Historical Background
Colonial Settlements
In 1607, the first permanent settlement was established at Jamestown, Virginia.
In 1620, the pilgrims, mostly humble countryfolks, stepped on the New England shore and established Plymouth Colony. They were Separatists (name applied to those who split from the Established Church of England in the 17th century, organizing independent congregations. They had much in common with the Puritan party within the state church, but went beyond them in desiring not merely purification in ceremonial but also complete independence. Frequently they had no stated ministry, emphasizing only the bare letter of the Scripture, believing in voluntary church membership, and a relatively democratic organization within the local church.)
In 1630, the Puritans came to colonize the Massachusetts Bay. These people had a great deal of wealth and owned land in England. They wanted to reform the Church of England.
Early in the 17th century, the English settlements in Virginia and Massachusetts began the main stream of what we recognize as the American national history.
Literature of Early Settlements
The first American literature was neither American nor really literature. It was not American because it was the work mainly of immigrants from England. It was not literature as we know it—in the form of poetry, essay, or fiction—but rather and interesting mixture of travel accounts and religious writings. It is mainly a literary expression of Puritan idealism. It is based on the Biblical myth of the Garden of Eden. The pious and self-disciplined Puritans worked with courage and hope toward building a new Garden of Eden in America. They looked even the worst of life in the face of with a tremendous amount of optimism. The puritan optimism has exerted enormous impact on American literature.
The pre-revolutionary writing in the colonies was essentially of 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, discussion of religious questions, which were later supplemented by political debates about the colonies’ relations with the mother country. American literature grew out of humble origins. Diaries, histories, journals, letters, commonplace books, travel books, sermons, in short, personal literature in its various forms, occupy a major position in the literature of the early colonial period.
Types of writing: histories, travel accounts, biographies, diaries, letters, autobiographies, sermons, and poems.
Reasons why there was not much written in English in America before the Revolutionary War (1776-1781).
a. Great Britain discouraged printing in her colonies at that time.
b. Early colonists were too busy to read or write.
c. There were few schools in the colonies and most people could not read or write.
d. The puritans felt that religious books were the only books that one should read.
Characteristics of Colonial Literature
a. All of the works are utilitarian, polemical or didactic.
b. The purpose of literature for puritans was first of all usefulness. It should teach some kind of lesson.
c. In content, the works served either God or colonial expression or both.
d. The style was determined by a practical consideration of the sort of impression each writer wanted to make upon a selected group of readers. Thus they stressed plainness in writing because they were interested in influencing the simple-minded people.
e. The writings are fresh, simple, direct and with a touch of nobility. As it faithfully imitated and transplanted European forms to the new experience, early American literature was as much a product of continuities as an indigenous creation.
American Puritanism
Puritanism is the practice and belief of the puritans. The new England settlements grew out of religious controversy, out of an urge for religious freedom and determination, out of fleeing from religious and political oppression and persecution, out of human thirst for greater economic opportunity, for land, and for adventure. (New England: region including the present states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut, was named by Captain John Smith in his map of 1616.)
The puritans are a group of serious, religious people, advocating highly religious and moral principles. As the word itself hints, puritans want to purify their religious beliefs and practices in the church. They felt that the Church of England was too close to the Church of Rome in doctrine form of worship, and organization of authority. They soon established their own religious and moral principles known as American Puritanism which became one of the enduring influences in American thought and American literature.
American Puritanism stressed the doctrine of predestination, original sin and total depravity, and limited atonement through a special infusion of grace from God. It was influenced heavily by Calvinism.
But in the grim struggle for survival that followed immediately after their arrival in America, they became more and more practical. Their lives are extremely disciplined and hard. They built a way of life that stressed hard work, thrift, piety and sobriety.
Calvinism
Calvinism refers to a comprehensive theological system chiefly distinguished by its view of God and His relationship to man. The name of the system is derived by John Calvin’s surname. There are 5 major points of Calvinism. They can be remembered by the acronym TULIP.
T Total hereditary depravity. (original sin, man’s natural inability to exercise free will, since through Adam’s fall he has suffered hereditary corruption)
U Unconditional election. (predestination, which manifests itself through God’s wisdom to elect those to be saved, despite their inability to perform saving works)
L Limited atonement (particular redemption, man’s hereditary corruption being partially atoned for by Christ, and this atonement being provided the elect through the Holy Spirit, giving them the power to attempt to obey God’s will as revealed through the Bible.)
I Irresistible grace (effectual calling, anticipatory grace made available only to the elect.)
P Perseverance of the saints (once saved, always saved)
加尔文五要点
1.完全无能力(Total inability)或全然败坏(Total depravity)人类由于亚当的堕落而无法以自己的能力作任何灵性上的善事。
2.无条件选择(Unconditional election)上帝对于罪人拣选是无条件的，他的拣选并非因为人在伦理道德上的优点，也非他预见了人将发生的信心。
3.有限的代赎(Limited atonement)基督钉十字架只是为那些预先蒙选之人，不是为世上所有的人。
4.不可抗拒的恩典(Irresistible Grace)人类不可能拒绝上帝的救恩，上帝拯救人的恩典不可能因为人的原因而被阻挠，无法被人拒绝。
5.圣徒蒙保守(Perseverence of the saints)已经得到的救恩不会再次丧失掉，上帝必能保守其拣选的。
With such doctrines in their mind they left Europe for America in order to prove that they were God’s chosen people who would enjoy God’s blessings on earth and in Heaven. They felt that they were exiles under the special grace of God to establish a theocracy in the New England. Over the years in the new homeland, they built a way of life that stressed hard work, thrift, piety and sobriety.
Comparison between American Puritanism and Chinese Confucianism
a. Both received criticism and abhorrence in its separative history. American Puritans came under violent and often virulent attacks for their religious intolerance and bigotry, for their austerity of taste and killjoy way of life, for the very heritage they bequeathed to the new nation. Chinese Confucianism, for a time, awakens abhorrence and even invokes a curse among the Chinese. And often in modern history a revolutionary was he who proved himself first an energetic iconoclast.
b. Both the wrath and the action were justified. When the mists of time have cleared away, traditions such as American Puritanism and Chinese Confucianism will receive, as they are already receiving, the kind of rehabilitation they so well deserve
c. Both have great influence on their literature.
As a dominant factor in American life, American Puritanism was one of the most enduring shaping influences in American thought and American literature.
Confucianism has been the most powerful shaping factor in the cultural maturity of the Chinese nation. It has, through the centuries, burned its way into the very fabric of Chinese social life, and way down into the Chinese consciousness, so that even the most incorruptible anti-Confucianist cannot escape its influence.
The Influence of American Puritanism on American Literature
a. It is a critical commonplace now that American literature or Anglo-American literature—is based on a myth, that is, the Biblical myth of the Garden of Eden. This literature is in good measure a literary expression of the pious idealism of the American Puritan bequest. The Puritans dreamed of living under a perfect order and worked with indomitable courage and confident hope toward building a new Garden of Eden in America, where man could at long last live the way he should. Fired with such a sense of mission, the Puritans looked even the worst of life in the face with a tremendous amount of optimism. All this went, in due time, into the making of American literature. If Emerson saw the American as Adam himself reborn, standing simple and sincere before the world, if Thoreau portrayed himself as an Adam in his Eden, and Whitman felt rapturous at the sight of the American bustling with activity as the children of Adam restored to their lost paradise, and Henry James talked, especially in his early career, about the innocence and simplicity of his Americans as so many American authors, Chinese students of American literature should not be unduly surprised: the optimistic Puritan has exerted a great influence on American literature.
b. The American Puritan’s metaphorical mode of perception was chiefly instrumental in calling into being a literary symbolism which is distinctly American. Puritan doctrine and literary practice contributed to no small extent to the development of an indigenous symbolism. To the pious Puritan the physical, phenomenal world was nothing but a symbol of God. To him the world was, in the words of Charles Feidelson the critic, “instinct with meaning by reason of God’s concurrence and susceptible of interpretation by reason of God’s salient acts.” Physical life was simultaneously spiritual; every passage of life, en-meshed in the vast context of God’s plan, possessed a delegated meaning. The world was, in a word, one world of multiple significance. If you read William Bradford and Cotton Mather, it is impossible to overlook the very symbolizing process that was constantly at work in Puritan minds. If Jonathan Edwards saw nature and even the Bible as “radically figurative,” if Emerson’s Nature is like a “continuous monologue,” to quote Feidelson again, in which the genesis of symbolism is enacted over and over, and if, with Hawthorne, Melville, Howells, and many others, symbolism as a technique has become a common practice, it is indeed as it should be. This particular mode of perception was an essential part of their upbringing.
c. With regard to technique, one naturally thinks of the simplicity, which characterizes the Puritan style of writing. Here the Puritan seems to need some form of rehabilitation, too. The Puritans have been abhorred for their austerity and rigidity in matters of taste, “notorious,” in a manner of speaking, for their distaste for the arts and for any manifestation of sensuous beauty. With regard to their writing, the style is fresh, simple, and direct; the rhetoric is plain and honest, not without a touch of nobility often traceable to the direct influence of the Bible. All this has left an indelible imprint on American writing.
Captain John Smith: the First American Writer
Captain John Smith was the English colonizer in North America who helped establish Jamestown, Virginia, the first permanent English settlement. Smith was born in Willoughby, Lincolnshire. He worked on his father’s farm until he left home as a teenager and became a soldier. His military adventures led him through Europe and eventually to Hungary, where he fought against invading Turks. In 1601 Turks captured Smith and sold him into slavery, from which he later escaped. By 1604 Smith had returned to England, where he became a member of the London Company’s colony council. In December 1606, Smith and the rest of the colonial expedition set sail for America. During the voyage he was accused of conspiracy, although the charges against him were dropped. Smith was one of seven men chosen to be on the governing Council of Virginia by the London Company. He was not formally sworn in as Councilor until June 1607. The expedition founded the settlement named Jamestown in May 1607. The colonists fared badly, suffering from famine, disease, and attacks by the natives. In December 1607 George Kendall, the leader of the council of Jamestown, was shot for mutiny. Smith was chosen president of the colony in1608. Smith insisted that all the colonists work, declaring: “He that will not work shall not eat, except by sickness he be disabled.” The colony survived, but Smith’s strict leadership resulted in uneasy relations with some of the colonizers, especially members of the gentry who were not used to hard labor. Smith organized trade with the Native Americans and led expeditions to explore and map the region surrounding Jamestown. On one of these expeditions he was captured by the Native American chief Powhatan, and, according to his account in a book he published in 1624, he was saved from being put to death by the chief’s daughter, Pocahontas. This adventure has become part of American folklore. However, most historians do not believe this story; they note that Smith did not mention Pocahontas as having anything to do with his release in a document he wrote detailing the colony’s experiences in its first year. Although his courageous and resourceful leadership is credited with having carried the colony through its first two years, his treatment of the local Native Americans was harsh.
Works:
A True Relation of Such Occurrences and Accidents of Note as Hath Happened in Virginia since the First Planting of that Colony (1608)
a pamphlet giving the earliest firsthand account of the settlement at Jamestown.
A Map of Virginia: with a description of the country (1612)
A boasting account of his adventures in America, a guide to the country and an invitation to the bold spirits needed to enlarge and strengthen the English plantations in the new land.
General History of Virginia (1624)
A lengthy and more magniloquent reworking of his earlier writings, containing an extended account of the Pocahontas story.
Characteristics:
His descriptions of America were filled with themes, myths, images, scenes, characters, and events that were a foundation for the nation’s literature. He portrayed English North America as a land of endless bounty.
William Bradford: first governor of Plymouth
In 1621 Governor William Bradford proclaimed a day of thanksgiving and prayer to celebrate the Pilgrim’s first harvest in America. This painting shows the Pilgrims celebrating that first Thanksgiving, a celebration they shared with the Native Americans
Bradford’s History was rediscovered in 1854 after having been taken by British looters during the Revolutionary War. Its discovery prompted a greater American interest in the history the Pilgrims, which eventually led to Lincoln’s decision to make Thanksgiving a holiday. It is also in this account that the Thanksgiving turkey tradition is founded.
They began now to gather in the small harvest they had, and to fit up their houses and dwellings against winter, being all well recovered in health and strength and had all things in good plenty. For as some were thus employed in affairs abroad, others were exercising in fishing, about cod and bass and other fish, of which they took good store, of which every family had their portion. All the summer there was no want: and now began to come in store of fowl, as winter approached, of which this place did abound when they came first (but afterward decreased by degrees). And besides waterfowl there was great store of wild turkeys, of which they took many, besides venison, etc. Besides they had about a peck of meal a week to a person, or now since harvest, Indian corn to that proportion.
One of the Pilgrim leaders and American colonial governor, Bradford was born in Austerfield, Yorkshire, England. In 1606 he joined the Separatists. Three years later, in search of freedom of worship, he went with them to Hollande, where he became an apprentice to a silk manufacturer. Bradford sailed on the Mayflower in 1620, and after his arrival in America he helped found Plymouth Colony. In April 1621 he succeeded Governor John Carver as chief executive of Plymouth Colony. Except for five years, Bradford served as governor almost continuously from 1621 through 1656, having been reelected 30 times. In 1621 he negotiated a treaty with the Massasoit, the chief of the Wampanoag tribe. Under the treaty, which was vital to the maintenance and growth of the colony, Massasoit disavowed Native American claims to the Plymouth area and pledged peace with the colonists. His History of Plymouth Plantation, 1620-1647, was published in 1856, 200 years after his death. The book is an important source of information about the early settlers.
The History of Plymouth Plantation (1630-1651)
In Book one, he sketches the Separatist movement, the flight from England to Holland, the settlement at Leiden, the plans for the settlement in New England, and the Mayflower voyage. The second book, which includes the major part of the history, is in the forms of annals from 1620 to 1646, and describes every aspect of the life of the Pilgrims. Besides being a primary historical source, the work has artistic value because of its dignified, sonorous style.
Bradford himself used a word “pilgrims” to describe the community of believers who sailed on the Mayflower and settled in Plymouth.
From 1621 until his death, Bradford probably possessed more power than any other colonial governor.
John Winthrop: the first governor of Massachusetts Bay colony
The History of New England (1826): journal
A Model of Christian Charity
His works is notable for its candid simplicity and honesty, though the Plymouth governor is the better writer.
Through a direct and vigorous prose style, each account attained literary excellence.
He best expressed the Puritan faith in the colonial period.
John Cotton: the first major intellectual spokesman of the Massachusetts Bay Colony “The Patriarch of New England”
Roger Williams: began the history of religious toleration and the history of separation of church and state in America.
A Key into the Language of America
The Bloody Tenet of Persecution for the Cause of Conscience
Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672)
American poet, born in Northampton, England. She was a daughter of Thomas Dudley, governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and in 1628 she married Simon Bradstreet, who later became governor of the colony. A housewife with eight children, she was also the first important poet in the American colonies. Her poems were published in 1650 as The Tenth Muse Sprung Up in America, which is generally considered the first book of original poetry written in colonial America. Through it she asserted the right of women to learning and expression of thought. Although some of her poems is conventional, much of it is direct and shows sensitivity to beauty. A Puritan poet who wrote “ponderous verses of interminable, interlocking poems on the 4 elements: the constitutions and ages of man, the seasons of the year, the chief empires of the ancient world.
She was known as the “Tenth Muse”. “The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America”
In Greek mythology, the muses were nine daughters of Zeus. Each was the patron of a particular art such as poetry, dance, music, etc)
Muse of Tragedy, Melpomene
Muse of Comedy, Thalia
Muse of dancing and choral songs, Terpsichore
Patroness of epic poetry, Calliope
Patroness of lyric poetry, Euterpe
Maker of love poems, Erato
Muse of hymns to gods, Polymnia
Patroness of astronomy, Urania
Muse of history, Clio
Three Graces: Aglaia makes brightness, Thalia makes bloom, Euphrosyne makes joy.
“Contemplations”
This short poem offers the reader an insight into the mentality of the early Puritan pioneering in a new world. When the poet heard the grasshopper and the cricket sing, she thought of this as their praising their Creator and searched her own soul accordingly. It is evident that she saw something metaphysical inhering in the physical, a mode of perception that was singularly Puritan. Ababccc
“Upon the Burning of Our House”
The nine-stanza work can be subdivided into three segments of three stanzas.
a. the first describes the initial response of a puritan to a disastrous occurrence: she feels resigned because God takes away what He has given.
b. the second segment shows that the pious rationalization fails to suppress the human reaction as a Puritan first and foremost a human. She feels bad as she looks on the debris and reminisces about her good old times.
c. The religious feeling gets the upper hand once and for all. She is happy at the thought that the world above is much better than this earthy earth.
d. The love, the care and the happiness that comes from family life are all the most important to her.
e. The argument of most of her poems is essentially about the justice of God’s ways with His Puritan flock. Her work search for a sense of man’s nature and destiny and his mission in the new world.
f. Bradstreet’s most deeply felt poetry concerns the arduous life of the early settlers, and her work provides an excellent view of the difficulties she and her fellow colonists encountered. She wrote several poems in response to the early deaths o her grandchildren, and “Contemplations” explores her place in the natural world. Bradstreet also used her poetry to examine her religious struggles; she was unable to embrace Calvinism completely. “The Flesh and the Spirit” describes the conflict between living a pleasant life and living a Christian life, and “Meditations Divine and Moral” recounts to her children her doubts about Puritanism. Although Bradstreet addressed broad and universal themes, she is remembered best for her body of evocative poems that provide intimate glimpses into the home life of inhabitants of colonial New England.
Edward Taylor (1642-1729): a meditative poet
Taylor is the best of puritan poets. In his splendid, exotic images, he came nearest to the English baroque poets. He concerned about how his images speak for God.
In "Upon a Spider Catching a Fly" Edward Taylor portrayed the "dance of death" between a spider, a fly, and a wasp. The poem symbolizes the human predicament: the sinner (the "silly fly") risks being caught by Satan ("Hell's spider"), while the person who is saved (the wasp) has the strength to escape Satan's web. It is obvious that Taylor has faith in God who can save the erring, or possibly sinful, humankind from the evil designs of Hell.
[ 本帖最后由 yl120872063b 于 2010-1-22 15:38 编辑 ] |
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