MTEL English (61)

Objective 0002 covers American literature from the colonial era to the present, across fiction, poetry, drama and nonfiction, by authors from diverse backgrounds. Expect items that match an author to a movement, a work to its context, or a passage to the traits of its period. Because MTEL items avoid digit dates, learn the periods by name and by century.

Oral traditions of Indigenous nations came before European settlement and still continue. They include creation stories, trickster tales such as those of Coyote and Raven, and ceremonial songs. Colonial writing in the seventeenth century includes exploration narratives, Puritan sermons, diaries and histories. Bradford's Of Plymouth Plantation and Winthrop's A Model of Christian Charity, with its "city upon a hill" image, present the colony as a covenant community. Anne Bradstreet wrote the first published poetry from the colonies, and Edward Taylor wrote metaphysical meditations. Mary Rowlandson's captivity narrative reads suffering as divine providence. Plain style, typology (reading events as fulfillment of scripture) and spiritual self-examination are Puritan hallmarks. Jonathan Edwards's Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God belongs to the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century.

Enlightenment rationalism shapes Franklin's Autobiography and Poor Richard's aphorisms, Paine's Common Sense and The Crisis, Jefferson's Declaration of Independence and the Federalist essays. Phillis Wheatley, enslaved and brought from West Africa, published neoclassical poems that drew on scripture and classical allusion to claim spiritual equality. Olaudah Equiano's Interesting Narrative began the tradition of the slave narrative. In the early nineteenth century, Washington Irving (Rip Van Winkle, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow) and James Fenimore Cooper (the Leatherstocking Tales) built an American literature on native landscapes and legends.

Major American literary periods

Romantics valued imagination, nature, the individual and the past. Dark Romantics looked at guilt, the irrational and evil. Poe developed the detective story and the theory of the unified effect. Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter looks at Puritan hypocrisy through symbolism and allegory. Melville's Moby-Dick mixes epic, sermon, encyclopedia and drama. The Fireside Poets, Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes and Lowell, wrote popular, accessible verse. Transcendentalists centered in Concord, Massachusetts, held that truth is reached through intuition and that each soul shares in the Over-Soul. Emerson's Nature and Self-Reliance, Thoreau's Walden and Civil Disobedience, and Margaret Fuller's Woman in the Nineteenth Century are core texts. Whitman's Leaves of Grass (free verse, catalogs, a democratic "I") and Dickinson's compressed lyrics in hymn meter with slant rhyme and dashes are the two founders of modern American poetry.

Memory Aid: Remember "Dark Romantics doubt, Transcendentalists trust." Both value intuition and nature, but Poe, Hawthorne and Melville stress sin and the limits of human understanding. Emerson and Thoreau stress the goodness and divinity of the self.

After the Civil War, writers turned to the faithful portrayal of ordinary life. Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn uses vernacular first-person narration and satire of slavery-era morality. Henry James developed the psychological novel and the international theme (The Portrait of a Lady). Charles W. Chesnutt (The Conjure Woman) and Paul Laurence Dunbar used dialect forms while critiquing racial ideology. Regionalists such as Sarah Orne Jewett (The Country of the Pointed Firs) and Kate Chopin (The Awakening, set in Creole Louisiana) recorded local speech and customs. Naturalists applied Darwinian determinism. Crane's The Open Boat and The Red Badge of Courage and London's To Build a Fire show characters at the mercy of indifferent forces. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper critiques the medical silencing of women. Zitkala-Ša's autobiographical essays record Native boarding-school experience.

Common Trap: Realism and naturalism both use plausible, detailed settings, so do not tell them apart by setting alone. Realist characters make meaningful ethical choices, as Huck does when he decides to help Jim. Naturalist characters are driven by heredity, environment and chance, and their choices matter little against those forces.

Disillusionment after the First World War produced fragmentation, allusion, multiple perspectives and stream of consciousness. Eliot's The Waste Land, Pound's Imagism, Williams's attention to everyday objects and Stevens's philosophical lyric changed poetry. Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby critiques the American Dream in the Jazz Age. Hemingway's iceberg theory leaves meaning beneath a plain surface. Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha novels (The Sound and the Fury) use multiple narrators and nonlinear time. The Harlem Renaissance, in Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro, Langston Hughes's jazz and blues poetics, Claude McKay's militant sonnets, Countee Cullen's formal lyrics, Jean Toomer's Cane and Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, claimed Black cultural expression and folk speech as art. Modern drama includes O'Neill's expressionist and family tragedies, Williams's The Glass Menagerie and Miller's Death of a Salesman. Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun and later Wilson's Century Cycle staged Black family life.

Southern Gothic writers, including O'Connor, Welty and McCullers, used grotesque characters and moments of grace. Ellison's Invisible Man and Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain and essays look at race and identity. Beat writers (Ginsberg's Howl, Kerouac's On the Road) rejected conformity. Confessional poets (Lowell, Plath, Sexton) made private pain public. Postmodernists such as Pynchon, Vonnegut and DeLillo use metafiction, irony and pastiche. Contemporary American literature is markedly multiethnic. It includes Morrison (Beloved, a neo-slave narrative), the Native American Renaissance (Momaday's House Made of Dawn, Silko's Ceremony, Erdrich's Love Medicine), Chicana writing (Cisneros's The House on Mango Street, Anzaldúa's Borderlands, Anaya's Bless Me, Ultima), Asian American writing (Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Tan's The Joy Luck Club, Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies) and Caribbean American writing (Danticat, Alvarez, Díaz). Poets include Brooks, Bishop, Rich, Angelou, Dove, Harjo and Tracy K. Smith.

Landmark American plays

Exam Tip: If an item gives an unfamiliar passage and asks for its period, find two or three features rather than relying on one. A passage that combines a natural landscape, an intuited spiritual truth and an affirmation of individual conscience points to Transcendentalism. Fragmented syntax, mythic allusion and urban alienation point to Modernism.