American Literature: American Literature: ProseProse

BEGINNINGS: THE 1500S BEGINNINGS: THE 1500S AND 1600SAND 1600S

By : St. Choiron Nisak AshariBy : St. Choiron Nisak Ashari

INTRODUCTION

• American Literature: Prose, fiction and nonfiction of the American colonies and the United States, written in the English language from about 1600 to the present.

• For its first 200 years American prose reflected the settlement and growth of the American colonies, largely through histories, religious writings, and expedition and travel narratives.

BEGINNINGS: THE 1500S AND 1600S

• When European explorers first saw North America, Native American cultures had rich, established literatures. Legends, folktales, and other forms of literature were preserved in oral form and passed down from one generation to the next through ceremonies and other community gatherings, as well as within family groups and other informal settings

• In Native American cultures, these myths served purposes similar to those served in Judeo-Christian cultures by the stories in the biblical book of Genesis.

• Through the 1600s American literature grew from exploration narratives to include histories of settlement—both natural histories of the land and social histories of the people. Religious writings expressed the values and beliefs of American colonists.

Exploration Narratives• The earliest literature about America consists of impressions of

America recorded by European explorers after they returned home. Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci provided some of the earliest European descriptions of the American continent in letters and maps from an expedition in 1499 and 1500; these had appeared in print by 1505. In 1507 German geographer and cartographer Martin Waldseemüller published Cosmographiae introductio, a collection of documents that included letters written by Italian-Spanish navigator Christopher Columbus to his sponsors, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain. Such texts were circulated among explorers and high-ranking political officials who made decisions about funding further expeditions.

Before 1600 Sir Walter Raleigh, Richard Hakluyt, Thomas Harriot, and John White had published accounts of discoveries

B HistoriesCaptain Smith Rescued by

Pocahontas• In 1608 English explorer and colonizer John Smith became

president of the Jamestown settlement, located in what is now Virginia. Smith organized trade with the Native Americans and began explorations to map the area. Smith said that on one trip, he was captured by the Powhatan people. In his historical narrative Generall Historie of Virginia (1624), Smith writes that the Powhatan were about to execute him when chief Powhatan’s daughter Matoaka, nicknamed Pocahontas, saved him. However, Smith did not tell of this in his earlier reports, and many historians doubt this story. In this excerpt from Smith’s 1624 book, he tells of his rescue by Pocahontas and of the antagonistic relationship between the colonists and the Native Americans. Seventeenth-century conventions of spelling and grammar have not been modified.

C. Religious Writings

• Roger Williams, an English religious nonconformist, founded the American colony of Rhode Island in the 1630s under the principles of religious freedom and the separation of church and state. Williams’s example contributed to the adoption of a system of religious tolerance by the framers of the Constitution of the United States.

• Religious writings recorded strenuous debates about church doctrine, such as the role of free-will and good works in an individual’s salvation, although certain issues discussed by the theologians went beyond religion. Williams’s A Key into the Language of America (1643), for example, was remarkable for its efforts to understand America's indigenous peoples.

On the Use of Spectral Evidence Against Witches

•In 1692 accusations of witchcraft swept through colonial Massachusetts, centered on the township of Salem. Twenty people were executed after they were convicted in trials of being witches.

Thomas HookerThomas Hooker, an English clergyman who fled to

Holland in 1630 to escape punishment for his Puritan sermons, emigrated to the Massachusetts Bay Colony

in 1633. In 1636 Hooker led a migration from New Towne (now Cambridge), Massachusetts, to Hartford, Connecticut, and became the leader of the settlement.

Connecticut Historical Society

John WinthropSermons and other religious writings

dominated the literature of the American colonies in the 1600s. Colonist John

Winthrop was governor of the Massachusetts Bay colony, a Puritan leader, and one of the top theologians of the period.

Culver Pictures

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