Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-g8jcs Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T09:16:29.183Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

3 - American fantasy 1820–1950

from PART I - HISTORIES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2012

Edward James
Affiliation:
University College Dublin
Farah Mendlesohn
Affiliation:
Middlesex University, London
Get access

Summary

To early European visitors, America was a land of the fantastic. Their reports were full of strange people, weird foodstuffs, incredible riches. Such travellers' tales inevitably became the basis of literature about America which, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, was often written to advertise colonial ventures by people who had never been there. During the first 300 years of European settlement in America, settlers primarily saw themselves as British, French or Spanish rather than as American, and what literature there was, therefore, tended to continue such fanciful forms, or to follow European models, subject matter and sensibilities. By the time of American independence, however, journals featuring American poets, essayists and short story writers were being published in New York, Boston and Philadelphia.

Of the first generation of American novelists who used the Gothic mode around the time of the Revolution and in its immediate aftermath, the most significant was probably Charles Brockden Brown. Brown absorbed the Gothic sensibilities and radical perspectives of writers such as Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin. His reading informed a series of startling, often violent novels which appeared over a very short period at the end of the century. The first published was Wieland; or, the Transformation (1798), in which the title character is driven to madness and murder by a malevolent ventriloquist who makes Wieland believe he is hearing the voice of God. In Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799), Huntly sets out to find a murderer but, after a mysterious episode of sleep walking, discovers that the real villains are American Indians who committed the crime to foment a war against the settlers.

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2012

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×