American Literature / Unit 6 AML 0522 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Placing an Early National Text by Its Hero
The idea
A passage from this period can usually be placed by the kind of figure at its centre, and four types cover the field. The idler or eccentric, comic and out of step with a changing community, belongs to Irving's sketches and their imitators, and the tone will be genial. The frontiersman, expert outside settlements and awkward inside them, belongs to Cooper's romances and their descendants, and the prose will admire competence. The isolated sufferer, carrying a secret or a guilt, belongs to the Gothic and to the dark Romantics who follow in the next unit, and the setting will be closed rather than open. The endangered young woman, pursued and instructed by a moralizing narrator, belongs to the seduction novel of the previous generation. Name the figure and the form usually follows.
In practice
Idler, frontiersman, sufferer, or endangered girl.
Where people slip
The types overlap at the edges, and the exam builds distractors there. A frontiersman inside a haunted forest is still Cooper's kind of book if the danger is human and still Gothic if the danger is inherited.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
Builds on
Unlocks
- Nothing yet depends on this.
Something wrong in this lesson? Flag it