Video Contents
- Native Voices: Native Oral Tradition is renewed and recast through the work of three modern writers, Leslie Marmon Silko (Pueblo), Simon Ortiz (Pueblo), and Luci Tapahonso (Navajo).
- Exploring Borderlands: The tumultuous history of Chicano literature and culture is traced from conquistador narratives and Mexican corridos and carried into contemporary times. Writers examined are ¡lvar N™Òez Cabeza de Vaca, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, Americo Paredes, and Gloria Anzald™a.
- Utopian Promise: New England Puritans clash with the Quakers. The divergent origins of the Utopian strain of American literature emerge from John Winthrop’s sermon "A Model of Christian Charity," Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative, and William Penn’s "Letter to the Lenne Lenape Chiefs."
- Spirit of Nationalism: The founding ideas of our national image germinate in the writings of Benjamin Franklin and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
- Masculine Heroes: European romantic heroes get an American spin in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leather-Stocking tales, Walt Whitman’s nationalist poetry, and John Rollin Ridge’s alternative view of Anglo expansion.
- Gothic Undercurrents: Anxiety and a general mistrust of heritage, science, and religion surface in the works of Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Emily Dickinson.
- Slavery and Freedom: Slave narratives of Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs add fuel to the abolitionist fire, while Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin evokes sentimentality to support emancipation for the enslaved.
- Regional Realism: New voices emerge to challenge the Eastern literary establishment. Mark Twain takes readers to the Mississippi, while Charles Chestnutt steers them to the rural South, and Kate Chopin brings French Creole Louisiana to life.
- Social Realism: Edith Wharton and Anzia Yezierska present contrasting views of the upper and working classes in fin-de-siècle Manhattan, as well as the conflicts inherent in each social sphere.
- Rhythms in Poetry: Modernist poetry is born as William Carlos Williams creates poems from the rhythm of everyday speech, while Langston Hughes borrows from blues music and African oral tradition.
- Modernist Portraits: Alienated American writers Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein flee to Paris, along with expatriate musicians and artists, to redefine modern American fiction.
- Migrant Struggle: Grinding poverty, alienation, and a struggle for human rights replay in the works of John Steinbeck, Carlos Bulosan, and Helena MarÌa Viramontes.
- Southern Renaissance: William Faulkner’s characters reveal the underbelly of racism as Zora Neale Hurston celebrates rural black culture in their vastly different but complementary portrayals of the South.
- Becoming Visible: Ralph Ellison, Philip Roth, and N. Scott Momaday take on the task of defining what it means to be a black man, a Jew, an Indian and an American.
- Poetry of Liberation: Resistance movements of the 1960s and 1970s spawn a poetry of liberation led by three key writers: Allen Ginsberg, Amiri Baraka, and Adrienne Rich.
- Search for Identity: Contemporary prose writers Maxine Hong Kingston, Sandra Cisneros, and Leslie Feinberg break the rules and weave a new American literary tradition to challenge the myths of the past.
Copyright © 2005, W. W. Norton & Company. All rights reserved.
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