Part ONE. Early American and Colonial Period to 1765.pptVIP

American Literature Part ONE. Early American and Colonial Period to 1765 1. Introduction Instead of beginning with folk tales and songs the American literature began with abstractions and proceeded from philosophy to fiction because there were no written literature among the more than 500 different Indian languages and tribal cultures that existed in North America before the first Europeans arrived there and set up the first colony Jamestown in about 1607. American writing began with the work of English adventurers and colonists in the New World chiefly for the benefit of readers in the mother country. Some of these early works reached the level of literature, as in the robust and perhaps truthful account of his adventures by Captain John Smith and the sober, tendentious journalistic histories of John Winthrop and William Bradford in New England. From the beginning, however, the literature of New England was also directed to the edification and instruction of the colonists themselves, intended to direct them in the ways of the godly. Therefore the writing in this period was essentially two kinds: (1) practical matter-of-fact accounts of farming, hunting, travel, etc. designed to inform people “at home” what life was like in the new world, and, often, to induce their immigration; (2) highly theoretical, generally polemical, discussions of religious questions. Furthermore, the influential Protestant work ethic, reinforced by the practical necessities of a hard pioneer life, inhibited the development of any reading matter designed simply for leisure-time entertainment. The first work published in the Puritan colonies was the Bay Psalm Book (1640), and the whole effort of the divines who wrote furiously to set forth their views was to defend and promote visions of the religious state. They set forth their visions—in effect the first formulation of the concept of national destiny—in a series of impassioned histories and jeremiads from Edward Johnson’s Wonder-Working Pr