Jennifer Wu's learning notes

American Literature Note 8

Edgar Allan Poe

He was an American author, poet, editor, and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story, and is generally considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre. He is further credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. He was the first well-known American writer to try to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.

The Raven

"The Raven" is Edgar Allan Poe’s poem. First published in January 1845, the poem is often noted for its musicality, stylized language, and supernatural atmosphere. It tells of a talking raven's mysterious visit to a distraught lover, tracing the man's slow fall into madness. The lover, often identified as being a student, is lamenting the loss of his love, Lenore. Sitting on a bust of Pallas, the raven seems to further instigate his distress with its constant repetition of the word "Nevermore". The poem makes use of a number of folk and classical references.

The Fall of the House of Usher (p.702)

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(1) Isolation:

This story explores a family so isolated from the rest of the world that they’ve developed their own supernatural barriers to interacting with it. The House of Usher exists in its own reality, governed by its own rules and with no interest in others. Such extreme isolation forces the family members closer and closer to each other, again to a supernatural degree, and inexplicable to any outsider.

(2)Fear:

For Roderick Usher fear itself is worse than whatever you actually fear. In fact, fear is responsible for at least one of the deaths in this story. One possible interpretation of the tale is that the fear of some dreaded occurrence actually manifests it in reality; that is, because the protagonist fears his death, he brings about his death.

“It is not worth the while to go round the world to count the cats in Zanzibar.”

(Self-reliance)

Renaissance

In American literature, the American Renaissance was a period during which many of the literary works most widely considered American masterpieces were produced. The period is generally defined as the mid-19th century but especially the years roughly from 1850 to 1855. Major works from those years include Ralph Waldo Emerson's Representative Men (1850, though most of Emerson's best-known texts were published earlier), Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851), Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Henry David Thoreau's Walden (1854), and Walt Whitman's first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855).

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ralph Waldo Emerson was an American Transcendentalist poet, philosopher and essayist during the 19th century. One of his best-known essays is "Self-Reliance.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born on May 25, 1803, in Boston, Massachusetts. In 1821, he took over as director of his brother’s school for girls. In 1823, he wrote the poem "Good-Bye.” In 1832, he became a Transcendentalist, leading to the later essays "Self-Reliance" and "The American Scholar." Emerson continued to write and lecture into the late 1870s. He died on April 27, 1882, in Concord, Massachusetts.

The American Scholar

"The American Scholar" was a speech given by Ralph Waldo Emerson on August 31, 1837, to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was invited to speak in recognition of his groundbreaking work Nature, published a year earlier, in which he established a new way for America's fledgling society to regard the world. Sixty years after declaring independence, American culture was still heavily influenced by Europe, and Emerson, for possibly the first time in the country's history, provided a visionary philosophical framework for escaping "from under its iron lids" and building a new, distinctly American cultural identity.

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My Kinsman, Major Molineux (p.607)

"My Kinsman, Major Molineux" is a short story written by American author Nathaniel Hawthorne in 1831. It first appeared in the 1832 edition of The Token and Atlantic Souvenir, published by Samuel Goodrich. It later appeared in The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales, a collection of short stories by Hawthorne published in 1852 by Ticknor, Reed & Fields. The story exemplifies the darkest times of American development.

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