The Literature of Colonial America

1. The Literature of Colonial America Made by 陈骢 陈静 韩顺平 李因亮 王新美

2. Contents • Historical background and ethos • The definition of literary terms • Authors and their works • Free tips of Mad-Max

3. Historical Background and Ethos • The first permanent English settlement in North America at James town, Virginia in 1617 • In 1629 the puritans established the Massachusetts Bay Colony • Independent War (1776-1783); the foundation of a Federative bourgeois democratic republic—the United Stats of America

4. The Definition of Literary Terms • American Puritanism • Colonial American • American Dream • Great Awakening

5. American Puritanism • A religious reform movement that arose within the Church of England in the late 16th century • Adhered to the Five Point of Calvinism as codified at the Synod of Dort in 1619: 1.Total depravity 2.Unconditional election 3.Limited atonement 4.Irresistible grace 5.The perseverance of the saints

6. Total Depravity • Humanity’s utter corruption since the Fall. • Total depravity doesn't mean we lost the image and likeness of God; • Total depravity doesn't mean we have no power to do good according to human standard; • Total depravity doesn't mean we do not have the ability to develop our power of religion and culture; • Total depravity doesn't mean we do not have the possibility to achieve cultural , scientific and technological discoveries. • The theory of “white clothes”

7. Unconditional Election • The God had decreed who was damned and who was saved from before the beginning of the world. • The reason of why the God give us the favor of love, decree and destination.

8. Limited Atonement • Someone but not everyone. • I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. • The power and redemption of Jesus Christ is sufficient for all, but efficient only for elects.

9. Irresistible Grace • Regeneration as entirely a work of God, which cannot be resisted and to which the sinner contributes nothing. • Irresistible grace of the Holy Spirit doesn't mean a sinner is not able to resist the Holy Spirit, to oppose the Holy Spirit, to reject the Holy Spirit, and to reject His move in our hearts. But it means that finally our opposition will be failed and He will succeed in moving us and giving new life to us.

10. The Perseverance of the Saints • The elect. • The Father, The Son, The Holy Spirit • Trinity--the divergence between Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox Church.

11. Colonial American • Columbus found the new world in a voyage of 1492. • The early 1600s witnessed the beginning of a great tide of emigration from Europe to North America. • In November 9, 1620, the Mayflower ship lands at Cape Cod, Massachusetts, with 101 colonists. • Building new civilization and bloody subjugation on native Americans.

12. American Dream • The American Dream is the faith held by many in the United Stats of America that through hard work, courage, and determination one can achieve a better life for oneself, usually through financial prosperity. These were values held by many early European settlers, and have been passed on to subsequent generations. Nowadays the American Dream has led to an emphasis on material wealth as a measure of success and/or happiness.

13. Great Awakening • Great Awaking is a series of religious revival that swept over the American colonies about the middle of the 18th century. It resulted in doctrinal changes and influenced social and political thought. In New England it was started in 1734 by the rousing preaching of Jonathan Edwards.

14. Authors and Their Works • William Bradford • Anne Bradstreet • Edward Taylor • Roger Williams • John Woolman • Thomas Paine • Philip Freneau • Jonathan Edwards • Benjamin Franklin • Hector St. John de Crevecoeur

15. William Bradford • 1590-1657 • One of the greatest of colonial American, a man large in spirit and wisdom, wholly consecrated to a mission in which he regarded himself as an instrument of God. • At the age of 18, he accompanied the group to Holland to escape persecution. • 13 years later he was one of those who, on December 11, took on the Mayflower and entered Plymouth Bay. • From 1622 until his death, Bradford was reelected thirty times as governor. • Masterpiece: Of Plymouth Plantation

16. Of Plymouth Plantation • A story of these early American and their long geographical and spiritual pilgrimage. • Through the story, we share the struggle, the fears, and the victories over the elements. • Bradford sees the signs everywhere and always keeps sight of signs of God’s judgment and providence. • Bradford writes in the Puritan Plain Style, seldom using any metaphor or decorative language.

17. Anne Bradstreet • 1612-1672 • Born in Northampton, England. • She came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony with her husband and her parents and settled in the frontier village of Andover. • Masterpiece: The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America

18. The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America • Published in England in 1650 as her first book. • Bradstreet’s finest poems are those closest to her personal experience as a Puritan wife and mother living in the edge of the wildness. • She found similarities domestic details of daily life and the spiritual details of her religious life. • In conclusion, Anne Bradstreet was not an innovative poet, but her directness and her sincerity are moving.

19. Edward Taylor • 1642-1729 • He was clearly a man of great spiritual passion, of large and liberal learning, enraptured by the Puritan dream to such a degree that he could express it in living song. • Most of his work dealt with religious themes and he considered them as a private record of his religious experience. • He again and again emphasized the themes of God-praising, auto-criticism and soul-purification. He holds the idea that only through consistent efforts human being may be chosen by God. • He was quite evidently acquainted with the serious British poetry of his times, especially the metaphysical poets such as John Donne and George Herbert. • Masterpieces: God’s Determinations, Preparatory Meditations and Housewifery

20. Roger Williams • 1603-1683 • One of the greatest Puritan dissenters in the early days of Puritan theocracy in New England. He is as important for his political views as for his religious beliefs. He believed the idea that simply to be virtuous in conduct and devout in belief did not give anyone the right to force belief on others. • Masterpieces: The Bloody Tenet of Persecution for Cause of Conscience, The Bloody Tenet Yet More Bloody, The Key into the Language of America

21. John Woolman • 1720-1772 • He was convinced that true religion consisted in an inward life in which the heart loved and respected God and learned to exercise true justice and goodness towards man and brutes alike. • Eventually became a preacher, traveling far and wide in America, teaching goodness and piety, speaking against total depravity, original sin and limited atonement, and attacking all forms of iniquity, be it a social evil or the atrocious slavery system. • Masterpiece: Journal

22. Journal • It veritably notes down his experience and feeling during witnessing the slave trade, revealing the cruel truth of black slave selling. • He has the courage to criticize himself and pursue self-perfection, which is consequently considered as a “Quaker classic of the inner Light”. • It’s language is straightforward and rhetorically precise.

23. Quaker • A member of the Religious Society of Friends, a Christian sect founded by the English religious leader George Fox (1624--91) about 1650, whose central belief is the doctrine of the Inner Light. Quakers reject sacraments, ritual, and formal ministry, hold meetings at which any member may speak, and have promoted many causes for social reform.

24. Thomas Paine • 1737-1809 • Be considered as the America’s most effective revolutionary propagandist. With his natural gift for pamphleteering and rebellion, he was appropriately born into an age of revolution. • On January 10, 1776, his famous pamphlet Common Sense appeared, which advocated a “Declaration for Independence”, and brought the separatist agitation to a crisis. • And then he contributed to 16 pamphlets, the first of which was The American Crisis with its blast at the “summer solider and the sunshine patriot”. • Later he participated in the French Revolution, and wrote The Right of Man and The Age of Reason. The former is the work of a man who combined clear thinking with an intense feeling for human possibilities and the latter is a deistic treatise advocating a rationalistic view of religion.

25. Philip Freneau • 1752-1832 • The most outstanding writer of the post-revolutionary period. • Father of American Poetry. • He is at once a satirist and a sentimentalist, a humanitarian but a bitter polemicist, a poet and a political journalist. • On one hand, he was a power in journalism and politics, whose prose and poems, like Paine, gave the Federalists a deadly weapon. On the other hand, Freneau heralded American literary independence by his close observation of nature distinguishing his treatment of indigenous wild life and other native American subjects. • Masterpieces: The Wild Honey Suckle and The Indian Burying Ground

26. Jonathan Edwards • 1703-1758 • The last and most gifted defender of New England Calvinism, and the most remarkable American Puritan in several respects. • He became a leading figure in the movement known as the Great Awaking, a fervent revival of religious feeling that swept America from New England to the South from about 1734 to 1749. • Masterpieces: Freedom of the Will, The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin, The Nature of True Virtue, Sinner in the Hands of an Angry God

27. Sinner in the Hands of an Angry God • Edwards is best known, even notorious, for his sermon Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. • This famous sermon describes the man tries to convince his flock of the almightiness of God in a figurative language mainly intended to appeal to their senses. • Edwards reveals the idea in the sermon that it is the natural men that are held in the hand of God over the pit of Hell and they have no refuge to take hold of except the mercy of God. Consequently, deprived of the hope of salvation only through eternal atonement, man cannot escape from the sin.

28. Benjamin Franklin • 1706-1790 • With great interest in science, he made substantial contributions to the scientific knowledge of his time and worked on lighting rods, earthquakes, bifocal lenses, and etc. • Masterpieces: Poor Richard’s Almanac, Autobiography

29. Poor Richard’s Almanac • It’s an annual collection of proverbs and became the most popular book of its kind. • In this almanac, Franklin not only put poems and essays but also managed to put in a good many adages and common-sense vitticisms.

30. Autobiography • It is, first of all, a Puritan document, which is a record of self-examination and self-improvement. • In this book, Franklin looks intensely into his past life and describes the image of a boy’s rise from rags to riches through hard work and wise management. • It is convinced, as the Autography shows, that man is good and capable of becoming better. Thus through telling a success story of self-reliance, the book celebrates, in fact, the fulfillment of the American dream.

31. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur • 1731-1813 • Born in Normandy, finished his education in England, and embarked for America in 1754. • Purchase an estate in the neighborhood of New York, and during the wars of the Revolution which was frequently revenged, and he himself forced to seek safety in flight. • In 1778, he was suspected of having entered New York as a spy, and cast into prison. After a detention of three months, he was released and then returned to France in 1782. About this time he introduced the culture of the American potato into Normandy. • Masterpieces: Letters of an American Farmer

32. Letters of an American Farmer • It consists of three volumes, giving a description of the United States and Canada. It was so laudatory of the climate, production, etc. • There are many interesting themes that can be pointed out in the text: the nature of American character—the work ethic, the responsibility of the individual, anti-intellectualism; the farmer as a prototype of the American character; the treatment of slaves; the view of new immigrants and their ethnicity.

33. Free Tips of Mad-Max • What is the national anthem of the USA? • The Star-Spangled Banner • The Star and Stripes Forever

34. The Star-Spangled Banner • 1812年，在美国保卫独立成果的战争中，诗人弗朗西斯·斯各特·凯伊在巴尔的摩亲眼目睹了英军对麦克亨利堡的进攻以及美军英勇抵抗的惨烈场面。 • 9月13日凌晨，凯伊透过炮火的硝烟，看到一面美国国旗仍然在麦克亨利城堡上迎风飘扬。 他被这个景象深深打动了，于是随手在一封信的背面写下了几行诗，抒发自己当时的感受，他给這首诗起的題目是《保卫麦克亨利城堡》。 • 凯伊在当年9月16号退役后，对这首诗又进行了加工润色，随后就发表了，并用一首当时非常流行的曲子做为配曲。后来，这首歌定名为《星条旗之歌》。 这首歌深受美国人民的喜爱，很快就在全国流传开来。 • 1931年，美国国会通过立法，把“星条旗之歌”正式定为美利坚合众国的国歌。歌词大意是： • “啊！在晨曦初现时，你可看见是什么让我们如此骄傲？在黎明的最后一道曙光中欢呼，是谁的旗帜在激战中始终高扬！烈火熊熊，炮声隆隆，我们看到要塞上那面英勇的旗帜在黑夜过后依然不倒。啊！你说那星条旗是否会静止，在自由的土地上飘舞，在勇士的家园上空飞扬。” • 在美国，每逢正式场合，一般都会以播放或者演唱《星条旗之歌》开始。 有趣的是，《星条旗之歌》的演唱者往往会根据自己的理解，对国歌的曲调加以发挥。然而，无论唱法怎么不同，演唱者无一例外，都在歌声中注入了深沉炽烈的感情。《星条旗之歌》演唱或播放完毕，大家都会报以热烈的掌声。

35. The Star and Stripes Forever • 这首乐曲是号称“进行曲之王”的苏萨最著名的代表作，创作于1897年，是一首由管乐合奏的进行曲，以磅薄的气势和热烈的情绪歌颂自己的国家和军队。 • 美国和中国当年通过乒乓外交，打破两国之间的坚冰。 美国总统尼克松1972年首次访华期间，乐队曾经高奏《星条旗永不落》，听众反应非常热烈，而这首乐曲也因此而被中国民众所熟知。 或许，这就是很多中国朋友把《星条旗永不落》误认做美国国歌的原因吧。

36. Cheers！