Colonial+Lit

English settlers had been in America almost a century before the novel. Two factors in American life worked against the acceptance of fiction: The hard, practical demand on the energy in the new country Puritanism, because the Puritans think that arts tell “lies”---- gives imitations of things, not reality; also, art stimulates unhealthy emotionalism, particularly sexual emotions which the Puritans especially abhorred.
Franklin’s Autobiography is a fascinating picture of the workings of the new American mind, and Franklin himself is the archetypal American success story. But the Autobiography is still not especially notable as “American Literature”, because it is not an imaginative response to America, it is simply Franklin telling his own story.
Hale Waihona Puke “Rip Van Winkle” is the first in a long line of texts by male American writers in which a male protagonist forsakes civilized life for the wilderness or the sea or the open road on a quest of sorts and perhaps joins forces with a male companion(s). Such books include Herman Melville’s “Moby Dick” and Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road”.
Washington Irving
As the first important writer in American literature, Irving inspired the American Romantic imagination as is presented by two of his most famous stories, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”. Yet he is not wholly American in either approach or major subject matter.
Themes in "Rip Van Winkle": loss (and discovery?) of identity a challenge to American values, the work ethic George III vs. George Washington (is the story anti-republican?)
Seeking the true religion, they fled England and in America attempted to create a "nation of saints" or the “City Upon A Hill," an intensely religious, thoroughly righteous community designed to be an example for all of Europe. These are the people we generally think of as the first colonisers, and whose beliefs influence the American way of life in many ways even today.
James Fenimore Cooper
James Fenimore Cooper has rightly been called the first American novelist. He was the first American to make a life-long and successful career of writing novels, and because his settings were mostly those of the New World, encompassing its social, political, and pioneer characteristics. Far more than any other writer up to his time, he presented in fiction the new nation and its background to the whole world.
Washington Irving
1783 – 1859 born when the American Revolution ended First major book: A History of New-York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty, by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809), a satire on self-important local history and contemporary politics. Irving spent 17 years in Europe The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. was partly written in England, and published there and in the USA in 1819 and 1820
The Romantic Period covers the first half of the 19th century. In this period, what we now see as American writing and literature begins through the writings of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper. Both of them began working straight from English models toward an American sensibility.
Literature existed in America before America existed. During the long period of colonization, a great deal of literature was composed, some of it a very high order. But it was not in any sense American literature. It did not arise out of an imaginative response to America Itself, either as a scene as a society as a historical event as a cluster of possibilities because America had not yet come into being.
Towards the end of the 18th century, writers like Jonathan Edwards, William Cullen Bryant and Benjamin Franklin are usually considered representatives of the American Enlightenment. They shared many of the intellectual commitments of what would be known as the Age of Reason.
They sought to reform the Church of England by creating a new, pure church in the New World. The Puritans created a deeply religious, socially tight-knit and politically innovative culture that is still present in the modern United States. They hoped this new land would serve as a “redeemer nation”.
The most important phase of the pre-national literature consists in the writings of of the Puritans. In this period, writers like William Bradford, John Winthrop, and so on, address themselves to questions of history: a record of concrete historical facts, to a meditation on the unique nature of the present historical moment, to the ultimate meaning of the historical process.