LITERATURA USA 18.10.2010WYKŁAD
Puritanism
Perry Miller, Harvard University Professor claims that “without understanding of Puritanism there is no understanding of America” […]. It was an organization of man’s whole life, emotional and intellectual “[…] it was a state of mind”.
Colonial and Puritan genres
- Travel accounts, journals
- Ships logs, reports to the explorers’ financial backers
- Letters
- Diaries
- Journals
- Captivity narratives – first person accounts of whites captured by Indians
- Slave narratives
- Sermons
- Histories
- Biographies of important people
- Religious and meditative poems
Style
- Instructive
- Plain
- Clear, orderly organization
- Elegy – (favourite genre) a poem of lamentation for the dead, with reflection on the departed life, mournful, melancholy.
European strategies of the early explorers and settlers of the New World:
- Converting Indians to Christianity
- Comparing the New World with the Old World
- Giving familiar names and labels to the strange things, i. e. giving names of Saints to places
- Making the new – familiar or changing the New World
John Smith (1580 – 1631) – Captain Smith
- Very attractive, courageous and resourceful gentleman. To him more than to any other man was due the success of the first colony in Virginia. Jamestown – 1607 (a permanent colony).
- Captain Smith named the coast of England from Cape Cod to the Penobscot River. In his maps he gave to the features of the coastline many of the English names that they bears to this day.
Captain Smith’s Writings
- “True Relation of Virginia” (1608) – historical account of the Jamestown settlement. “General History of Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles” (1624) – contains the story of his rescue by a beautiful Indian princess.
- “Description of New England” (1616) – fascinating “advertisements” which try to persuade the reader to settle in the New World, perform the necessary labour that would make the new plantations profitable.
Propagandistic presentation of the New World
Captain Smith’s Style:
- His works are not fully reliable.
- He has overly vivid imagination, mixing facts and fantasy.
- He seems to have embroidered his adventures.
PURITANISM
- 1620 – Plymouth Colony – Separatists from Holland. Pilgrims or the Pilgrim Fathers.
- Thousands of others came to America, especially during the Great Migration of 1630-40.
- 1620 – Mayflower – nicknamed the Ship of Hope, 65 day voyage across the wintry Atlantic Ocean. 50 Pilgrims (or Saints) as they called themselves led by William Bradford. The rest – seeking fortune and adventure. Saints called them “Strangers”.
- Mayflower Compact – a written agreement providing for a democratic government.
PURITANS
- Their attitude towards all aspects of life – including literature is very important.
- They were convinced of their special mission.
- They believed the whole world is watching them.
- America was to become their “Promised land”. They clung to the tales of the Jews in the Old Testament. Like the Jews, were persecuted for their faith, that they new the one true God. They considered themselves chosen to establish the New Jerusalem – a heaven on Earth. Like Moses (who led the Israelites out of captivity from Egypt, parted the Red Sea), Puritan leaders felt they were rescuing people from their spiritual corruption in England, passing miraculously over a wild sea with God’s aid and fashion new laws and new forms of government after God’s wishes.
- Considered themselves mediators between God and history.
- Bible – at every home, knowing it was a must.
- 1638 – Cambridge Mass – the first print shop and the first printed work – the Bay Psalm Book – religious psalms and hymns, translated from Hebrew to English by colonial preachers and theologians, in verse, intended for group singing in the churches.
- Puritans wanted education to understand and execute God’s will. Harvard (established in 1636) students had to read the Bible three times a day.
Typical Puritan Sermon:
1. Biblical quotation and explication – explanation of philosophical and historical details.
2. Doctrine – the lesson or law, drawn from the Bible.
3. Application – and proposition referring to the present day situation, some uses. The biblical past was compared to the present.
John Winthrop’s Sermon: “A model of Christian Charity”
- The sermon was delivered abroad Arbella (ship) going to the New World in 1630. Convinced that they had enormous responsibility building a new society. God would protect them as Israelites if they followed His word.
- “Not only the eyes of God but the eyes of all people are upon us”.
- Sense of mission and visionary example
Samuel Danforth (1626 – 1674) - “Errand into Wilderness”
Puritan Writing
- Tension and powerful consequences – trying to explain human errors and wickedness, trying to tell how they form part of God’s design. They fall back on the idea of original sin (God’s displeasure, test for his people, wondering about the evil work in the colony).
- Long for meaning behind the mask of material event. Every event has a meaning. It is up to them to find out what it is. Sometimes it is easy and sometimes difficult.
- Authors analyze what happened and compare it with happenings in the Bible. They are looking for signs of being elected (in their private life or in the community life).
War between the colonists and the Pequot nation in 1637.
Bradford had no problems explaining the slaughter of 500 Pequot tribe and the burning of their village by the English.
Moralizing tendency, tendency for allegory and symbol. Every material fact is a symbolof some spiritual truth.
William Bradford (1590 – 1657)
Bradford’s Writing
- “Of Plymouth Plantation” – begun as a personal journal of his own affairs and those of the colony, summing up the colony history through 1646. First publication in 1856.
- Plain style – “clear light of truth” to an uneducated reader. Puritan literature was not to entertain but to instruct.
- Deeply influenced by the belief that God directs everything that happens.
- Bradford sees a special work of God’s providence (care).
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