American Literature Test 2 – Flashcards
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This Early Romantic author is celebrated for contributing to the new nation's burgeoning literature and for being the first American writer to achieve international literary fame; like Ben Franklin, he published some texts as a young man under the pseudonym Jonathan Oldstyle.
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Washington Irving
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This author is considered to be one of the "inventors" of the American short story, though he is also author of numerous respected histories.
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Washington Irving
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Creator of the characters/pen names Diedrich Knickerbocker and Geoffrey Crayon, this author was one of the first to be able to support himself solely through his writing.
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Washington Irving
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Because of this Early Romantic author's prevalent theme of the bewildering rapidity of change, some literary historians claim that he is a precursor to the Local Color literature of the mid- and late-nineteenth century; his descriptions of the folks and landscape in the New York countryside definitely capture a certain place and time.
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Washington Irving
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This author's The Sketch Book compiles several German folktales rewritten on American soil and with American characters and themes.
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Washington Irving
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In his lifetime, this prolific Early Romantic writer published 32 novels, a history of the American navy, five travel books, and two works of social criticism; yet, he has always been best known for his five historical romances referred to as the Leatherstocking series.
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James Cooper
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While one other famous early Romantic fiction writer tried to make his works look "far away and long ago," this author set his imaginative literature on the American frontier.
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James Cooper
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Creator of the frontiersman Natty Bumppo and his Mohican "brother" Chingachgook, this author was expelled from Yale for pulling pranks.
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James Cooper
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According to a famous article by Mark Twain, this Early Romantic author is "guilty" of the following literary "offenses": improbable plots, long descriptive passages, the use of "flat" characters, and long-windedness; perhaps that is true, but he still taught a donkey to sit in a teacher's desk, so "Mama Higgins'" students think he was pretty cool.
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James Cooper
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This author created America's first enduring mythic hero, a figure who also represents this author's ability to realize the mythic possibilities of the frontier.
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James Cooper
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This author's "firsts" include the fact that he is the first novelist to achieve international fame, to support himself solely by writing, and to realize the mythic possibilities for literature placed on the frontier; he is also the first to write a sea novel, a historical romance, and a multi-sequence novel.
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James Cooper
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This mythic character is drawn as a fearless, resourceful, moralizing, anti-establishment nature lover.
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Natty Bumppo
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While Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson are considered the "giants" or innovation, these poets were the financial and pop cultural "giants" of the nineteenth-century poetic world.
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Fireside
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This type of poetry is characterized by its genteel subject matter, its perfect meter and rhyme schemes, its nostalgic, melancholy tones, and its traditional stanza forms.
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Fireside
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Unlike any American poets before them, this group of poets were deeply aware of living in a time of thorough and unprecedented change, thus the prevalent nostalgic tones of their verses.
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Fireside
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This author of "Paul Revere's Ride" was the first American poet to be honored with a bust in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner; he was also the first American to translate Dante's The Divine Comedy; there was even a postage stamp made with his face on it.
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Henry Longfellow
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A friend of this Fireside poet once claimed, "No other poet was so fully recognized in his lifetime" as was this poet; almost every school child could recite his "Paul Revere's Ride."
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Henry Longfellow
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The most popular woman poet of the Late Revolutionary and early Romantic periods, this prolific artist published over fifty volumes of poetry and prose; she was even invited to be an editor for Godey's Lady's Book, one of the most famous magazines of the day.
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Lydia Sigourney
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This poet's husband did not allow her to publish poetry, but when he failed to support them financially he had to admit that the family needed her income to survive.
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Lydia Sigourney
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This poet is famous for arguing that America needed to realize its republican and spiritual ideals voiced in the nation's earliest documents and protect the disenfranchised.
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Lydia Sigourney
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This literary, philosophical, religious movement originated in Concord, Massachusetts and is referred to by most American Literature scholars as the "heart" of the Romantic period.
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Transcendentalism
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This Dark Romantic author is known especially for his themes concerning the death of a woman, the remembering/forgetting of a love, and the destructive bent of the human imagination.
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Edgar Allan Poe
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This writer coined his "Philosophy of Composition," a literary concept that argues that a reader must be able to read a text in its entirety in one sitting.
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Edgar Allan Poe
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Author of America's very first detective story, this writer is also celebrated for having created a new genre of symbolic poetry and psychological symbolism, for having invented and then broadening the science fiction story, and for having drafted a great deal of literary/critical theory and reviews.
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Edgar Allan Poe
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This author is famous for his creation of "tortured narrators who delve into deep wells of guilt."
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Edgar Allan Poe
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This writer was born to slaveholders in Charleston, South Carolina, but a move up North lead her to see slavery as very wrong, even sinful; her Appeal to the Christian Women of the South is vastly important as one of the first political works to call for women to exert their power in their "proper" sphere (the home).
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Angelina Grimke
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This South Carolina abolitionist spoke against slavery passionately, eventually seeing that many women, black and white, were enslaved by the patriarchal attitudes and laws of the United States.
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Angelina Grimke
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This abolitionist writer was daughter to a New England Congregational preacher, sister to five preacher brothers, and eventually married to a preacher; her sister wrote one of the most important domestic guidebooks in America—even Emily Dickinson had a copy of it.
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Harriet B. Stowe
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This author felt God call her to write what she later defined as a "moral epic of negro bondage," a text that emerged out of a vision she had.
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Harriet B. Stowe
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This author of a powerful anti-slavery domestic novel not only met the president of the United States but was at that time the most famous literary figure in America—and even a great international celebrity.
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Harriet B. Stowe
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Called by President Lincoln "the little lady who made this big war," this writer crafted the most effective antislavery novel in America's history.
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Harriet B. Stowe
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This novel was crafted especially in response to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act, a law which made it criminal to assist an escaping slave, with the penalty being a $1,000 fine and a prison term.
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Uncle Tom's Cabin
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While its prose style is not in vogue now, this novel was a publication phenomenon of historic proportions: it sold 10,000 copies one week, 300,00 by the first year, and three million by the Civil War; it was also translated into 37 languages.
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Uncle Tom's Cabin
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The power of this abolitionist novel comes from its appropriation of the domestic novel genre to showcase the ways in which slavery destroyed the sanctity of the family.
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Uncle Tom's Cabin
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This powerful speaker was born a slave in New York but eventually "walked" away from slavery, as running away was against the law and therefore sinful.
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Sojourner Truth
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This speaker's famous speech "Ain't I a Woman" attacked slavery by pointing out that this institution robbed female slaves of their ability to be treated as pure, pious, domestic, and submissive True Women, though they were indeed women.
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Sojourner Truth
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Called by God to tell the "truth" about slavery, this x-slave saw antislavery and women's rights as inextricably intertwined.
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Sojourner Truth
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Writing under the pen name Linda Brent, this x-slave was the first African American woman to author her own slave narrative.
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Harriet Jacobs
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Because the literary techniques and conventions of the male slave narrative could not address sexual vulnerability/abuse, this x-slave appropriated the literary characteristics of both the sentimental and domestic novels.
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Harriet Jacobs
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This author's slave narrative deliberately addresses female readers and outlines the ways in which slavery converts into liabilities the very qualities of femininity that American culture taught women to cultivate.
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Harriet Jacobs
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This author's slave narrative is seen as the great archetype of the slave narrative, an impressive fact given that it was written by a woman in a time period when women were seen as only understanding domestic matters; her text was "rediscovered" by feminist scholars in the 1980s and is now considered a great American classic.
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Harriet Jacobs
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This activist is considered one of the most influential African American male leaders of the nineteenth century, as well as one of the most successful and powerful speakers of his time period; it's too amazing that he was born a slave.
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Frederick Douglass
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This preacher, salaried lecturer, Civil War recruiting agent, presidential appointee, speaker, president of the Freedman's Savings and Trust, Recorder of deeds, Minister and Consul General to Haiti, and US Marshall is often compared to Ben Franklin because of his rags to riches life and his "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" attitude.
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Frederick Douglass
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This author's slave narrative, an international bestseller, was a vastly important anti-slavery text, reflecting both the American Dream of the self-made man and underscoring the connection between bondage and literacy.
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Frederick Douglass
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This author's text is one of the great archetypes of the slave narrative that provided African Americans a national hero of the romantic scope of Natty Bumppo or Daniel Boone.
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Frederick Douglass
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This x-slave is praised by literary historians especially for his slave narrative's discussion of important issues of manhood as it relates to slavery; later editions also reveal his deep appreciation for the power of the female slave and women within the Underground Railroad.
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Frederick Douglass
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"One call, that's all"; this poet responded to Emerson's call for an American bard, breaking all cultural taboos with his subject matter and all previous literary rules of stanza form, meter, and subject matter.
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Walt Whitman
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This poet created what literary scholars eventually named "free verse," his particular version of verse also making frequent use of lots of "catalogues."
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Walt Whitman
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This poet is known as the "Great Egalitarian," his great catalogues pointing out his connection to all humans, male and female, of all times, places, socio-economic levels, physical health, and races.
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Walt Whitman
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This New York poet was a nurse during the Civil War, tending so many bodies in the huge open-air military hospitals that he cried out in his journal, "the dead, the dead, the dead, OUR dead"; he later wrote power poems about this experience.
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Walt Whitman
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Often called "The Good Gray Poet," this poet shocked America by appearing on his cover page in workingman's clothes, with the shirt unbuttoned a little too low for a country still promoting the concept of a true (and thus pure) woman who should never seen another man thus (un)dressed.
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Walt Whitman
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Not even Emerson adopted so thoroughly the Romantic concept of the poet as seer; he proclaimed in his famous "Leaves of Grass," I speak the word primeval."
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Walt Whitman
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This New England poet and daughter of the founder of Amherst College is known for her experimental poetic lines, which play with traditional meters (especially the "fourteener") and use "slant rhyme" instead of the classic rhyme patterns beloved of the Fireside poets.
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Emily Dickinson
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This transitional figure won awards for her baked goods, sent hundreds of letters and gifts to folks in her hometown, and let down baskets of cookies to neighbor children waiting below her second story bedroom window; she also quietly and secretly stored up a good sized arsenal of "unpublished" poetry.
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Emily Dickinson
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Although this poet did not pursue publication as defined by the establishment, she created over forty bound booklets of poetry that were discovered after her death; within those booklets were almost 2,000 poems.
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Emily Dickinson
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This poet's deeply private poetry is vastly different than the genteel verse of the Fireside Poets, especially with regard to her focus on death and her anti-establishment stance on spiritual matters.
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Emily Dickinson
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While Walt Whitman loudly proclaimed that he was the nineteenth-century's great American Bard, this transitional poet seems to have been quietly confident.
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Emily Dickinson
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Along with Walt Whitman, this poet is seen as exerting more influence on contemporary American poetry than any other poets, especially with regard to the habit of dealing with the hard questions of life without nostalgia, the use of ironic tones and sexual metaphor, and the habit of breaking all rules of rhythm and rhyme.
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Emily Dickinson
