accounts that recount real events using lively details, as in his work Diary, where he records the transition of the years 1674 to

1729 (from the Puritans to the Yankee period of mercantile wealth in the New England

colonies).

4.1.2.2. Prose.

William Bradford (1590-1657).

Shortly after the Separatists landed at Plymouth in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, William Bradford was elected governor. A deeply pious and self-educated man, he learned several languages, including Hebrew. His participation in this migration made him ideally suitable to be the first historian of his colony. His history work, Of Plymouth Plantation (1651), is a clear and compelling account of the colony’s

beginning. Moreover, the first document of colonial self- governance in the English

New World, the Mayflower Compact was written when the Pilgrims were still on board ship, and was regarded as the first Declaration of Independence, which was to come a century and a half later.

Mary Rowlandson (c.1635-c.1678).

Mary Rowlandson was the earliest woman prose writer of note married to a minister. In her first book she gives a clear, moving account of her 11-week captivity by Indians during an Indian massacre in 1676. The book undoubtedly fanned the flame of anti- Indian sentiment.

Cotton Mather (1663-1728).

Cotton Mather wrote over 500 books and pamphlets. His Magnalia Christi Americana (Ecclesiastical History of New England), (1702) was his most ambitious work, exhaustively chronicles the settlement of New England through a series of biographies. The huge book presents the holy Puritan errand into the wilderness to establish God’s kingdom; and its structure is a narrative progression of representative American Saints Lives.

Roger Williams (c. 1603-1683).

Roger Williams was. Graduated from Cambridge University (England), and his ideas were ahead of his time. He was an early critic of imperialism, insisting that European kings had no right to grant land charters because American land belonged to the Indians. Williams also believed in the separation between church and state, still a fundamental principle in America today. Williams’s numerous books include one of the first phrase books of Indian languages, A Key Into the Languages of America (1643), an embryonic ethnography, giving bold descriptions of Indian life based on the time he had lived among the tribes; The Bloody Tenet of Persecution for Cause of Conscience (1644), which reads about the intercultural experience of living among gracious and humane Indians undoubtedly accounts for much of his wisdom.

4.3. Literature in Middle and Southern colonies.

Literature in Middle and Southern colonies was considered as pre-revolutionary southern literature, that is, aristocratic and secular, and reflecting the dominant social and economic systems of the southern plantations. Early English immigrants were drawn to the southern colonies because of economic opportunity rather than religious freedom. The Puritan emphasis on hard work, education

and earnestness was rare, and the church was the focus of a genteel social life, not a forum for

minute examinations of conscience. So the main authors and works are to be framed within this background. We namely include: William Byrd, Robert Beverley, and Jupiter Hammon within prose.

William Byrd (1674-1744).

Since southern culture revolved around the ideal of the gentleman, William Byrd described the gracious way of life at plantations in his famous letter to his English friend Charles Boyle, Earl of Orrery (1726), where a Renaissance man is equally good at managing a farm and reading classical Greek, in short, he has the power of a feudal lord. He visited the French Court, became a Fellow of the Royal Society, and was friendly with some of the leading English writers of his day, particularly William Wycherley and William Congreve. His London diaries are the opposite of those of the New England Puritans, full of fancy dinners, glittering parties, and womanizing, with little introspective soul-searching. His best known work is History of the Dividing Line , a diary of a 1729 trip of some weeks and 960 kilometers into the interior to survey the line dividing the neighboring colonies of Virginia and North Carolina.

Robert Beverley (c. 1673-1722).

Robert Beverley was another wealthy planter and author of The History and Present State of Virginia (1705, 1722) , which records the history of the Virginia colony in a humane and vigorous style. In general, the colonial South may fairly be linked with a light, worldly, informative, and realistic literary tradition. Imitative of English literary fashions, the southerners attained imaginative heights in witty, precise observations of distinctive New World conditions.

4.2. From the War of Independence to the Civil War: Revolutionary Writers.

During this period (1776-1860), which coincides with democratic origins, revolutionary writers and the Romantic period, the triumph of American independence was regarded as a divine sign of greatness, where military victory fanned nationalistic hopes for a great new literature. Yet with the exception of outstanding political writing, few works of note appeared during or soon after the Revolution. Since American books were harshly reviewed in England and there was an excessive dependence on English literary models, the search for a native literature became a national obsession. Hence it would take fifty years of accumulated history for America to earn its cultural independence and to produce the first great generation of American writers: Washington Irving,

would find expression in the epic (a long, dramatic narrative poem in elevated language, celebrating

the feats of a legendary hero).

Yet, many writers tried but none succeeded, and not surprisingly, satirical poetry and mock epics fared much better than serious verse. The mock epic genre encouraged American poets to use their natural voices and did not lure them into a bog of pretentious and predictable patriotic sentiments and faceless conventional poetic epithets out of the Greek poet Homer and the Roman poet Virgil by way of the English poets. Thus, the main poets will be listed below: Philip Freneau (1752- 1832) and Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753-1784).

Philip Freneau (1752-1832).

Philip Freneau is relevant to mention since he incorporated the new stirrings of European Romanticism. The key to both his success and his failure was his passionately democratic spirit combined with an inflexib le temper. Born in a Huguenot (radical French Protestant) background, Freneau fought as a militiaman during the Revolutionary War. In 1780, he was captured and imprisoned in two British ships, where he almost died before his family managed to get him released. His poem The British Prison Ship (1792) is a bitter condemnation of the cruelties of the British. This piece and other revolutionary works, including Eutaw Springs, American Liberty, A Political Litany, A Midnight Consultation, and George the Third’s Soliloquy, brought him fame as the ‘Poet of the American Revolution’.

Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753-1784).

Given the hardships of life in early America, it is ironic that some of the best poetry of the period was written by an exceptional slave woman. The first African-American author of importance in the United States, Phyllis Wheatley was born in Africa and brought to Boston, Massachusetts, when she was about seven, where she was purchased by the pious and wealthy tailor John Wheatley to be a companion for his wife. The Wheatleys recognized Phillis’s remarkable intelligence and, with the help of their daughter, Mary, Phillis learned to read and write. Her poems are namely religious, and her style, like that of Philip Freneau, is neoclassical. Among her best-known poems are To S.M., a Young African Painter, on Seeing His Works (1769) a poem of praise and encouragement for another talented black, and a short poem showing her strong religious sensitivity filtered through her experience of Christian conversion, On Being Brought from Africa to America (1778).

4.2.2. Prose.

The first important fiction writers widely recognized today, Charles Brockden Brown, Washington

Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper, used American subjects, historical perspectives, themes of

would find expression in the epic (a long, dramatic narrative poem in elevated language, celebrating

the feats of a legendary hero).

Philip Freneau (1752-1832).

Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753-1784).

4.2.2. Prose.

The first important fiction writers widely recognized today, Charles Brockden Brown, Washington

Irving, and James Fenimore Cooper, used American subjects, historical perspectives, themes of

change, and nostalgic tones. They wrote in many prose genres, initiated new forms, and found new

ways to make a living through literature. With them, American literature began to be read and appreciated in the United States and abroad.

Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810).

Already mentioned as the first professional American writer, Charles Brockden Brown was inspired by the English writers Mrs. Radcliffe and English William Godwin⁴. He wrote four haunting novels in two years: Wieland (1798), Arthur Mervyn (1799), Ormond (1799), and Edgar Huntley (1799). In them, he developed the genre of American Gothic, a popular genre of the day featuring exotic and wild settings, disturbing psychological depth, much suspense, ruined castles or abbeys, ghosts, mysterious secrets, threatening figures, and solitary maidens who survive by their wits and spiritual strength. Though flawed, his works are darkly powerful. Increasingly, he is seen as the precursor of romantic writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

Washington Irving (1789- 1859).

Washington Irving became a cultural and diplomatic ambassador to Europe, like Benjamin Franklin and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Despite his talent, he probably would not have become a full-time professional writer, given the lack of financial rewards, if a series of fortuitous incidents had not thrust writing as a profession upon him. Through friends, he was able to publish his Sketch Book of Geoffrye Crayon (1819-1820) simultaneously in England and America, obtaining copyrights and payment in both countries. This book contains his two best remembered stories, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, which describe Irving’s delicate, elegant, yet seemingly casual style. He also discovered the raw new nation’s sense of history and his numerous works are proof of it. For subjects, he chose the most dramatic aspects of American history: the discovery of the New World, the first president and national hero, and the westward exploration. His earliest work was a sparkling, satirical History of New York (1809) under the Dutch, ostensibly written by Diedrich Knickerbocker.

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851).

James Fenimore Cooper, like Irving, evoked a sense of the past and gave it a local habitation and a name. In Cooper, though, one finds the powerful myth of a golden age and the poignance of its loss. He did not search for legends, castles, and great themes, but the essential myth of America as a timeless and wild land, which attracted the colonists in the first place. Early in 1823, he wrote The Pioneers, and later on, the unifying thread of the

five novels collectively known as the Leather-Stocking Tales, which constitute a vast prose

⁴Radcliffe and Godwin were respectively known for her terrifying Gothic novels and novels of social reform, and Godwin as the father of Mary Shelley ( who wrote Frankenstein ).

epic with the North American continent as setting, Indian tribes as characters, and great

wars and westward migration as social background. The novels bring to life frontier America from 1740 to 1804. Cooper’s novels reveal a deep tension between the lone individual and society, nature and culture, spirituality and organized religion.

Later on, the Romantic period and, in particular, the Romance form indicated how difficult it was to create an identity without a stable society. Most of the Romantic heroes die in the end: All the sailors except Ishmael are drowned in Moby-Dick , and the sensitive but sinful minister Arthur Dimmesdale dies at the end of The Scarlet Letter. The self-divided, tragic note in American literature becomes dominant in the novels, even before the Civil War of the 1860s manifested the greater social tragedy of a society at war with itself. It is in this background that we find, for our purposes, the first of our novelists: Nathaniel Hawthorne, among other relevant writers such as Herman Melville and Edgar Allan Poe.

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864).

Nathaniel Hawthorne, a fifth-generation American of English descent, was born in Salem, Massachusetts in 1809 a wealthy seaport north of Boston that specialized in East India trade. One of his ancestors had been a judge in an earlier century, during trials in Salem of women accused of being witches (1662). Hawthorne used the idea of a curse on the family of an evil judge in his novel The House of the Seven Gables (1851).

Many of Hawthorne’s stories are set in Puritan New England, and his greatest novel, The Scarlet Letter (1850), has become the classic portrayal of Puritan America. It tells of the passionate, forbidden love affair linking a sensitive, religious young man, the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale, and the sensuous, beautiful townsperson, Hester Prynne. Set in Boston around 1650 during early Puritan colonization, the novel highlights the Calvinistic obsession with morality, sexual repression, guilt and confession, and spiritual salvation.

For its time, The Scarlet Letter was a daring and even subversive book. Hawthorne’s gentle style, remote historical setting, and ambiguity softened his grim themes and contented the general public, but sophisticated writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Herman Melville recognized the book’s hellish power. It treated issues that were usually suppressed in 19th-century America, such as the impact of the new, liberating democratic experience on individual behavior, especially on sexual and religious freedom. The book is superbly organized and beautifully written. Appropriately, it uses allegory, a technique the early Puritan colonists themselves practiced.

Hawthorne’s reputation rests on his other novels and tales as well. In The House of the Seven Gables (1851), he returns again to New England’s history. The theme concerns an inherited curse and its resolution through love. As one critic has noted, the idealistic

protagonist Holgrave voices Hawthorne’s own democratic distrust of old aristocratic

families.

Hawthorne’s last two novels were less successful. Both use modern settings, which hamper the magic of romance. The Blithedale Romance (1852) is interesting for its portrait of the socialist, utopian Brook Farm community. In the book, Hawthorne criticizes egotistical, power-hungry social reformers whose deepest instincts are not genuinely democratic. The Marble Faun (1860), though set in Rome, dwells on the Puritan themes of sin, isolation, expiation, and salvation.

These themes, and his characteristic settings in Puritan colonial New England, are trademarks of many of Hawthorne’s best-known shorter stories: The Minister’s Black Veil (1853), Young Goodman Brown (1855), and My Kinsman, Major Molineux (1859). In the last of these, he casts light on one of the most striking elements in Hawthorne’s fiction: the lack of functioning families in his works. Although Cooper’s Leather-Stocking Tales manage to introduce families into the least likely wilderness places, Hawthorne’s stories and novels repeatedly show broken, cursed, or artificial families and the sufferings of the isolated individual.

The ideology of revolution, too, may have played a part in glorifying a sense of proud yet alienated freedom. The American Revolution, from a psychohistorical viewpoint, parallels an adolescent rebellion away from the parent-figure of England and the larger family of the British Empire. Americans won their independence and were then faced with the bewildering dilemma of discovering their identity apart from old authorities. This scenario was played out countless times on the frontier, to the extent that, in fiction, is olation often seems the basic American condition of life. Puritanism and its Protestant offshoots may have further weakened the family by preaching that the individual’s first responsibility was to save his or her own soul.

Herman Melville (1819-1891).

Herman Melville, like Nathaniel Hawthorne, was a descendant of an old, wealthy family that fell abruptly into poverty upon the death of the father. His interest in sailors’ lives grew naturally out of his own experiences, and most of his early novels grew out of his voyages. His first book, Typee, (1840) was based on his time spent among the supposedly cannibalistic but hospitable tribe of the Taipis in the Marquesas Islands of the South Pacific. The book praises the islanders and their natural, harmonious life, and criticizes the Christian missionaries. Moby -Dick; or, The Whale (1856), Melville’s masterpiece, is the epic story of Captain Ahab, whose obsessive quest for the white whale Moby-Dick leads the ship and its men to destruction. This work, a realistic adventure novel, contains a series of meditations on the human condition. Certain literary references resonate throughout the

novel, thus Ahab, named for an Old Testament king, desires a total, Faustian, god- like

knowledge whereas Moby-Dick ends with the word orphan. Moby-Dick has been called a natural epic.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849).

Edgar Allan Poe, a southerner, shares with Melville a darkly metaphysical vision mixed with elements of realism, parody, and burlesque. He refined the short story genre and invented detective fiction. Many of his stories prefigure the genres of science fiction, horror, and fantasy so popular today. Poe’s short and tragic life was plagued with insecurity and this influenced his works. He believed that strangeness was an essential ingredient of beauty, and his writing is often exotic. His stories and poems are populated with doomed, introspective and gloomy aristocrats (Poe, like many other southerners, cherished an aristocratic ideal). His main works include The Premature Bu rial, Ligeia, The Cask of Amontillado, and The Fall of the House of Usher. On the other hand, Poe’s verse, like that of many Southerners, was very musical and strictly metrical. His best-known poem, in his own lifetime and today, is The Raven (1845), an eerie poem. Poe’ decadence”also reflects the devaluation of symbols that occurred in the 19th century. The resulting chaos of styles was particularly noticeable in the United States, which often lacked traditional styles of its own and the loss of coherent systems of thought. In art, this confusion of symbols fueled the grotesque, an idea that Poe explicitly made his theme in his classic collection of stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840).

4.3. From the Civil War onwards: the Rise of Realism.

The end of the Civil War (1865) gave way to a period of exhaustion. American idealism remained but was rechanneled. This was the era of the millionaire manufacturer and the speculator, when Darwinian evolution and the movement of Naturalism had the power. Also, business boomed after the war: industry in the North, the mana gement of men and machines, the enormous natural resources (iron, coal, oil, gold, and silver ), the new intercontinental rail system, inaugurated in

1869, the transcontinental telegraph, which began operating in 1861, gave industry access to

materials, markets, and communications.

The constant influx of immigrants provided a seemingly endless supply of inexpensive labor as well (over 23 million foreigner, among which we namely find German, Scandinavian, and Irish in the early years, and increasingly Central and Southern Europeans thereafter), and Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino contract laborers were imported by Hawaiian plantation owners, railroad companies, and other American business interests on the West Coast. So, from 1860 to 1914, the United States was transformed from a small, young, agricultural ex-colony to a huge, modern, industrial nation. A debtor nation in 1860, by 1914 it had become the world’s wealthiest state, with a populat ion that

had more than doubled, rising from 31 million in 1860 to 76 million in 1900. By World War I, the

United States had become a major world power.

As industrialization grew, so did literature. Characteristic American novels of the period Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Jack London’s Martin Eden , and later Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy depict the damage of economic forces and alienation on the weak or vulnerable individual. Survivors, like Twain’s Huck Finn, Humphrey Vanderveyden in London’s The Sea- Wolf, and Dreiser’s opportunistic Sister Carrie, endure through inner strength involving kindness, flexibility, and, above all, individuality. For our purposes, we shall only review the second novelist under consideration, as the symbol of naturalism and muckraking.

Stephen Crane is to be set up within the naturalist writers who used realism to relate the individual to society. Often they exposed social problems and were influenced by Darwinian thought and the related philosophical doctrine of determinism, which views individuals as the helpless pawns of economic and social forces beyond their control. Among these writers we find: Stephen Crane, Jack London, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Upton Sinclair. For them Naturalism is essentially a literary expression of determinism, since it is associated with bleak, realistic depictions of lower- class life and determinism, on denying religion as a motivating force in the world and instead perceives the universe as a machine.

Like Romanticism, naturalism first appeared in Europe. It is usually traced to the works of Honor de Balzac in the 1840s and seen as a French literary movement associated with Gustave Flaubert, Edmond and Jules Goncourt, Èmile Zola, and Guy de Maupassant. It daringly opened up the seamy underside of society and such topics as divorce, sex, adultery, poverty, and crime. Naturalism flourished as Americans became urbanized and aware of the importance of large economic and social forces. By 1890, the frontier was declared officially closed. Most Americans resided in towns, and business dominated even remote farmsteads.

Stephen Crane (1871-1900).

Stephen Crane was born in New Jersey where he had roots going back to Revolutionary War soldiers, clergymen, sheriffs, judges, and farmers who had lived a century earlier. Primarily a journalist who also wrote fiction, essays, poetry, and plays, Crane saw life at its rawest, in slums and on battlefields. His short stories, in particular, The Open Boat, The Blue Hotel, and The Brid e Comes to Yellow Sky, exemplified that literary form.

His most outstanding work is the haunting Civil War novel, The Red Badge of Courage, which was published to great acclaim in 1895. This great realistic novel is a study of the mind of an inexperienced solier trapped in the fury and turmoil of bottle. In particular, his work the Red Badge of Courage is regarded as one of his greatest novels on the American Civil War in a fictional style. The essential strains in the character of Henry Fleming who, prior to the battle, had a conflict between his romantic craving for neo- pagan action and the Christian self-abnegation demanded of him by his mother.

Once in battle, hes self-destructive introspection intensifies. During his wandering behind

the lines, he is tormented by a sense of exclusion and moral transparency as a result of his attempt to convert the battle into a spectacle with no moral claims on him. He feels guilty for the death of his friend Jim Conklin, leaving him overwhelmed with quilt. So, as we can see, the main theme in man’s salvation and spiritual growth, where a battle represents life at its most intense flux. The actual battle is actually symbolic against the fact of change and growth, where Henry Fleming realizes that he shall develop into a veteran.

The success of this book led to the reissue of Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) is one of the best, if not the earliest, naturalistic American novels of free verse. It is the harrowing story of a poor, sensitive young girl whose uneducated, alcoholic parents utterly fail her. In love and eager to escape her violent home life, she allows herself to be seduced into living with a young man, who soon deserts her. When her self-righteous mother rejects her, Maggie becomes a prostitute to survive, but soon commits suicide out of despair. Crane’s earthy subject matter and his objective, scientific style, devoid of moralizing, earmark Maggie as a naturalist work.

Other works followed such as The Black Riders (1895), The Little Regiment (1896) on the Civil War; Pictures of War and George’s Mother (both published in 1896), the latter reading on the story of the dull lives of a young working man and his mother in New Yors; and The Third Violet (1897), a conventional novel about the romance of a young artist. After this literary production period, he decided to remain into the field of reporting. Hence in his latest years, he went to Cuba to report the Spanish-American War, and his journalist sketches and stories are collected in Wounds in the Rain (1899). He was virtually forgotten during the first two decades of the 20th century, but was resurrected through a laudatory biography by Thomas Beer in 1923. He has enjoyed continued success ever since as a champion of the common man, a realist, and a symbolist.

Regarding poetry, we shall namely mention three Midwestern poets who grew up in Illinois and shared the midwestern concern with ordinary people are Carl Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, and Edgar Lee Masters. Their poetry often concerns obscure individua ls since they developed techniques from realism and dramatic renderings. They are part of the Midwestern, or Chicago School that arose before World War I to challenge the East Coast literary establishment. The Chicago Renaissance was a watershed in American culture since it demonstrated that America’s interior had matured.

5. EDUCATIONAL IMPLICATIONS IN LANGUAGE TEACHING.

Literature, and therefore, literary language is one of the most salient aspect of educational activity. In classrooms all kinds of literary language (poetry, drama, novel, prose, periodicals, newspapers,

pamphlets), either spoken or written, is going on for most of the time. Yet, handling literary

productions in the past and, in particular, American History and Literature, makes relevant the analysis of the main literary works, such as novels, letters, poems, newspapers, essays, among others, which reflect the social, political, economical and cultural situation of the period.

Hence it makes sense to examine relevant figures such as of Phillis Wheatley in poetry, who was an exceptional slave woman or prose writers, such as Hawthorne, Melville, Crane, and Poe among others because of their relevant contributions not only to American literature, but also to European literature as well. Who has not been read Moby Dick or Rip van Winkle when we were little, not seen The Scarlett Letter or got frightened with The Legend of Sleepy Hollow at the cinema? As we can see, American literature is so close to our culture and, in particular, to most of our students through TV, films, books, and magazines, among others.

Currently, action research groups attempt to bring about change in classroom learning and teaching through a focus on literary production under two premises. First, because they believe le arning is an integral aspect of any form of activity and second, because education at all levels must be conceived in terms of literature. The basis for these assumptions is to be found in an attempt, through the use of various modes of literary forms, to develop understanding of students’ shared but diverse social and physical environment.

Learning involves a process of transformation of participation itself which has far reaching implications on the role of the teacher in the teaching- learning relationship. This means that literary genres are an analytic tool and that teachers need to identify the potential contributions and potential limitations of them before we can make good use of the genre analysis techniques: poems, comedies, historical accounts and romances. We must bear in mind that most students will continue their studies at university and there, they will have to handle successfully all kind of genres, especially poetry and fiction ones within our current framework.

But how do American literature tie in with the new curriculum? American literature may be approached in linguistic terms, regarding form and function (morphology, lexis, structure, form) and also from a cross-curricular perspective (Sociology, History, English, French, Spanish Language and Literature). Spanish students are expected to know about the American culture and its influence on Europe since students are required to know about the world culture and history. So, American literature is easily approached by means of the subjects of History, Language and Literature by establishing a paralelism with the Spanish one (age, literature forms, events).

In addition, one of the objectives of teaching the English language is to provide good models of almost any kind of literary productions for future studies. Following van Ek & Trim (2001), ‘the learners can perform, within the limits of the resources available to them, those writing (and oral) tasks which adult citizens in general may wish, or be called upon, to carry out in their private capacity or as members of the general public’ when dealing with their future regarding personal and professional life.

Moreover, nowadays new technologies may provide a new direction to language teaching as they

set more appropriate context for students to experience the target culture. Present-day approaches deal with a communicative competence model in which first, there is an emphasis on significance over form, and secondly, motivation and involvement are enhanced by means of new technologies. Hence literary productions may be approched in terms of films and drama representations in class, among others, and in this case, by means of books (novels: historical, terror, descriptive), paper (essays), among others.

The success partly lies in the way the language becomes real to the users, feeling themselves really in the language. Some of this motivational force is brought about by intervening in authentic communicative events. Otherwise, we have to recreate as much as possible the whole cultural environment in the classroom. This is to be achieved within the framework of the European Council (1998) and, in particular, the Spanish Educational System which establishes a common reference framework for the teaching of foreign languages where students are intende d to carry out several communication tasks with specific communicative goals, for instance, how to produce a literary text (oral or written): writing a chapter of a novel, a terror story, a poem, acting out in a theatre play, representing a film scene orally, and so on.

The knowledge about American culture (history and literature) should become part of every literary student’s basic competence (B.O.E., 2004). There are hidden influences at work beneath the textual surface: these may be sociocultural, inter and intratextual. The literary student has to discover these, and wherever necessary apply them in further examination. The main aims that our currently educational system focuses on are mostly sociocultural, to facilitate the study of cultural themes, as our students must be aware of their current social reality within the European framework.

6. CONCLUSION.

So, on reviewing the political background of the United States, we shall divide our study in three main sections which correspond to three main periods: What we have found here provides some interesting slants on those larger themes. For example, Burdett’s personal religious position (against Royal control of the Church) does not easily fit with the received picture of the religious and political tensio ns at the heart of the English Civil War. The example of Burdett reminds us that the causes of historical events are frequently not as tidy as historians would sometimes like them to be; and he might therefore prompt further study of the extent to which religious divisions underlay the conflict between cavaliers and roundheads. In a different fashion, the tensions between the New World colonies and England over government and law provide an intriguing insight into conflicts that pre-date the American War of Independence. Again, having followed Burdett, we find ourselves aware of a new possible avenue for historical exploration

To conclude with, the present unit, Unit 45, has aimed to provide a relevant framework for the imaginative literature of eighteenth -century Great Britain in terms of changing social, economic, political, cultural and technological conditions within this period, namely by reviewing the main socioeconomic developments, political body, and the main cultural and technological events . In

addition, we have analysed the relevance of the rise of the novel in the second half of the century

since it marked a hallmark in that century. By approaching the greatest eighteenth -century writers and their works, we have intended to provide a general overview of the Augustan Age and its literary production, which still reflects their prevailing ideologies at present.

We consider worth including a historical background for the eighteenth-century Great Britain since many of its most important events had their explanation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The literary background of the Augustean Age (1714-1790), namely regarding drama, poetry, and prose help us to get an organized scheme of the evolution of these literary form, which are, in turn, a reflection of the main social, economic, cultural, technogical and political events in that period. Hence, figures such as Cromwell, Pope, Johnson or Walpole make us think about turning points in the History of Great Britain, as well as historical events, such as the execution of Charles I (1649 ), the French Revolution (1789) or the Black Death (1665) that lead us to the explanation of literary development.

A general overview of the eighteenth-century Great Britain regarding social, economic and political background, scientific and te chnological background, and cultural and literary background in Great Britain take us to a close analysis of how literature developed in Augustan Age (1714-1790) and the earlier years of the nineteenth century (1790-1837). We have namely focused on three periods: (a)

1680- 1740, which relates to the Enlightenment, the Age of Pope (1700-c.1750) and the starting

point for a profound change in literature mode, the novel. Secondly, the period between 1740 and

1788, which is related to the rise of the novel and the Age of Johnson, also known as the Age of Transition; and the period between 1788 and 1820, which relates to the late eighteenth century and the pre-Romantic period. In each section we have examined the main literary forms : poetry, drama and prose in terms of authors and their works.

Therefore, we shall underline again the relevance of the novel within this period. Following Watt (2001), “the novel is the form of literature which most fully reflects this individualist and innovating reorientation. Previous literature forms had reflected the general tendency of their cultures to make conformity to traditional practice the major test of truth: the plots of classical and Renaissance epic, for example, were based on past history or fable, and the merits of the author’s treatment were judged largely according to a view of literary decorum derived from the accepted models in the genre. This literary traditionalism was first and most fully challenged by the novel, whose primary criterion was truth to individual experience.”

According to Watt (2001) the novel was namely “begun by Defoe, Richardson and Fielding” and adds that “Richardson and Fielding saw themselves as founders of a new kind of writing, and that both viewed their work involving a break with the old-fashioned romances; but neither they nor their contemporaries provide us with the kind of characterization of the new genre that we need”. Yet, the term ‘novel’ was not fully established until the end of the eighteenth century. On the other hand, Watt considers that “Defoe and Richardson are the first great writers in our literature who did not take plots from mythology, history, legend or previous literature.

In this they differ from Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare and Milton, for instance, who, like the

writers of Greece and Rome, habitually used tradition plots; and who did so, in the last analysis, because they accepted the general premise of their times”. Therefore, “after Defoe, Richardson and Fielding in their very different ways continued what was to become the novel’s usual practice, the use of non-traditional plots, either wholly invented or based in part on a contemporary incident” (2001:15)

So far, we have attempted to provide the reader in this presentation with a linguistic, historical and cultural background on the vast amount of literature productions in Augustan Age, and its further developments up to the nineteenth century. This information is relevant for language learners, even

2nd year Bachillerato students, who do not automatically establish similiarities between British and Spanish literary works. So, el arners need to have these associations brought to their attention in cross-curricular settings. As we have seen, understanding how literature genres developed into the ones we know today is important to students, who are expected to be aware of the richness of English literature.

7. BIBLIOGRAPHY.

Albert, Edward. 1990. A History of English Literature . Walton-on-Thames. Nelson. 5^t^hedition

(Revised by J.A. Stone).

Allan Neilson, W. et al. 2001. Lectures on the Harvard Classics, edited byVol. XLI. The Harvard

Classics. New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1909–14; Bartleby.com, 2001. Alexander, M. 2000. A History of English Literature. Macmillan Press. London.

B.O.E. 2004. Consejería de Educación y Cultura. Decreto N.º 116/2004, de 23 de enero. Currículo de la Educación Secundaria Obligatoria en la Comunidad Autónoma de la Región de Murcia.

B.O.E. 2004. Consejería de Educación y Cultura. Decreto N.º 117/2004, de 23 de enero. Currículo de Bachillerato en la Comunidad Autónoma de la Región de Murcia.

Council of Europe (1998) Modern Languages: Learning, Teaching, Assessment. A Common

European Framework of reference.

Rogers, P. 1987. The Oxford Illustrated History of English Literature. Oxford University Press.

Speck, W.A. 1998. Literature and Society in Eighteenth-Century England: Ideology Politics and

Culture 1680-1820. Book Reviews.

Thoorens, Léon. 1969. Panorama de las literaturas Daimon: Inglaterra y América del Norte. Gran

Bretaña y Estados Unidos de América. Ediciones Daimon.

Ward & Trent, et al. 2000. The Cambridge History of English and American Literature. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1907–21; New York: Bartleby.com.

White, R.J. 1971. The Horizon Concise History of England. American Heritage Publishing Co, Inc.: New York, New York.

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Topic 46 – Historic configuration of the united states: from independence to secession war. Reference novels: the scarlet letter and the red badge of courage.

Topic 46 – Historic configuration of the united states: from independence to secession war. Reference novels: the scarlet letter and the red badge of courage.

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