Blooming Lilacs HUM 2212: British and American Literature I Fall 2012 Dr. Perdigao September 26,...
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Transcript of Blooming Lilacs HUM 2212: British and American Literature I Fall 2012 Dr. Perdigao September 26,...
Blooming LilacsHUM 2212: British and American
Literature IFall 2012
Dr. PerdigaoSeptember 26, 2012
How the West Was Won• Political, geographical changes• Louisiana Purchase (1803)• Mexican War—southwest, California into nation• 1848: discovery of gold in California• Westward expansion• Relocation of Native Americans, 1830s Removal, Ulysses S. Grant
forcing • Relocation of Native America in the 1860s
• American identity constructed during the period• 1861-1865: American Civil War• 8 billion dollars, 600,000 lives lost
• First transcontinental railroad completed in 1869• Shipment of goods, moving into industrial age
• 1840s: telegraph• 1879: Thomas Edison invents the electric light bulb• 1876: Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone
• Immigration—1870s, 1880s, from Scandinavian countries; eastern and southern European countries, Italy, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Russia
American Expansionism• Urban migration—New York, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco as major
centers
• 1893: Frederick Jackson Turner said that the western frontier no longer existed, based on 1890 census and population density; no more “free” or “unoccupied” land
• US colonization—Cuba, Puerto Rico, Philippines after Spanish-American War in 1898
• American expansionism
• Hawaii annexed as colony in 1898
• Mythologized frontier—already lost, never a reality due to industrialization (6)
• Steel industry—transport from Pittsburgh and Chicago to manufacturing in Cleveland and Detroit
• US population changes:• 1870: 38.5 million• 1910: 92 million• 1920: 123 million
Typifying• Change from rural landscape to urban centers
• Romanticism and Industrial Revolution, Enlightenment
• Immigration changing “national” identity
• Urban landscape as “jungle,” Darwinian model
• New figures in fiction: industrial workers, rural poor, ambitious business leaders, vagrants, prostitutes, unheroic soldiers (7)
Stop the Presses• Importance of newspapers—cultural and political changes• Pulitzer, Hearst
• Authors as journalists
• Magazines publishing stories
• “Literature of argument”—sociology, philosophy, psychology; exposure, reform
• Like “pamphlets” in Europe, Wollstonecraft
• Gender and women’s rights
• Political corruption, degradation of natural world, economic inequality, business deceptions, exploitation of labor, tenement housing (14)
Defining the Tradition• American protagonists, “American Girl,” middle-class family,
businessman, complicated citizens of new international culture (9)
• After Civil War, idea of “great” American novel
• Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson as key figures in the tradition
• New forms of representation during the period after the Civil War to reflect the turbulence and disruption experienced
• Immigrants trying to “reconcile traditional values and ways of living with American modernity” (12)
What is Real?• Naturalism and realism
• Realism—1830s-1900—English, European, American
• Moral and psychological lives of upper class, surroundings; Edith Wharton and Henry James
• Power of language to represent reality (10)• Twain and James, interpretation of the real• Stream of consciousness
• Naturalism—version of realism, or alternative
• Life shaped by forces beyond human control• Far from middle class• Social Darwinism
• Scientific, realistic, not romantic• Biology, environment, material forces shape lives, especially those of
lower class
• Characters’ situations within “enchanting, exciting, ugly, and dangerous metropolis” (12)
April is the cruellest month• “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (1865-1866, 1881)
• Great star—Venus—as Lincoln
• Bright star, lilac, thrush
• Funeral procession (stanzas 5-6)
• Landscape changes: Manhattan, South and North (stanza 12)
• Civil War (stanza 15)
• Transcends death
• Private versus public mourning
• Question of remembrance of those lost to war versus the remembrance of the president
• Nature as consolatory or distanced?
How not to perform a funeral• How to write the elegy
• William Carlos Williams: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174772
• How to represent this loss to America? Of America?
Source Material• Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)• 16th president (1861-1865)• Vampire Hunter• Prose, common speech
• Declaration of Independence and the Bible as foundation for principles and ideals
• Mystical Christ-like figure in death, his death as redemption of a nature
• If undead?
• Born in Kentucky
• Incredible memory, limited schooling
• Father, farmer in Indiana
• Loss of mother at age 9, stepmother
• Illinois, career in law
Source Material• 1834: Illinois state legislator
• Moved to Springfield, married Mary Todd in 1842
• Elected to Congress in 1845
• Voted against abolition but for new territories to remain free
• 1854: Whigs (Lincoln’s party) and Democrats compromised on slavery issues
• Formation of Republican Party in 1854, Lincoln joined
• Emerged as 1858 candidate for Illinois Senate
• “House Divided” speech—house not to fall (counter to Usher? Other Usher)
• Elected president in November 1860
• Before he took office in 1861, 7 southern states seceded to form the Confederacy
• One month after inauguration, Civil War began
Memorialization• 1863 Emancipation Proclamation—free slaves in seceded southern
states
• 13th Amendment outlawed slavery
• One month after new term in 1865, assassinated by John Wilkes Booth, died on April 15, 1865
• “Address Delivered at the Dedication of the Cemetery at Gettysburg, November 19, 1863”
• 6000 dead
• Return to terms of the Declaration of Independence, foundation for America
• “For the Union Dead” poem, St. Gaudens monument
• Cannot hollow the ground
• Idea of mourning the dead—forgetting or remembering?
St. Gaudens Relief, Boston Common54th Massachusetts Infantry, General Shaw