MASCULINE HEROES
In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner delivered a paper entitled "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" at the World's Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. Looking back over the course of American history, Turner concluded that the presence of unexplored land--"free land," as he termed it--gave a unique dynamism to American culture. For Turner, the frontier was "the meeting point between savagery and civilization." Ever since Turner made this famous pronouncement, Americans have been debating the definition and significance of the "frontier." As many scholars have pointed out, "frontier" is a term used by conquerors. It masks a reality of imperial invasion and colonialism under a veil of innocence and exceptionalism. That is, the idea of "free land" does not take into account the many other peoples who were displaced--sometimes violently--to make way for European-American expansion. As historian Patricia Nelson Limerick puts it, "the term 'frontier' blurs the fact of conquest."
To combat this problem, scholars have suggested other ways of thinking about the lands and historical events we have traditionally associated with the "frontier." Along these lines, we might think of the frontier as a permeable zone where distinct cultures struggle and mix, or as a space of contact and contest among diverse groups. The Spanish word "la frontera," which describes the borderlands between Mexico and the United States, is perhaps a more useful term than "frontier." Because the concept of a border does not contain a fantasy of "free land" or uninhabited space, it is a more realistic way to describe a place where cultures meet and where trade, violence, and cultural exchange shape a variety of individual experiences.
The Renaissance in or the Flowering of American Literature
The decade of 1850-59 is unique in the annals of literary production. For a variety of reasons American authors, both African and European, published remarkable works in such a concentration of time that this feat, it is safe to say, has not been duplicated in this or any other literary tradition. Given below are the details:
Works by European American Writers
Year 
Author Title
Author Title 1850 Ralph Waldo Emerson Representative Men
Ralph Waldo Emerson Representative Men 1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter
Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter 1851 Herman Melville Moby-Dick
Herman Melville Moby-Dick 1852Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Tom's Cabin
Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Tom's Cabin1854 Henry David Thoreau Walden
Henry David Thoreau Walden 1855 Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass Works by African American Writers
Year Author Title
Author Title 1853 Frederick Douglass Heroic Slave
Frederick Douglass Heroic Slave 1853 William Wells Brown Clotel: Or, The President's Daughter
William Wells Brown Clotel: Or, The President's Daughter 1857 Frank J. Webb The Garies and Their Friends
Frank J. Webb The Garies and Their Friends 1859 Martin R. Delany Blake: Or, The Huts of America
Martin R. Delany Blake: Or, The Huts of America 1859 Harriet E. Wilson Our Nig: Or, Sketches from the Life of a
Harriet E. Wilson Our Nig: Or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black
Important ideas from: Warren, Robert Penn, Cleanth Brooks, and R.W.B. Lewis. "A National Literature and Romantic Individualism." in Romanticism. eds. James Barbour and Thomas Quirk. NY: Garland, 1986, 3-24.
1. Social and political changes - Andrew Jackson's unsuccessful bid for presidency in 1824, when he won the plurality of votes but lost to John Quincy Adams when the election was decided in the House of Representatives. Jackson, a man of common beginnings, was the first candidate of the new states. In 1828 election, Jackson convincingly defeated Adams bringing to an end the domination of the eastern establishment.
2. The beginning of industrial and technological developments - key markers were the introduction of steamboats, spinning mills, Eli Whitney's cotton gin, the clipper ships, railroads, and telegraph.
3. "The success of northern industry made slavery appear anomalous, and to the free labor of the North slavery became ... repugnant."
4. The industrial revolution also raised the issue of the overworked laborers. Influenced by the French philosopher Charles Fourier, Albert Brisbane published The Social Destiny of Men (1840). In it Brisbane states: " ... monotony, uniformity, intellectual inaction, and torpor reign: distrust, isolation, separation, conflict and antagonisms are almost universal. ... Society is spiritually a desert."
5. Utopian experiments to counter the industrial revolution - Robert Owen's New Harmony in Indiana; George and Sophia Ripley's Brook Farm; Bronson Alcott's Fruitlands; and many Fourierist colonies.
6. Other experiments: Amelia Bloomer's bloomers worn by women in some Fourierist colonies, mesmerism, phrenology, hydropathy, giving up of tobacco or alcohol, the eating of Dr. Graham's bread.
7. The major reform movements: abolition of slavery, the rights of women, and the civil war. Reformism was, according to Whittier, "moral steam-enginery" and it was fed by two impulses - the idea of evolution even before Darwin and the idea of the "perfection of the social order."
8. Transcendentalism - the philosophical, literary, social, and theological movement -
Early Nineteenth Century: Romanticism - A Brief Introduction
Elements of Romanticism
1. Frontier: vast expanse, freedom, no geographic limitations.
2. Optimism: greater than in Europe because of the presence of frontier.
3. Experimentation: in science, in institutions.
4. Mingling of races: immigrants in large numbers arrive to the US.
5. Growth of industrialization: polarization of north and south; north becomes industrialized, south remains agricultural.
Romantic Subject Matter
1. The quest for beauty: non-didactic, "pure beauty."
2. The use of the far-away and non-normal - antique and fanciful:
a. In historical perspective: antiquarianism; antiquing or artificially aging; interest in the past.
b. Characterization and mood: grotesque, gothicism, sense of terror, fear; use of the odd and queer.
3. Escapism - from American problems.
4. Interest in external nature - for itself, for beauty:
a. Nature as source for the knowledge of the primitive.
b. Nature as refuge.
c. Nature as revelation of God to the individual.
Romantic Attitudes
1. Appeals to imagination; use of the "willing suspension of disbelief."
2. Stress on emotion rather than reason; optimism, geniality.
3. Subjectivity: in form and meaning.
Romantic Techniques
1. Remoteness of settings in time and space.
2. Improbable plots.
3. Inadequate or unlikely characterization.
4. Authorial subjectivity.
5. Socially "harmful morality;" a world of "lies."
6. Organic principle in writing: form rises out of content, non-formal.
7. Experimentation in new forms: picking up and using obsolete patterns.
8. Cultivation of the individualized, subjective form of writing.
Philosophical Patterns
1. Nineteenth century marked by the influence of French revolution of 1789 and its concepts of liberty, fraternity, equality:
a. Jacksonian democracy of the frontier.
Andrew Jackson made such a lasting impression upon his times that the period when he was president is usually called the Age of Jackson or the Era of Jacksonian Democracy. As the victor in the battle of New Orleans, during the War of 1812, he was one of the nation's most famous military heroes. As president he stood for equality of opportunity and for the right of ordinary Americans to better themselves
Indian Removal.
Jackson's interest in western settlement and his feelings as a former Indian fighter led to his policy of moving all eastern Indian tribes to lands beyond the Mississippi River, under the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Although the U.S. Supreme Court tried to prevent the state of Georgia from expelling the Cherokees in 1832, Jackson would not enforce the court's decision. The removal policy was popular with white settlers who acquired the valuable land, but it proved tragic for thousands of Indians.
Indian Removal Act of 1830 - In 1830 the United States Congress, with the support of President Andrew Jackson, attempted to legislate a permanent solution to their land disputes with eastern Native American tribes by passing the Indian Removal Act. Passed by a narrow margin, the Act stipulated that the government could forcibly relocate Native Americans living within their traditional lands in eastern states to areas west of the Mississippi designated as "Indian Territory" (much of this land was in present-day Oklahoma). With this stroke, the federal government sanctioned the racist view that Native Americans had no valid claims to their homelands and should be moved westward to make way for white settlers and white culture. The Indian Removal Act enabled the tragic "Trail of Tears" migration, in which a third of the population of the Cherokee tribe died.
Manifest Destiny - The belief that American control of the land that stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific was inevitable and divinely sanctioned. Because of this culturally arrogant conviction, American policy makers had few scruples about displacing Native Americans, Mexicans, and other groups inhabiting the land from the Great Plains to California.
c. Middle colonies - utopian experiments like New Harmony, Nashoba, and the Icarian community.
2. America basically middle-class and English - practicing laissez-faire (live and let live), modified because of geographical expansion and the need for subsidies for setting up industries, building of railroads, and others.
3. Institution of slavery in the South - myth of the master and slave - William Gilmore Simms' modified references to Greek democracy (Pericles' Athens which was based on a slave proletariat, but provided order, welfare and security for all) as a way of maintaing slavery.
WALT WHITMAN
Walt Whitman's publication of Leaves of Grass in July 1855 represented nothing short of a radical shift in American poetry. Written in free verse--that is, having no regular meter or rhyme but instead relying on repetition and irregular stresses to achieve poetic effects--Whitman's poems flouted formal conventions in favor of an expansive, irregular, and often colloquial expression of poetic voice. Whitman unified his poems through the use of repetition of key opening words and ideas, parallelism between lines, and lists to bridge together the diversity he found around him. Critics have tended to see this mode of verse-making as more democratic, as it allows for both autonomy and unity in a startling new way. Whitman also flouted convention in his choice of subject matter: in his efforts to tell the epic story of American democracy in all its diversity, he excluded almost nothing from his focus and emphasized the body as much as the soul, the rude as much as the refined. Figuring himself and his poetry as the visionary representation of the American body politic, Whitman constructed an inclusive, all-embracing identity that could, as he characterized it, "contain multitudes." In the first edition of Leaves of Grass (which he printed himself), he did not include his name on the title page. Instead, he presented his readers with a picture of himself, dressed in casual working man's clothes, as the representative of the American collective self. Challenging tradition and shocking readers, Whitman's book was a revolutionary manifesto advocating a new style and a new purpose for American literature, as well as a new identity for the American poet
OTHER IMPORTANT TERMS
border - Sometimes used as a replacement for the culturally insensitive term "frontier." Borders are places where cultures meet, and where trade, violence, and cultural exchange shape a variety of individual experiences.
epic - A long narrative poem celebrating the adventures and accomplishments of a hero. More generally, the term "epic" has come to be applied to any narration of national or cultural identity that has a broad, all-encompassing scope.
free verse - Poetry that does not adhere to conventional metrical patterns and has either irregular rhyme or no rhyme at all. Walt Whitman pioneered the use of free verse in American poetry, and his "Song of Myself" is a classic example.
frontier - Traditionally, the term Americans have used to describe the unexplored or contested land to the west of the eastern settlements on the Atlantic coast. Scholars have pointed out that the term "blurs the facts of conquest" and does not take into account the many other peoples who were displaced--sometimes violently--to make way for U.S. expansion.
homosocial/homosexual continuum - The relationship between non-sexual same-sex bonding activities and sexual contact between people of the same sex. While American culture has traditionally insisted that homosexuality is distinct from non-sexual same-sex relationships, scholars and theorists argue that the division between the two is always unstable.
