Literary Questions

Provide five features of Puritan literature and the names of the major Puritan writers with the titles of their works.

How is the idea of predestination mirrored in Puritan literature?

What kinds of texts were written by Puritans and why?

Describe briefly two main representatives of the American Enlightenment. Provide their names, titles of their works and main philosophical assumptions.

Compare and contrast Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Edwards focusing especially on literary texts they produced.

In what ways are the literary texts of Jonathan Edwards placed on the borderline between Puritanism and the Enlightenment?

Describe the three main kinds of the novel at the turn of the 19th century and provide the names of the writers related to every kind and titles of their works.

Describe major Romantic elements in Rip Van Winkle.

The historical versus the individual in Rip Van Winkle.

The historical versus the individual in The Red Badge of Courage.

Compare and contrast gothic novel in Europe and in America at the turn of the 19th century.

What were characteristic features of domestic novel in America at the turn of the 19th century?

What were the beginnings of historical novel in America (general background, titles, authors)?

Explain the concept of Nature in Transcendentalist philosophy. Provide the names of the authors and the titles of texts which focus on that issue.

What was the role of nature according to Ralph Waldo Emerson?

Explain the term the American Renaissance.

What was the local colour fiction?

Describe the main features of American Gothic on the basis of Poe’s short stories.

Edgar Allan Poe as a symbolic writer.

What was the contribution of James F. Cooper to American literature?

Explain major concepts of E.A. Poe’s Philosophy of Composition.

Contrast the American Romance with its European equivalent.

Can The Scarlet Letter be called the American romance? Why?

Leaves of Grass as the national epic in prose.

What were the major literary innovations introduced by Whitman into America poetry? (Song of Myself)

Moby Dick as the national epic in prose.

Foreshadowing in Moby Dick.

Herman Melville as a symbolic writer.

E.A. Poe as the first detective story writer.

Can Daisy Miller be read as a detective story?

How is “the international theme” developed in Daisy Miller by Henry James?

Realism in America.

Naturalism in America.

The Red Badge of Courage as a naturalistic text.

Provide the names of major modernist writers and the titles of their novels

Explain the term the LOST GENERATION.

What was the contribution of Ernest Hemingway to American literature?

In what way does the novel The Great Gatsby portray the problems of the lost generation?

The Great Gatsby as a modernistic text + symbolism.

Describe the main features of modernistic poetry.

Explain