At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the vast continental area that was to become the United States had been probed only slightly by English and European explorers. At last early in the seventeenth century, the English settlements in Virginia and Massachusetts began the main stream of what we recognize as the American national history.
　

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, the vast continental area that was to become the United States had been probed only slightly by English and European explorers. At last early in the seventeenth century, the English settlements in Virginia and Massachusetts began the main stream of what we recognize as the American national history.

The forms of early American literature:

1)Early American literature begins with the orally transmitted myths, legends, tales, and lyrics of Indian cultures.

2)There was no written literature among the more than 500 different Indian languages and tribal cultures that existed in North America before the first Europeans arrived. However, American literature was not based on native Indian culture. It was a descendant of European literature.

I. The Literature of Exploration

In the 17th century, pirates, adventurers, and explorers opened the way of permanent colonists, bringing their wives, children, farm implements, and craftsmen's tools. The early literature of exploration, made up of diaries, letters, travel journals, ships' logs, and reports to the explorers' financial backers -- European rulers or, in England and Holland, joint stock companies -- gradually was supplanted by records of the settled colonies. Because England eventually took possession of the North American colonies, the best-known and most-anthologized colonial literature is English. As American minority literature continues to flower in the 20th century and American life becomes increasingly multicultural, scholars are rediscovering the importance of the continent's mixed ethnic heritage. Although the story of literature now turns to the English accounts, it is important to recognize its richly cosmopolitan beginnings.

II. New England Literature

It is likely that no other colonists in the history of the world were as intellectual as the Puritans. Between 1630 and 1690, there were as many university graduates in the northeastern section of the United States, known as New England, as in the mother country -- an astounding fact when one considers that most educated people of the time were aristocrats who were unwilling to risk their lives in wilderness conditions. The self-made and often self-educated Puritans were notable exceptions. They wanted education to understand and execute God's will as they established their colonies throughout New England.

The Puritan definition of good writing was that which brought home a full awareness of the importance of worshipping God and of the spiritual dangers that the soul faced on Earth. American Puritanism was a dominant factor in American life. It was one of the most enduring shaping influences in American thought and American literature. It has become so much a state of mind and a part of the national cultural atmosphere that the American breathes, that we may state with a degree of safety that, without some understanding of Puritanism, there can be no real understanding of America and its literature.

The American Puritans believing that the Church should be restored to the “purity” of the first-century Church as established by Jesus Christ. To them religion was a matter of primary importance. They made it their chief business to see that man lived and thought and acted in a way which tended to the glory of God. They accepted the doctrine of predestination, original sin and total depravity, and the salvation of a selected few through a special infusion of grace from God.

To sum up, American Puritanism could be defined as following.

1) It originally uses to refer to the theology advocated by a party within the Church of England.

2) It used in a broader sense to refer to attitudes and values held by Puritans.

3) As a cultural heritage, American Puritanism exerted great influences over American moral values and literature.

4) Puritans holds three concepts: original sin; predestination and the salvation of selected few.

American Puritanism influences early American literature on the following aspects:

1) idealism: American literature is in good measure a literary expression of the pious idealism of the American Puritan bequest.

2) symbolism: American Puritan’s metaphorical mode of perception was chiefly instrumental in calling into being a literary symbolism which is distinctly American. Puritan doctrine and literary symbolism which is distinctly American. Puritan doctrine and literary practice contributed to no small extent to the development of an indigenous symbolism. To the pious Puritan the physical, phenomenal world is nothing but a symbol of God. It is impossible to overlook the very symbolizing process that was constantly at work in Puritan minds. This process became, in time, part of the intellectual tradition in which American authors were brought up along with their people.

3) plain style: With regard to technique one naturally thinks of the simplicity, which characterizes the Puritan style of writing. With regard to their writing, the style is fresh, simple and direct; the rhetoric is plain and honest, not without a touch of nobility often traceable to the direct influence of the Bible. All this has left an indelible imprint on American writing.

Thus American Puritanism has been, by and large, a healthy legacy to the Americans.

American literature grew out of humble origins. As previous we had discussed, diaries, histories, journals, letters, common books, travel books, sermons, poetries and personal literature in its various forms, occupy a major position in the literature of the early colonial period. Among them, sermon and poetry were two major genres. In content these early writings served either God or colonial expansion or both. In form, English traditions were faithfully imitated and transplanted.

2.1 Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672)

The first published book of poems by an American was also the first American book to be published by a woman -- Anne Bradstreet. It is not surprising that the book was published in England, given the lack of printing presses in the early years of the first American colonies. Born and educated in England, Anne Bradstreet was the daughter of an earl's estate manager. She emigrated with her family when she was 18. Her husband eventually became governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, which later grew into the great city of Boston. She preferred her long, religious poems on conventional subjects such as the seasons, but contemporary readers most enjoy the witty poems on subjects from daily life and her warm and loving poems to her husband and children. She was inspired by English metaphysical poetry, and her book The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America (1650) shows the influence of Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, and other English poets as well.

2.2 Edward Taylor (1644-1729)

Like Anne Bradstreet, and, in fact, all of New England's first writers, the intense, brilliant poet and minister Edward Taylor was born in England. The son of a yeoman farmer -- an independent farmer who owned his own land -- Taylor was a teacher who sailed to New England in 1668 rather than take an oath of loyalty to the Church of England. He studied at Harvard College, and, like most Harvard-trained ministers, he knew Greek, Latin, and Hebrew. A selfless and pious man, Taylor acted as a missionary to the settlers when he accepted his lifelong job as a minister in the frontier town of Westfield, Massachusetts, 160 kilometers into the thickly forested, wild interior. Taylor was the best-educated man in the area, and he put his knowledge to use, working as the town minister, doctor, and civic leader.

Modest, pious, and hard working, Taylor never published his poetry, which was discovered only in the 1930s. He would, no doubt, have seen his work's discovery as divine providence; today's readers should be grateful to have his poems -- the finest examples of 17th-century poetry in North America.

Taylor wrote a variety of verse: funeral elegies, lyrics, a medieval "debate," and a 500-page Metrical History of Christianity (mainly a history of martyrs). His best works, according to modern critics, are the series of short Preparatory Meditations.

2.3 Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758)

Jonathan Edwards was born on October 5, 1703, in East Windsor, Connecticut, into a Puritan household. From 1726 to 1750 Edwards served as the pastor of Northampton, Massachusetts, the largest and most influential church outside of Boston, succeeding his grandfather, the famous revivalist Solomon Stoddard. Turning his attention from theoretical to practical divinity, Edwards himself gained international fame as a revivalist.

The widespread revivals of the early 1740s, known to historians as the "Great Awakening," stimulated one of the two most fruitful periods for Edwards' writings. Edwards furthered his renown as a revivalist preacher who subscribed to an experiential interpretation of Reformed theology that emphasized the sovereignty of God, the depravity of humankind, the reality of hell, and the necessity of a "New Birth" conversion. While critics assailed the convictions of many supposed converts as illusory and even the work of the devil, Edwards became a brilliant apologist for the revivals. In The Distinguishing Marks of a Work of the Spirit of God (1741), Some Thoughts Concerning the Present Revival (1742), A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746), and The Life of David Brainerd (1749), he sought to isolate the signs of true sainthood from false belief. The intellectual framework for revivalism he constructed in these works pioneered a new psychology and philosophy of affections, later invoked by William James in his classic Varieties of Religious Experience (1902).

Edward’s published writings at Northampton also reflect strong millenarian and prophetic interests. In "A History of the Work of Redemption," originally preached as a sermon series in 1739 but not published until after his death, Edwards cast theology into "a method entirely new" by showing God's work as a history structured around God's scriptural promises and periods of the outpouring of the Spirit. "An Humble Attempt to Promote . . . Extraordinary Prayer" (1747) was part of a larger movement towards Anglo-American "concerts of prayer" and was an important contribution to millennial thought. Scholars such as Alan Heimert have recognized the signal importance of these works in American history, particularly their contribution to revolutionary ideology. Both of these works have already been published in the Yale Edition (1989).

In late 1757, he accepted the presidency of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton University). However, he did not live to leave a permanent mark on the college. After only a few months there he died on March 22, 1758, following complications from a smallpox inoculation. He is buried in the Princeton Cemetery(The Grave of Jonathan Edwards in the Princeton Cemetery, Princeton, New Jersey).

Edward’s reputation grew rapidly after his death. At the end of the twentieth century, as both the American scholarly community and the nation at large are rediscovering religion's role in the formation of the country and are grappling with the issues of religion and society, the name of Jonathan Edwards continues to be invoked.

As Edwards has been studied over the generations, he has come to emerge as a quintessential "representative man," not in the usual sense but because in some profound sense he marked the culmination of one era and prefigured a subsequent one. While other colonial figures exerted comparable influence on their own age, none, with the possible exception of William Penn and Benjamin Franklin, so completely anticipated the subsequent shape of an American culture, at once material and spiritual, piously secular and pragmatically sacred, as did Edwards. It is due to the intersection of Edwards' colonial times with an ever-changing American "present" that he enjoys a uniquely representative status in American thought and letters.

III. The Literature of Reason and Revolution

In 1770s the English colonies in North America rose in arms against their mother country. The War for Independence lasted for eight years (1776-1783) and ended in the formation of a Federative bourgeois democratic republic?the United States of America.

This event of epoch-making significance had been predetermined by the whole course of historical development of the colonial America ever since the beginning of the 18th century. The spiritual life in the colonies during that period was to a great degree mould by the bourgeois Enlightenment?a movement supported by all progressive forces of the country which opposed themselves to the old colonial order and religious obscurantism. The representatives of the Enlightenment set themselves the task of disseminating knowledge among the people and advocating revolutionary ideas. They also actively participated in the War for Independence.

In 1783, the year the United States achieved its independence, Noah Webster declared, “America must be as independent in literature as she is in politics, as famous for the arts as for arms”. The beginnings of literary independence were evident in such celebrations of the American scene as Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), and Bartram’s Travels (1791). Yet American literature throughout the century was largely patterned on the writing of eighteenth-century Englishmen. Philip Freneau, the most important poet of the period, derived his power and style, his sentiments and regular couplets from English models. Franklin shaped his writing after the Spectator Papers (1711-1712) of the English essayists Addison and Steele.

However, while imaginative literature in America remained derivative and dependent, the heroic and revolutionary ambitions of the age had created great political pamphleteering and state papers. Essayists and journalists had shaped the nation’s beliefs with reason dressed in clear and forceful prose. Out of the tumult of the age came the inspired writing of Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, of T. Paine in Common Sense (1776), which stirred the world and helped form the American republic.

The popular literary forms in the age were as follows:

1) Speech: Patrick Henry (1736-1799) was the representative of the genre. The characteristics of his speech is full of force and sincerity.

2) Pamphlet: Thomas Paine (1737-1809) was the representative of the genre. His pamphlets are characterized with clear thinking and exciting language.

3) Essay: Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826) was the representative of the genre. The characteristics of his essay are logical statement and freedom from emotional appeal.

4) Poetry: Philip Freneau (1752-1832) was the representative of the genre. The characteristics of his poetry are lyric quality, sensuous images and fresh perception of nature and “noble savagery.”

3.1 Thomas Paine (1737-1809)

The life of Thomas Paine was one of continual, unswerving fight for the rights of man. He wrote a number of works of such a revolutionary and inflammatory character that it is no exaggeration to state that he helped to spur and inspire two greatest revolutions that his age had witnessed. His Common Sense, declaring as it did that “government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one,” attacked British monarchy. Paine declared that the crisis with which the North American colonies were then faced could only be solved by an appeal to man’s instincts and common sense and to “the clear, uniform and irresistibly obeyed” impulses of conscience. The booklet was warmly received in the colonies both as a justification for their cause of independence and as an encouragement to the painfully fighting people. Paine became a major influence in the American Revolution. Nor was this all. The first of his American Crisis series of pamphlets came out at one of the darkest moments of the revolution when Washington’s troops had just suffered one of the worst defeats in the war and were in the process of retreating. When Washington had it read to the troops, it proved a heartening stimulus, a spurring excitement to further action with hope and confidence. “These are the times that try men’s souls,” it declared. “The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.” Paine was commended by the Congress of the United States for his distinguished service to the country. Later he participates in the French Revolution, and wrote The Rights of Man and The Age of Reason, Spreading the ideals of the French Revolution among the people. He was imprisoned during the “Reign of Terror” and escaped the guillotine only narrowly. He returned to America, only to die in poverty and in vilifications by the same people he had served three decades earlier.

3.2 Philip Freneau (1752-1832)

Philip Freneau was important in American literary history in a number of ways. Apart from the fact that he used his poetic talents in the service of a nation struggling for independence, writing verses for the righteous cause of his people and exposing British colonial savageries, he was a most notable representative of dawning nationalism in American literature. While still an undergraduate, he wrote in collaboration with one of his friends a poem entitled “The Rising Glory of America,” the national spirit of which pointed forward to the intellectual and literary independence which achieved its maturity first in the writings of men like Emerson and Whitman and other pre-eminent writers of the nineteenth century. Almost alone of his generation, he managed to peer through the pervasive atmosphere of imitativeness, to see life around directly, to appreciate the natural scenes on the new continent and the native Indian civilization. Some of his most famous works, with their lyric quality, sensuous images and their fresh perception of nature and “noble savagery,” are distinctly American. Poems such as “The Wild Honey Suchle,” “The Indian Burying Ground” and “The Dying Indian: Tomo Chequi” have been frequently anthologized.

Freneau was the most significant poet of eighteenth-century America. Some of his themes and images anticipated the works of such nineteenth-century American Romantic writers as Cooper, Emerson, Poe and Melville.

The period of some two centuries from the arrival of the Mayflower through the end of the eighteenth century was, from a literary point of view, one in which the national experience of the American settlers building the wilderness into a habitable place groped and struggled for literary expression. It represents a process in which colonial literature strove for a higher degree of excellence and evolved slowly but steadily toward the native literature. If the eighteenth-century literary scene looked still barren and bleak, there appeared at least certain figures that exercised something like a seminal influence on the subsequent development of American literature. Jonathan Edwards and Benjamin Franklin were but two of these.

3.3 Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

America has never forgotten Benjamin Franklin because his greatness in American history. He lived these words of wisdom by writing as much as he possibly could and by doing even more. He became famous for being a ,scientist, and a statesman.

Franklin’s claim to a place in literature rests chiefly on his Autobiography. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin was probably the first of its kind in literature. It is the simple yet immensely fascinating record of a man rising to wealth and fame from a state of poverty and obscurity into which he was born, the faithful account of the colorful career of America’s first self-made man. The book is in four parts, written at different times.

The Autobiography is, first of all, a Puritan document. It is Puritan because it is a record of self-examination and self-improvement. The Autobiography is also an eloquent elucidation of the fact that Franklin was spokesman for the new order of eighteenth-century enlightenment, and that he represented in America all its ideas, that man is basically good and free, by nature endowed by God with certain inalienable rights of liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Franklin himself is an embodiment of the American Dream. The book has the features of plainness of its style, the homeliness of imagery, the simplicity of diction and the syntax and expression are salient.