Baixe o app para aproveitar ainda mais
Prévia do material em texto
1 Introduction In order to understand the American Literature, we do need to understand its historical context, thoughts and beliefs of each time. By starting from the late 16th century, we can say that there was a group of people who were dissatisfied with the Church of England. These people were called Puritans due to their work towards religion and moral standards. It so happens that the Puritans aimed to purify the Church of England by returning to the values of early Christianity with a view to recognizing only the Bible as a religious reference. As a matter of fact, the Puritans’ interpretation of America was related to the so called “American dream”. In fact, the Bible stimulated the Puritans by promoting discussions of literature. Consequently, they were encouraged to create their own religious poetry. An important Puritan poet: Anne Bradsreet Anne Bradstreet was a Puritan, and the content of her poems usually empathized her faith in God and eternal life. Motherhood and marriage for Anne were all based on the Puritan ideal of a loving, respectful partnership and the traditional feminine role. By analyzing her poems, her strength through the vicissitudes of life lay on predestination, in other words, God’s will. For the author, Heaven is more important than Earth, but she clearly shows her thought process with the reader, making her work so relatable four centuries after her death. 2 An important preacher and theologist: Jonathan Edwards By reading one of Edwards’ sermons entitled Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God, you can recognize his literary tendency to reform the values of theology with determinism and still showing his Puritan origins. Sinners in the hands of an angry God (1741): If God should let you go, you would immediately sink, and sinfully descend, and plunge into the bottomless gulf... The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked... he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else but to be cast into the bottomless gulf. The age of Enlightment On the late 17th century people started questioning the role of church or even the Bible in their lives. The Age of Reason gave rise to a completely new way of thinking. Instead of trying to believe in God as being responsible for everything in their lives, people started to consider how they could be in control of the world around them. Consequently, a new focus on scientific discovery and a boom in higher education started to take place. 3 Thomas Paine: an English American writer and pamphleteer Paine’s Common Sense and other writings had a great influence in the American Revolution, and helped pave the way for the Declaration of Independence. Here are some of Thomas Paine’s quotes to help you identify his revolutionary ideas: “I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any Church that I know of. My own mind is my own Church”. [Thomas Paine, The age of reason] “It is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what one does not believe. It is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that mental lying has produced in society. When man has so far corrupted and prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of every other crime”. [Thomas Paine, The age of reason] “Toleration is not the opposite of intoleration, but it is the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms. The one assumes to itself the right of withholding liberty of conscience, and the other of granting it. The one is the pope, armed with fire and fagot, and the other is the pope selling or granting indulgences”. [Thomas Paine, The rights of man] “The most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. I have never used any other, and I trust I never shall”. [Thomas Paine, The age of reason] “Until an independence is declared the continent will feel itself like a man who continues putting off some unpleasant business from day to day, yet knows it must be done, 4 hates to set about it, wishes it over, and is continually haunted with the thoughts of its necessity”. [Thomas Paine, The common sense] “Reason and Ignorance, the opposites of each other, influence the great bulk of mankind. If either of these can be rendered sufficiently extensive in a country, the machinery of government goes easily on. Reason obeys itself; and Ignorance submits to whatever is dictated to it”. [Thomas Paine, The rights of man: being an answer to Mr. Burke's attack on the French revolution, Part the First, Conclusion] “It is always to be taken for granted, that those who oppose an equality of rights never mean the exclusion should take place on themselves”. [Thomas Paine, Inspiration and wisdom from the writings of Thomas Paine]
Compartilhar