The Campaign of Periodicals After the War of 1812 for National American Literature

PMLA ◽  
1935 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 262-273 ◽  
Author(s):  
John C. McCloskey
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
War Of 1812 ◽  
American Mind ◽  
Mother Country ◽  
Foreign Influence ◽  
Wide Experience

American triumphs on the sea in the War of 1812 tempered the American mind into a belief in its power to express itself in a literature independent of any foreign influence. Previously America had shown only a faltering confidence in herself as a literary nation. No great protestations of literary strength had appeared in the periodicals. But with America's victory in this second war with the mother country, a new-found note of confidence came into literature. This new confidence was not, however, a nation-wide experience. It was a political phenomenon, Democratic rather than Federal.

Shaking Hands with the Prophet

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Mac Kilgore
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
American Literature ◽  
American Indian ◽  
War Of 1812 ◽  
Cultural Criticism ◽  
Native American Literature ◽  
The South ◽  
William Apess ◽  
Us Imperialism ◽  
A Performance

This chapter focuses on the War of 1812 era and Native American resistance to US imperialism. It documents how the politics of enthusiasm, understood as religious fanaticism, was mobilized to discredit the rise of a multi-tribal Native American confederation and its right to resistance. Tenskwatawa, or the Shawnee Prophet, figures centrally in this cultural criticism, and the author analyzes available accounts of the Prophet and his brother Tecumseh, highlighting indigenous dissent as a performance of enthusiasm. Subsequently, the chapter turns to obscure War of 1812 novels (Samuel Woodworth’s The Champions of Freedom, Don Pedro Casender’s The Lost Virgin of the South, and James Strange French’s Elkswatawa) in order to show how American literature absorbed Native American enthusiasms. In these novels it becomes apparent that a pro-American vision of the War of 1812 requires the white imagination to displace and appropriate Native America’s rightful struggle for independence. The chapter ends with a reading of the Pequot American Indian, William Apess, and his response to the War of 1812. Apess is unique for defending an indigenous enthusiastic politics in sympathy with the multi-tribal confederation, and he invents a Native American literature of enthusiasm in the process.

Pigment and Ether: A Comment on the American Mind

1963 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. 40-45
Author(s):  
Tony Tanner
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Industrial Society ◽  
Margaret Fuller ◽  
American Mind ◽  
Poor White

Tocqueville once made the extremely penetrating observation that the American mind tends to oscillate between ideas that ‘are all either extremely minute and clear or extremely vague’ and with a view to illustrating the relevance of this remark to American literature I want to start by juxtaposing two quotations from writers separated by almost a century. First, Margaret Fuller, a leading female transcendentalist; ‘Are the stars too distant, pick up that pebble that lies at thy feet, and from it learn the ALL.’ Second, some lines from the end of Sherwood Anderson's novel entitled Poor White. There Hugh McVey, disillusioned by and alienated from the industrial society which hems him in, breaks one of his business journeys and goes down to the beach at Sandusky where he picks up some pebbles from the sands. He renews his journey and as the train passes through depressingly ugly factory towns, he plays with the stones. ‘There was relief for his mind in the stones. The light continually played about them, and their colour shifted and changed. One could look at the stones and get relief from thoughts.’ Those little stones, as Anderson explained in his A Story Teller's Story, gave comfort because they could be seen to ‘glisten and shine outside the muddle of life.’

Israel in the American Mind

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shaul Mitelpunkt
Keyword(s):  
American Mind

Practices of Surprise in American Literature After Emerson

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kate Stanley
Keyword(s):  
American Literature

American Literature and Immediacy

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heike Schaefer
Keyword(s):  
American Literature
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