Early American Literary Period Indigenous Traditions [VERIFIED]
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The written Native American literary traditioncommenced as early as the eighteenthcentury, when a Mohegan Methodist missionary,Samson Occum, published his Sermon Preached at the Execution of Moses Paul, an Indian in 1772. William Apess (Pequot), also aChristian minister, wrote an autobiographythat protested non-Indians' treatment of Indians,and he also collected the autobiographiesof other Christian Indians in Experiences of Five Christian Indians of the Pequot Tribe(1833). Other Native Americans published historicaland cultural accounts of their peoplesduring the nineteenth century: David Cusick(Tuscarora); George Copway, Peter Jones, andWilliam Whipple Warren (Ojibwa); PeterDooyentate Clarke (Wyandot); Chief EliasJohnson (Tuscarora); and Chief Andrew J.Blackbird (Ottawa). These valuable writingsrepresent a range of genres and reflect culturalissues of the times in which they were written.
The substantial amount of writing by NativeAmericans now enables the identificationof clusters of work based on genre, tribal affiliation,geography, theme, style, gender, andsexual preference. The blossoming of nonfictionalessay writing and literary criticism byNatives themselves bodes well for the futurestudy of Native American literature. Most notableamong contemporary essayists is ElizabethCook-Lynn (Crow-Creek-Dakota); hercollection Why I Can't Read Wallace Stegner(1996) hits at crucial contemporary NativeAmerican struggles, challenges, and grievancesin tough-minded and bold terms. Althoughprimarily a poet and fiction writer,Cook-Lynn presents "a tribal voice" (the subtitleof the text) that cannot be ignored. Mostimportantly, Native American literature owesits existence to continuing and vibrant oraltraditions.
Long before the arrival of Europeans in the Americas, native people had their own rich culture. The Native American literary tradition comprises oral tradition, folktales, creation stories and other myths that survive in the traditions and stories told by modern-day Native Americans.
American literature is literature written or produced in the United States of America and in the colonies that preceded it. The American literary tradition thus is part of the broader tradition of English-language literature, but also includes literature of other traditions produced in the United States and in other immigrant languages.[1] Furthermore, a rich tradition of oral storytelling exists amongst Native American tribes.[2]
The Thirteen Colonies have often been regarded as the center of early American literature. However, the first European settlements in North America had been founded elsewhere many years earlier, and the dominance of the English language in American culture was not yet apparent.[7] The first item printed in Pennsylvania was in German and was the largest book printed in any of the colonies before the American Revolution.[7] Spanish and French had two of the strongest colonial literary traditions in the areas that now comprise the United States, and discussions of early American literature commonly include texts by Samuel de Champlain alongside English-language texts by Thomas Harriot and Captain John Smith. Moreover, a wealth of oral literary traditions existed on the continent among the numerous different Native American tribes. Political events, however, would eventually make English the lingua franca as well as the literary language of choice for the colonies at large. Such events included the English capture of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam in 1664, with the English renaming it New York and changing the administrative language from Dutch to English.[8]
The 1920s brought sharp changes to American literature. Many writers had direct experience of the First World War, and they used it to frame their writings.[36] Writers like Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and poets Ezra Pound, H.D. and T. S. Eliot demonstrate the growth of an international perspective in American literature. American writers had long looked to European models for inspiration, but whereas the literary breakthroughs of the mid-19th century came from finding distinctly American styles and themes, writers from this period were finding ways of contributing to a flourishing international literary scene, not as imitators but as equals. Something similar was happening back in the States, as Jewish writers (such as Abraham Cahan) used the English language to reach an international Jewish audience.
Frequently linked with Updike is the novelist Philip Roth. Roth vigorously explores Jewish identity in American society, especially in the postwar era and the early 21st century. Frequently set in Newark, New Jersey, Roth's work is known to be highly autobiographical, and many of Roth's main characters, most famously the Jewish novelist Nathan Zuckerman, are thought to be alter egos of Roth. With these techniques, and armed with his articulate and fast-paced style, Roth explores the distinction between reality and fiction in literature while provocatively examining American culture. His most famous work includes the Zuckerman novels, the controversial Portnoy's Complaint (1969), and Goodbye, Columbus (1959). Among the most decorated American writers of his generation, he has won every major American literary award, including the Pulitzer Prize for his major novel American Pastoral (1997).
Though its exact parameters remain disputable, from the early 1990s to the present day the most salient literary movement has been postmodernism. Thomas Pynchon, a seminal practitioner of the form, drew in his work on modernist fixtures such as temporal distortion, unreliable narrators, and internal monologue and coupled them with distinctly postmodern techniques such as metafiction, ideogrammatic characterization, unrealistic names (Oedipa Maas, Benny Profane, etc.), plot elements and hyperbolic humor, deliberate use of anachronisms and archaisms, a strong focus on postcolonial themes, and a subversive commingling of high and low culture. In 1973, he published Gravity's Rainbow, a leading work in this genre, which won the National Book Award and was unanimously nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction that year. His other major works include his debut, V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), Mason & Dixon (1997), and Against the Day (2006).
Native American literature is literature, both oral and written, produced by Native Americans in what is now the United States (as distinct from First Nations writers in Canada), from pre-Columbian times through to today. Famous authors include N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, Simon Ortiz, Louise Erdrich, Gerald Vizenor, Joy Harjo, Sherman Alexie, D'Arcy McNickle, James Welch, Charles Eastman, Mourning Dove, Zitkala-Sa, John Rollin Ridge, Lynn Riggs, Diane Glancy, Hanay Geiogamah, William Apess, Samson Occom, et al. Importantly, it is not "a" literature, but a set of literatures, since every tribe has its own cultural traditions. Since the 1960s, it has also become a significant field of literary studies, with academic journals, departments, and conferences devoted to the subject.
In the early 1900s, as white American audiences became interested in reading about the lives and cultures of Native Americans, Native American writers began transcribing the stories of their cultures, such as Charles Eastman's Old Indian Days and Mourning Dove's Coyote Tales. Others began to write fiction, for example, Mourning Dove's novel Cogewea and D'Arcy McNickle's The Surrounded. Other novelists include John Joseph Mathews and John Milton Oskison. Perhaps the best known Native American work from this period is Green Grow the Lilacs, a play by Cherokee author Lynn Riggs that became the basis for the musical Oklahoma! Many of these authors blended autobiography, traditional stories, fiction, and essays, as can be seen in Zitkala-Sa's (Dakota) American Indian Stories.
American literature does not easily lend itself to classification by time period. Given the size of the United States and its varied population, there are often several literary movements happening at the same time. However, this hasn't stopped literary scholars from making an attempt. Here are some of the most commonly agreed upon periods of American literature from the colonial period to the present.
Also known as the Romantic Period in America and the Age of Transcendentalism, this period is commonly accepted to be the greatest of American literature. Major writers include Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville. Emerson, Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller are credited with shaping the literature and ideals of many later writers. Other major contributions include the poetry of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the short stories of Melville, Poe, Hawthorne, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. Additionally, this era is the inauguration point of American literary criticism, lead by Poe, James Russell Lowell, and William Gilmore Simms. The years 1853 and 1859 brought the first novels written by African-American authors, both male and female: "Clotel," by William Wells Brown and "Our Nig," by Harriet E. Wilson.
This relatively short period is defined by its insistence on recreating life as life really is, even more so than the realists had been doing in the decades before. American Naturalist writers such as Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London created some of the most powerfully raw novels in American literary history. Their characters are victims who fall prey to their own base instincts and to economic and sociological factors. Edith Wharton wrote some of her most beloved classics, such as "The Custom of the Country" (1913), "Ethan Frome" (1911), and "The House of Mirth" (1905) during this time period.
In 1789, Olaudah Equiano published a narrative that became central to the antislavery cause, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, an early example of the slave narrative genre that would become wildly popular in the antebellum period. 2b1af7f3a8