Littérature Américaine

Séquence 2 : Early American and Colonial Period to 1776

Littérature Américaine
Dr. Alassane Abdoulaye DIA
Séquence 2 : Early American and Colonial Period to 1776

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American literature begins with the orally transmitted myths, legends, tales, and lyrics (always
songs) of Indian cultures. There was no written literature among the more than 500 different Indian
languages and tribal cultures that existed in North America before the first Europeans arrived.
Examples of almost every oral genre can be found in American Indian literature: lyrics, chants,
myths, fairy tales, humorous anecdotes, incantations, riddles, proverbs, epics, and legendary
histories. The songs or poetry, like the narratives, range from the sacred to the light and humorous:
There are lullabies, war chants, love songs, and special songs for children's games, gambling,
various chores, magic, or dance ceremonials.
Indian oral tradition and its relation to American literature as a whole is one of the richest and
least explored topics in American studies. The Indian contribution to America is greater than is
often believed. The hundreds of Indian words in everyday American English include "canoe,"
"tobacco," "potato," "moccasin," "moose," "persimmon," "raccoon," "tomahawk," and "totem."

1. THE LITERATURE OF EXPLORATION

The earliest explorers of America were not English, Spanish, or French. The first European record
of exploration in America is in a Scandinavian language. The Old Norse Vinland Saga recounts
how the adventurous Leif Eriksson and a band of wandering Norsemen settled briefly somewhere
on the northeast coast of America -- probably Nova Scotia, in Canada -- in the first decade of the

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Séquence 2 : Early American and Colonial Period to 1776

11th century, almost 400 years before the next recorded European discovery of the New World.
The first known and sustained contact between the Americas and the rest of the world, however,
began with the famous voyage of an Italian explorer, Christopher Columbus, funded by the Spanish
rulers Ferdinand and Isabella. Columbus's journal in his "Epistola," printed in 1493, recounts the
trip's drama (the terror of the men, who feared monsters and thought they might fall off the edge
of the world; the near-mutiny; how Columbus faked the ships' logs so the men would not know
how much farther they had travelled than anyone had gone before; and the first sighting of land as
they neared America).

Initial English attempts at colonization were disasters. Jamestow is the first English colony
established in 1607. It endured starvation, brutality, and misrule. However, the literature of the
period paints America in glowing colors as the land of riches and opportunity. Accounts of the
colonizations became world-renowned. The exploration of Roanoke was carefully recorded by
Thomas Hariot in A Brief and True Report of the New-Found Land of Virginia (1588). Hariot's
book was quickly translated into Latin, French, and German; the text and pictures were made into
engravings and widely republished for over 200 years.

The Jamestown colony's main record, the writings of Captain John Smith, one of its leaders, is
the exact opposite of Hariot's accurate, scientific account. Smith was an incurable romantic, and
he seems to have embroidered his adventures. To him we owe the famous story of the Indian
maiden, Pocahontas. Whether fact or fiction, the tale is ingrained in the American historical
imagination. The early literature of exploration, made up of diaries, letters, travel journals, ships'
logs, and reports to the explorers' financial backers (European rulers or, in mercantile England and
Holland, joint stock companies) gradually was 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 in English. As American minority literature continues to
flower in the 20th century and American life becomes increasingly multicultural, scholars are
rediscovering the importance of the continent's mixed ethnic heritage. Although the story of
literature now turns to the English accounts, it is important to recognize its richly cosmopolitan
beginnings.

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Séquence 2 : Early American and Colonial Period to 1776

2. THE COLONIAL PERIOD IN NEW ENGLAND

It is likely that no other colonists in the history of the world were as intellectual as the Puritans.
Between 1630 and 1690, there were as many university graduates in the northeastern section of
the United States, known as New England, as in the mother country (an amazing fact when one
considers that most educated people of the time were aristocrats who were unwilling to risk their
lives in wilderness conditions). The self-made and often self-educated Puritans were notable
exceptions. They wanted education to understand and execute God's will as they established their
colonies throughout New England. The Puritan definition of good writing was that which brought
home a full awareness of the importance of worshipping God and of the spiritual dangers that the
soul faced on Earth. Puritan style varied enormously (from complex metaphysical poetry to
homely journals and crushingly pedantic religious history). Whatever the style or genre, certain
themes remained constant.

Life was seen as a test; failure led to eternal damnation and hellfire, and success to heavenly
bliss. This world was an arena of constant battle between the forces of God and the forces of Satan,
a formidable enemy with many disguises. Many Puritans excitedly awaited the "millennium,"
when Jesus would return to Earth, end human misery, and inaugurate 1,000 years of peace and
prosperity. In recording ordinary events to reveal their spiritual meaning, Puritan authors
commonly cited the Bible, chapter and verse.

Here are some representative Puritan writers to note :

William Bradford (1590-1657): As a longtime member of a Puritan group that separated

from the Church of England in 1606, William Bradford lived in the Netherlands for more
than a decade before sailing to North America aboard the Mayflower in 1620. He served
as Governor of Plymouth in the Massachusetts Bay Colony for more than 30 years,
chronicling his experiences in a journal that became the authoritative account of
the Pilgrims and Plymouth Colony. His history, Of Plymouth Plantation (1651), is a clear and
compelling account of the colony's beginning. Bradford also recorded the first document of
colonial self-governance in the English New World, the "Mayflower Compact," drawn up while
the Pilgrims were still on board ship.

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Anne Bradstreet (c. 1612-1672) : The first published book of poems by an American was also
the first American book to be published by a woman (Anne Bradstreet). Born and educated in
England, Bradstreet was the daughter of an earl's estate manager. She emigrated with her family
when she was 18. Her husband eventually became governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony,
which later grew into the great city of Boston. She preferred her long, religious poems on
conventional subjects such as the seasons, but contemporary readers most enjoy the witty poems
on subjects from daily life and her warm and loving poems to her husband and children. She was
inspired by English metaphysical poetry, and her book The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in
America (1650) shows the influence of Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, and other English poets
as well. She often uses elaborate conceits or extended metaphors. "To My Dear and Loving
Husband" (1678) uses the oriental imagery, love theme, and idea of comparison popular in Europe
at the time, but gives these a pious meaning at the poem's conclusion.

Edward Taylor (c. 1644-1729) : Like Anne Bradstreet, and, in fact, all of New England's first
writers, the intense, brilliant poet and minister Edward Taylor was born in England. The son of a
yeoman farmer (an independent farmer who owned his own land) Taylor 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, like most Harvard-trained ministers, he knew Greek, Latin, and Hebrew.
Modest, pious, and hard-working, Taylor never published his poetry, which was discovered only
in the 1930s. He would, no doubt, have seen his work's discovery as divine providence; today's
readers should be grateful to have his poems (the finest examples of 17th-century poetry in North
America). Taylor wrote a variety of verse: funeral elegies, lyrics, a medieval "debate," and a 500-
page Metrical History of Christianity (mainly a history of martyrs). His best works, according to
modern critics, are the series of short Preparatory Meditations.

Michael Wigglesworth (1631-1705): Wigglesworth, like Taylor an English-born, Harvard-

educated Puritan minister who practiced medicine, is the third New England colonial poet of note.
He continued the Puritan themes in his best-known work, 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. This first American best-seller is an appalling portrait
of damnation to hell in ballad meter. The great model of writing, belief, and conduct was the Bible,

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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.

Cotton Mather (1663-1728): No account of New England colonial literature would be complete
without mentioning Cotton Mather, the master pedant. The third in the four-generation Mather
dynasty of Massachusetts Bay, he wrote at length of New
England in over 500 books and pamphlets. Mather's 1702 Magnalia Christi Americana
(Ecclesiastical History of New England), his most ambitious work, exhaustively chronicles the
settlement of New England through a series of biographies.
Roger Williams (c. 1603-1683) : Williams's numerous books include one of the first phrase
books of Indian languages, A Key Into the Languages of America (1643). He wrote lively defenses
of religious toleration not only for different Christian sects, but also for non-Christians. "It is the
will and command of God, that...a permission of the most Paganish, Jewish, Turkish, or
Antichristian consciences and worships, be granted to all men, in all nations...," he wrote in The
Bloody Tenet of Persecution for Cause of Conscience (1644).

Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758): Edwards is best known for his frightening, powerful sermon,
"Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (1741). This was a highly influential sermon of the Great
Awakening, emphasizing God’s wrath upon unbelievers after death to a very real, horrific, and
fiery Hell. The underlying point is that God has given humans a chance to confess their sins. It is
the mere will of God, according to Edwards, that keeps wicked men from being overtaken by the
devil and his demons and cast into the furnace of hell (“like greedy hungry lions, that see their
prey, and expect to have it, but are for the present kept back [by God’s hand].)” Edwards provides
much varied and vivid imagery to illustrate this main theme throughout.

3. LITERATURE IN THE SOUTHERN AND MIDDLE COLONIES

Pre-revolutionary southern literature was aristocratic and secular, 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.

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Her are some representative writers of this area:

William Byrd (1674-1744): Southern culture naturally revolved around the ideal of the
gentleman. William Byrd described the gracious way of life at his plantation. Byrd epitomizes the
spirit of the southern colonial gentry. His library of 3,600 books was the largest in the South. Byrd
is best known today for his lively 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): Beverley, another wealthy planter and author of The History
and Present State of Virginia (1705, 1722) records the history of the Virginia colony in a humane
and vigorous style. Humorous satire (a literary work in which human vice or folly is attacked
through irony, derision, or wit) appears frequently in the colonial South. A group of irritated settlers
satirized Georgia's philanthropic founder, General James Oglethorpe, in a tract entitled A True and
Historical Narrative of the Colony of Georgia (1741). The disruptive, satirical poem "The Sotweed
Factor" satirizes the colony of Maryland, where the author, an Englishman named Ebenezer Cook,
had unsuccessfully tried his hand as a tobacco merchant.

Olaudah Equiano (Gustavus Vassa) (c. 1745-c. 1797): Important black writers like Olaudah
Equiano and Jupiter Hammon emerged during the colonial period. Equiano, an Ibo from Niger
(West Africa), was the first black in America to write an autobiography, The Interesting Narrative
of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African(1789). As an enslaved person, his
work is a slave narrative pioneering this particular genre in African American literature.

Jupiter Hammon (c. 1720-c. 1800): The black American poet Jupiter Hammon, a slave on Long
Island, New York, is remembered for his religious poems as well as for “An Address to the Negroes
of the State of New York” (1787), in which he advocated freeing children of slaves instead of
condemning them to hereditary slavery. His poem "An Evening Thought" was the first poem
published by a black male in America.

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