Early american literature from colonial period to revolution

THE POLITICAL PAMPHLET: Thomas Paine (1737-1809)

• Common Sense

America is a democratic experiment and a country theoretically open to all immigrants, the fate of America foreshadows the fate of humanity at large.

POET OF THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION: Philip Freneau (1752-1832)

• The key to both his success and his failure was his passionately democratic spirit combined with an inflexible temper.
• Freneau fought as a militiaman during the Revolutionary War. In 1780, he was captured and imprisoned in two British ships, where he almost died before his family managed to get him released. His poem “The British Prison Ship” is a bitter condemnation of the cruelties of the British, who wished “to stain the world with gore.”

Philip Freneau (1752-1832)

• Poems of revolution “Eutaw Springs,” “American Liberty,” “A Political Litany,” “A Midnight Consultation,”and “George the Third’s Soliloquy,”
• Social themes :“The Virtue of Tobacco” concerns the indigenous plant, a mainstay of the southern economy, while “The Jug of Rum” celebrates the alcoholic drink of the West Indies, a crucial commodity of early American trade and a major New World export.
• Common American characters lived in “The Pilot of Hatteras,” as well as in poems about quack doctors and bombastic evangelists.

Conclusion

• American literature begins with the orally transmitted myths, legends, tales, and lyrics (always songs) of Indian cultures
• 1492 - Christopher Columbus’ discovery of America
• The early literature of exploration, made up of diaries, letters, travel journals, ships’ logs, and reports to the explorers’ financial backer
• American Revolution = Enlightenment 1776-1820