American Literature (Middle School)
An introduction to American literature for grades 7-8: from colonial and Revolutionary writing through Romanticism, Transcendentalism, Realism, Modernism, the Harlem Renaissance, and twentieth-century classics commonly read in U.S. middle schools.
Ämne: Engelska · Nivå: Högstadium (13–15) · 429 kort
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- 'The Cask of Amontillado' (1846) is Poe's revenge story in which Montresor walls his rival Fortunato into the catacombs beneath his palazzo.
- Raven plays the role of trickster and culture-bringer in the oral traditions of many Northwest Coast peoples, including the Tlingit and Haida.
- Crane's short story 'The Open Boat' (1897) draws on his experience as a shipwreck survivor off the Florida coast and is a classic statement of nature's indifference to human striving.
- Arthur Miller's 'The Crucible' (1953) dramatises the Salem witch trials of 1692, including the magistrates and the accused John Proctor, but was widely read as an allegory of the McCarthy-era hearings on Communism.
- Hemingway's 'iceberg theory' holds that the deeper meaning of a story should be implied beneath a small visible amount of text, like the seven-eighths of an iceberg below the waterline.
- Irving's stories drew on German and Dutch folk traditions but moved them onto American soil, helping to create a sense of native legend.
- Eliot's long poem 'The Waste Land' (1922) is a foundational Modernist work. It is a fragmented collage of voices, allusions and broken images responding to post-World-War-I Europe.
- The Puritan worldview, dominant in 17th-century New England, emphasised plain style in writing, the depravity of human nature, predestination, and the close reading of Scripture.
- Emerson's essay 'Nature' (1836) is the founding text of American Transcendentalism. It argues that the natural world is a symbolic expression of the divine.
- Cormac McCarthy's 'The Road' (2006) follows a father and his young son walking through a post-apocalyptic America. It won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
- Christopher Paul Curtis's 'The Watsons Go to Birmingham — 1963' (1995) follows a Black family from Flint, Michigan, on a trip south during the civil rights era. It uses the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing of September 1963.
- Lois Lowry's 'The Giver' (1993) follows the twelve-year-old Jonas in a controlled future community of 'Sameness'. He is chosen to be the Receiver of Memory, taking on humanity's lost knowledge of colour, pain, and love.
- Thornton Wilder's play 'Our Town' (1938) is set in the fictional New Hampshire village of Grover's Corners and is staged with very little scenery, narrated by a 'Stage Manager'.
- Twain's first major success was the short story 'The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County' (1865), set among California gold-rush miners.
- Lois Lowry's 'Number the Stars' (1989) is set in occupied Denmark during World War II. The ten-year-old Annemarie Johansen helps her Jewish friend Ellen Rosen escape the Nazis. It won the Newbery Medal in 1990.
- Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) was a Puritan theologian and a leading figure in the Great Awakening, a religious revival that swept the American colonies in the 1730s and 1740s.
- Kate Chopin (1850-1904) wrote 'The Awakening' (1899), set in Louisiana Creole society, in which Edna Pontellier breaks with the expectations of marriage and motherhood. Her short story 'The Story of an Hour' (1894) is widely taught.
- Stephen Crane (1871-1900) was a key American Naturalist. His novel 'The Red Badge of Courage' (1895) follows the young Union soldier Henry Fleming through his first battles in the Civil War.
- Frost's poem 'Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening' (1923) ends with a famously repeated closing line in which the speaker notes the long distance still to travel before resting.
- W.E.B. Du Bois (1868-1963) was a sociologist and civil rights leader whose book 'The Souls of Black Folk' (1903) influenced the writers of the Harlem Renaissance.
- Sojourner Truth (c. 1797-1883) was a formerly enslaved abolitionist and women's rights speaker. Her 1851 speech in Akron, Ohio, is commonly remembered by the refrain 'Ain't I a Woman?'
- American Romanticism, flourishing roughly from 1820 to 1865, emphasised the imagination, the individual, nature, emotion, and the past, in reaction against Enlightenment rationalism.
- Countee Cullen (1903-1946) was a leading Harlem Renaissance poet. His short poem 'Incident' (1925) recalls a childhood experience of racial insult during a visit to Baltimore.
- Mark Twain (1835-1910) was the pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens. He is often called the father of American literature.
- 'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow' (1820) by Washington Irving features the lanky schoolmaster Ichabod Crane, his rival Brom Bones, and the ghostly Headless Horseman of Sleepy Hollow, New York.
- Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) was an American feminist, journalist and Transcendentalist. She edited 'The Dial', the movement's main literary magazine, from 1840.
- 'A Farewell to Arms' (1929) by Ernest Hemingway follows the American ambulance officer Frederic Henry and the English nurse Catherine Barkley on the Italian Front in World War I.
- 'Rip Van Winkle' (1819) by Washington Irving tells of a Catskill villager who falls asleep before the American Revolution and wakes up twenty years later in a transformed country.
- Crane's first novel, 'Maggie: A Girl of the Streets' (1893), portrays the doomed life of a young woman in the slums of New York's Bowery.
- Iktomi, a spider-trickster of the Lakota people, appears in stories that warn against pride and greed.
- Edward Taylor (c. 1642-1729) was a Puritan minister and poet whose private 'Preparatory Meditations' were not published until the 20th century.
- Southern Gothic is a distinctively American genre that combines Gothic elements with the troubled history of the American South. Key writers include William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers.
- Amy Tan's 'The Joy Luck Club' (1989) follows four Chinese American mothers and their American-born daughters as they meet to play mahjong and share stories.
- The slave narrative is a 19th-century genre in which formerly enslaved African Americans wrote first-person accounts of their lives in bondage and their escape to freedom.
- Other major characters in 'The Scarlet Letter' are the tormented minister Arthur Dimmesdale, who is the secret father of Pearl, and the cold physician Roger Chillingworth, Hester's estranged husband.
- Abraham Lincoln is said to have greeted Harriet Beecher Stowe as 'the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war'. The remark is disputed but widely quoted.
- Jack London's short story 'To Build a Fire' (1908) is set in the Yukon and follows a lone man and his dog struggling against extreme cold.
- Anne Bradstreet's poems combine Puritan faith with personal themes of marriage, motherhood, and grief, as in 'To My Dear and Loving Husband'.
- Langston Hughes's early poem 'The Negro Speaks of Rivers' (1921) connects African American identity to ancient rivers such as the Euphrates, the Congo, the Nile, and the Mississippi.
- 'The Pit and the Pendulum' (1842) is set during the Spanish Inquisition and traps the narrator in a dungeon equipped with a swinging blade above him and a deadly pit at his feet.
- Whitman wrote in long, rhythmic free-verse lines, breaking with the regular metres and end-rhymes of earlier English-language poetry. He is regarded as the great poet of American free verse.
- Naturalism is a late-19th- and early-20th-century literary movement, growing out of Realism, in which characters are largely shaped by heredity and environment in a deterministic, often indifferent universe.
- 'To Kill a Mockingbird' is narrated by Scout Finch looking back on her childhood with her brother Jem and their reclusive neighbour Arthur 'Boo' Radley.
- 'The Adventures of Tom Sawyer' (1876) by Mark Twain follows the schoolboy Tom Sawyer in the fictional Mississippi town of St. Petersburg. Major characters include Becky Thatcher, Aunt Polly, Huck Finn and the murderous Injun Joe.
- Transcendentalists taught that nature is the visible face of the divine, that intuition is a more reliable guide than received institutions, and that the individual conscience is supreme.
- A symbol is an object, person, or image that stands for something larger, such as the green light in 'The Great Gatsby' as a symbol of longing and the American Dream.
- Madeleine L'Engle's 'A Wrinkle in Time' (1962) follows Meg Murry, her younger brother Charles Wallace and their friend Calvin O'Keefe as they travel through space and time to rescue Meg's father from the dark planet Camazotz.
- William Bradford (1590-1657) was the long-serving governor of Plymouth Colony. His history 'Of Plymouth Plantation', written between 1630 and 1651, is one of the foundational documents of American literature.
- William Cullen Bryant's poem 'Thanatopsis' (1817) is an early American meditation on death, written when the poet was still a teenager.
- 'The Raven' (1845) is Poe's best-known poem. Its refrain 'Nevermore' is spoken by a black bird that visits the grieving narrator.