CSET English Subtests I-IV (105-108)

This chapter covers SMR 1.1 as it applies to American literature. Expect items that ask you to identify the movement an author belongs to, recognize the traits of a movement in an excerpt, or connect a work to its historical context. American literary history is easiest to learn as a series of conversations: each movement responds to the one before it and to the national questions of its time, such as religion, independence, slavery, the frontier, industrialization, and identity.

Long before European settlement, Indigenous nations of North America maintained rich oral literatures: creation stories, migration accounts, songs, chants, and trickster tales. Many creation stories explain the origin of the world and of a people; the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) story of Sky Woman falling to an earth covered by water, where animals bring up mud to form land on a turtle's back, is a widely taught example. Trickster figures such as Coyote, Raven, and Rabbit are clever, greedy, or foolish beings whose adventures teach lessons and explain features of the world. Traits of oral literature include repetition, formulaic patterns, close ties to place and nature, and performance in community. These traditions continue to shape contemporary Native writers.

Seventeenth-century colonial writing was largely religious and practical: sermons, histories, diaries, and devotional poetry. William Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation records the Plymouth colony's history as a providential story. Anne Bradstreet, the first published poet in the English colonies, wrote personal poems such as "To My Dear and Loving Husband" and "Upon the Burning of Our House." Edward Taylor wrote meditative poems with metaphysical conceits. In the eighteenth century, during the religious revival known as the Great Awakening, Jonathan Edwards preached "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God," famous for its image of a sinner held over the pit of hell like a spider over a fire. Puritan traits include a plain style, a belief in divine providence, attention to sin and salvation, and reading everyday events as signs of God's will.

The eighteenth-century Enlightenment emphasized reason, natural rights, and human progress. Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography and Poor Richard's Almanack model self-improvement and practical wisdom. Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense argued for independence in plain, forceful prose, and his The American Crisis opens, "These are the times that try men's souls." Thomas Jefferson drafted the Declaration of Independence. The Federalist Papers argued for ratifying the Constitution. Phillis Wheatley, enslaved as a child and brought to Boston, became the first African American woman to publish a book of poetry. The dominant genres were political: pamphlets, speeches, essays, and documents built on persuasion and logic.

In the early and middle nineteenth century, American Romantics valued imagination, emotion, the individual, and nature, and began building a distinctly American literature. Washington Irving wrote "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow." James Fenimore Cooper wrote The Last of the Mohicans and the other Leatherstocking Tales of the frontier. The Fireside Poets, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, wrote popular, traditional verse.

Dark Romanticism, sometimes called American Gothic, explored sin, guilt, madness, and the darker side of human nature. Edgar Allan Poe wrote "The Raven," "The Tell-Tale Heart," and "The Fall of the House of Usher," and is credited with shaping the modern short story and the detective story. Nathaniel Hawthorne examined Puritan guilt and hypocrisy in The Scarlet Letter and "Young Goodman Brown." Herman Melville's Moby-Dick follows Captain Ahab's obsessive hunt for the white whale. Dark Romantics doubted the Transcendentalist faith in human goodness.

Transcendentalism, centered in New England in the mid-nineteenth century, held that truth can be known through intuition and that the divine is present in nature and in each individual soul. Ralph Waldo Emerson's "Nature" and "Self-Reliance" ("Trust thyself") are core texts. Henry David Thoreau lived for two years at Walden Pond and wrote Walden, and his essay "Civil Disobedience" argued that individuals should refuse to support unjust laws, an idea that later influenced Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. Margaret Fuller wrote Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Walt Whitman, though not strictly a Transcendentalist, carried its spirit into Leaves of Grass, whose long free-verse lines celebrate democracy, the body, and the self. Emily Dickinson, writing compressed lyrics with slant rhyme and dashes, is often studied alongside Whitman as one of the two great innovators of nineteenth-century American poetry.

Slave narratives are autobiographical accounts by people who escaped slavery, written to expose its cruelty and support abolition. Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave describes how learning to read set him on the path to freedom. Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published under the pseudonym Linda Brent, addressed the particular abuses suffered by enslaved women. Common features include a prefatory statement vouching for authenticity, the struggle for literacy, scenes of brutality and family separation, escape, and an appeal to the reader's conscience. Sojourner Truth's speeches belong to the same abolitionist tradition.

After the Civil War, realism sought to depict ordinary life truthfully, with everyday characters, plausible plots, and attention to social class and moral choice. Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn uses vernacular dialect and a boy narrator to satirize racism and hypocrisy. William Dean Howells (The Rise of Silas Lapham) championed realism, and Henry James wrote psychologically detailed novels such as The Portrait of a Lady and Daisy Miller.

Naturalism pushed realism further, portraying characters as shaped by heredity, environment, and forces beyond their control, often in harsh settings. Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, The Red Badge of Courage, and "The Open Boat," Jack London's "To Build a Fire" and The Call of the Wild, Frank Norris's McTeague, and Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie are key works.

Regionalism, also called local color writing, captured the dialect, customs, and landscape of particular places. Bret Harte wrote of California mining camps; Sarah Orne Jewett of coastal Maine in The Country of the Pointed Firs; Kate Chopin of Louisiana Creole society, and her novel The Awakening and story "The Story of an Hour" also anticipate feminist concerns.

The Harlem Renaissance, which flourished in the years after World War I, was a flowering of African American literature, music, and art centered in Harlem, New York. Langston Hughes drew on blues and jazz rhythms in poems such as "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." Zora Neale Hurston, also an anthropologist, wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God, celebrated for its use of Southern Black vernacular. Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer (Cane), and Nella Larsen (Passing) are other major figures. The movement emphasized racial pride, the richness of Black folk culture, and the "New Negro" identity described by Alain Locke.

American modernism, after World War I, shared the experimental spirit of British modernism. F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby critiques the American Dream in the Jazz Age; Ernest Hemingway's spare style and "iceberg theory" of omission shape The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms. Writers of the "Lost Generation" expressed disillusionment after the war. In poetry, Ezra Pound promoted Imagism (direct treatment of the thing, economy of words), and T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, and Marianne Moore experimented with form. Robert Frost used traditional meters with modern ambiguity.

The Southern Renaissance brought a burst of writing from the American South that confronted history, race, family, and the decline of the old order. William Faulkner set much of his work in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, using stream of consciousness and multiple narrators in The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying. Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers, Robert Penn Warren, and the playwright Tennessee Williams belong here. Southern Gothic, a subgenre, uses grotesque characters, decay, and violence to probe moral and social disorder; O'Connor's stories are prime examples.

The Beat Generation, which emerged in the years after World War II, rejected conformity and materialism. Allen Ginsberg's long poem Howl, Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road, with its spontaneous, jazz-influenced prose, and William S. Burroughs's experimental fiction are representative. Beat traits include spontaneity, spiritual searching (often through Eastern religion), and open treatment of taboo subjects.

From the mid-twentieth century on, American literature has been shaped by multicultural voices. Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, James Baldwin's essays and novels, and Lorraine Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun address African American experience; Toni Morrison's Beloved confronts the legacy of slavery. N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn, Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, and Louise Erdrich's novels mark the Native American Renaissance. Sandra Cisneros's The House on Mango Street and Rudolfo Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima are central Chicana and Chicano texts. Maxine Hong Kingston's The Woman Warrior and Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club explore Chinese American identity and generational conflict.

American Movements at a Glance

Native oral traditions use creation and trickster stories, repetition, and close ties to place.

Puritan writing reads life as providence; Revolutionary writing uses reason and persuasion to argue for rights.

Transcendentalists trusted intuition and nature; Dark Romantics explored sin, guilt, and madness.

Realism shows ordinary life and choice; naturalism shows forces beyond human control; regionalism captures local color.

The Harlem Renaissance, modernism, the Southern Renaissance, the Beats, and multicultural writers each redefined American identity in the twentieth century and after.