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Edgar Allen Poe (dates)
The Raven (1845)
Genre & Form: narrative poetry
Characters: speaker (scholar), raven, Lenore
Summary: Rational --> madness; "midnight dreary", "pondering", reading, falling asleep, fire dying, pinning for Lenore, scary sounds (tap, rustling curtain, beating heart), thinks visitor but no one, thinks window, raven flies in, on Pallus Athena bust (raven has wisdom that he doesn't), talks friendly to raven, "Nevermore", but raven becomes ominous ("prophet, thing of evil"), asks for forgetfulness ("nepenthe") from grief, raven and grief eternal
Themes: madness, grief, mourning, death, romantic love/devotion, happy afterlife?; collapsing of Lenore/Raven
Connections: Kubla Kahn; Blake; Weiland; Bradstreet (grief) |
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Edgar Allen Poe
Annabel Lee (1849)
Genre & Form: elegiac
Characters: speaker, Annabell Lee, angels
Summary: "Kingdom by the sea"; "but our love was stronger by far" than those older and wiser; love coveted by angels, they took her, he still loves her, souls still intertwined, lies by her tomb and dreams of her
Themes: gothic love, (depth of) romance is greater than wisdom or religion, passion and beauty over ration: anti-Enlightenment |
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Sonnet: To Science (1829)
Characters: Science personified as a woman "thou"
Summary: Series of questions - Why do you prey on and pick things apart? Example, references to Diana and nymphs, science destroying myth. "Who woulst not leave him in his wandering to seek for treasure in the jeweled skies" Poets no longer see stars as jewels, knowing the scientific truths.
Themes: Science should be feared not loved like art and nature, science vs. nature, poetry, passion and myth |
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Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
Song of Myself (1855, or 1881)
Genre & Form: epic, free verse
Summary: "I am large. I contain multitudes." Concept of self as both individual and universal; "A child said, what is the grass?" Grass image connecting all: god, earth, people, living to the dead; Celebratory, "every one good" (all things); acknowledges the ugly too, "the suicide" etc; helping a runaway slave; 28 male bathers + 1 female voyeur; Long lists covering all kinds of people, scenes, places, objects, nature; Poet of the body and soul; Horrors of war; Jesus
Themes: Romanticism, nature, Transcendentalism, humanism, realism, politics of identity, national identity, sex, (homo)sexuality, 1st hand experience, present moment, universal divinity, empathy, anti-slavery, anti-war?, democracy, America
Relevance: What revisions after civil war?
Connections: Keats's negative capability (transcendent creative, oppositional thinking, doublethink); Compare, contrast w/ GRL; Blake, social justice, monism |
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| There's a Certain Slant of Light |
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Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
There's a Certain Slant of Light
Summary: "on winter afternoons"; "heft of cathedral tunes"; "internal difference"; "none may teach it": Feeling, awareness of mortality (symbolized by the light), sense of conflict but resolution that death is inevitable; once the feeling passes see death at a little greater "distance"
Themes: Death, mortality, contemplation; light as collapsed life/death/feeling; encompassing power of the poetic imagination |
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| I felt a Funeral, in my Brain |
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Emily Dickinson
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain
Summary: The mourners "treading" on the floor, until "the sense was breaking through", brain/sense/mind/soul/reason the floor (of her mind) feeling like it's breaking; trapped in her mind, in her feeling, "solitary"; "finished knowing -- then --"
Themes: madness, a migraine, obsession or thinking on death, losing awareness at the end; mind/body connection (body encroaching on mind)
Connections: Fever 103 |
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| Because I not stop for Death -- |
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Emily Dickinson
Because I not stop for Death --
Summary: Told from perspective of centuries dead speaker; carriage ride past children, harvest, setting sun, lowering temperatures; translucent clothing (dissolving body and soul); "a house", a grave; time passes quickly since "the day" of death
Themes: Death as a courteous (lover?) man; Biblical imagery ("horses heads turned towards eternity"); eternity vs. mortality |
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| Tell all the Truth but tell it Slant |
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Emily Dickinson
Tell all the Truth but tell it Slant
Summary: "Success in circuit lies"; "The truth must dazzle gradually or every man be blind": To communicate true understanding, experience, go in a round about way
Themes: Poetry, art, communication; Transcendent truth must be gotten to by art
Connections: Frost (sometimes you have to lie to get at the truth) |
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| I heard a Fly buzz -- when I died |
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Emily Dickinson
I heard a Fly buzz -- when I died
Summary: Speaker on death bed; "eyes", relatives done crying, her physical possessions willed; all waiting for her death, "when the King" enter the room; fly enters; "could not see to see", dying moment
Themes: Death; physical/spiritual; fly: insignificant, ubiquitous, associated with death |
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Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906)
We Wear the Mask (1896)
Genre & Form:
Characters:
Summary: "We sing, but oh the clay is vile / Beneath our feet, and long the mile; /But let the world dream otherwise,/We wear the mask!" Mask a fake smile. Inside suffering
Themes: exteriority/interiority
Relevance: Happy Darky stereotype is pointed out false. Can be read as "we" blacks or universal |
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Paul Laurence Dunbar
Sympathy (1899)
Genre & Form:
Characters:
Summary: "Till its blood is red on the cruel bars; ... But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core, / But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings — /I know why the caged bird sings!"
Themes: suffering in captivity; universalizing empathy for black people, Christian |
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James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851)
The Last of the Mohicans (Vol I, Ch I, III) (1826)
Genre & Form: frontier, adventure story
Characters: Hawkeye (Natty Bumppo)
Summary: Set in 1757; Great friendship between Hawkeye and Chingachgook; Love between Cora and Uncas vs. threatening relationship between Cora and Magua; Alice (passive and fainting); Cora (frontier woman, more aggressive and active); Detailed description of nature
Themes: War; Man/land; Colonists/natives; Culture/nature; Eradication of NA culture and people; Whiteness/Indian; Interracial bonding; Homosocial bonding; Model American man (hero, rugged individual); Nobel savage; Femininity; Learning by experience (vs. ideal of European scholar)
Relevance: Indians could not own land, time of great discrimination against Indians; Forming the American novel |
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Harriet Beecher Stowe (dates)
Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851)
Genre & Form: social protest fiction, sentimentalist, abolitionist
Characters: didactic narrator, Tom, Shelbys (original owners), Mr. Haley, St. Clare, Marie, Eva, Quakers, Senator and Mrs. Bird, Topsy, Miss Ophelia, Simon Legree, Harris family (George, Eliza, Harry), Cassie, Emiline
Summary: Idyllic description of cabin life, Shelby forced to sell Tom and Harry for money, Mrs. tries to stop him, Eliza escapes with Harry and meets George at Quaker settlement; T to St Clare who tolerates slavery b/c feels cannot stop it, Marie a selfish horror, T and Eva Christian, E dies, SC killed before can free T; George kills pursuer, cross to Canada; Marie sells T to Legree, beaten to death Jesus like to protect escaping Cassie and Emiline; Cassie finds out Eliza is her lost daughter; Harris family to Liberia
Themes: horrors of slavery, social justice; female morality; Christianity; blackness |
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Herman Melville (dates)
Moby Dick (1851)
Genre & Form: epic, adventure narrative, quest tale, allegory, tragedy, Romanticism
Characters: Ishmael, Queequeg, Ahab, Moby Dick, Starbuck, Stubb, Tashtego, Flask, Dagoo, Pip, Fedallah
Summary: Pequod, Ishmael looking for work on a ship, meets Q,
Themes: monomania; madness; capitalism; oneness, collapsing gender, class, race; limits of knowledge; fate v. choice; whiteness; death; religion; brotherhood |
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Mark Twain (dates)
Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Genre & Form: Satire, picaresque (episodic, colorful), adventure, bildungsroman
Characters: Huck, Jim, Tom, Miss Watson (severe), Widow Douglas (gentle), Pap, Grangerfords (feud w/ Shepherdsons), King & Duke, Wilkses, Silas and Sally Phelps
Summary: Huck trying to be "civilized"; kidnapped by Pap, fakes death; teams up with Jim, snake trick, fog trick, damned for helping to free; Grangerfords; King and Duke cons, Wilkses; Jim sold to Phelpses, Tom and Huck "escape" plot, T shot, Jim already free; H plan to go out to the territories for more adventure
Themes: race, slavery, individual/society, civilized/savage, religion, social conventions, hypocrisy, education traditional/moral, common sense, authority |
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Joel Chandler Harris (dates)
The Wonderful Tar Baby (1881)
Genre & Form: regionalism, trickster tale, animal fable, frame narrative
Characters: Uncle Remus, the boy, Tar Baby, Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox
Summary: All "quotes"; strong dialect; Fox makes Baby to ensnare Rabbit, knowing that he is combative, prideful, temper; Rabbit gets stuck, Fox threatens to eat for dinner; ambiguous ending
Themes: Racism, feelings of superiority between classes of blacks, sticky situations |
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| How Mr. Rabbit Was Too Sharp for Mr. Fox |
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Joel Chandler Harris
How Mr. Rabbit Was Too Sharp for Mr. Fox (1881)
Summary: Picks up from last story; Fox gloating; Rabbit tricks by pleading for any punishment but not to be thrown in briar patch; Fox tries to give him the worst punishment; Rabbit escapes, having grown up in the briar patch
Themes: Exploiting/punishing for worst qualities (Fox's cruelty), struggle for dominance, trickster behavior |
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Kate Chopin (dates)
The Awakening (1899)
Genre & Form: bildungsroman/kunslerroman, local color, feminist; 3rd person
Characters: Edna Pontellier, Leonce, Robert, Alcée, Adéle, Mademoiselle Reisz, the lady in black and two lovers; two Pontellier sons
Summary: Grand Isle vacation with affluent Creoles; Adéle saintly mother, Creole women assumed chaste, more open; loves with Robert, he leaves suddenly; Edna painting, own apartment, kids to grandparents, affair with Alcée; develops awakening via Reisz (courage of the artist); Robert returns, will love but not sex, leaves her; Adéle difficult childbirth; Edna becomes more distant from everyone, drowns herself in sea
Themes: Marriage, love, sex, motherhood, female independence, society's limits on women, art, artist, individual/society |
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