Edgar Allan Poe was not only a poet, but also a critic and a writer. He was well known for his expressive short stories and poems that captured the imagination of readers. Annabel Lee was not the only writing by Poe that narrates death. According to Britannica, most of his work was concerned with terror and sadness. He was capable of writing angelic or weird poetry, with a supreme sense of rhythm and word appeal.
He especially admired Hawthorne’s psychological deepness and linked him with unique American Literature. Such was Melville’s admiration for Hawthorne that he dedicated Moby Dick to him. Melville’s life had a great impact on the story Moby Dick. In the same way, he had a bad leg on one of his journeys, he creates Captain Ahab with a broken leg. Primarily, by reading Shakespeare’s plays he creates the setting and language of the novel.
In “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”, Douglass narrates in detail the oppressions he went through as a slave before winning his freedom. In the narrative, Douglass gives a picture about the humiliation, brutality, and pain that slaves go through. We can evidently see that Douglass does not want to describe only his life, but he uses his personal experiences and life story as a tool to rise against slavery. He uses his personal life story to argue against common myths that were used to justify the act of slavery. Douglass invalidated common justification for slavery like religion, economic argument and color with his life story through his experiences torture, separation, and illiteracy, and he urged for the end of slavery.
Rhett Butler’s words in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1936) reflect the notion of the ‘South’ in America as it prides itself on a certain lifestyle. It is an extremely popular novel which clutched at American hearts for its romantic portrayal of the South and its ‘Lost Cause’. It remains prevalent in spite of the ambivalent form of criticism against the novel and the author of being flawed and racist. Mitchell takes an iconic moment in American History and by setting it in the South, she retains a certain image of the ‘Old South’ while depicting a change brought about by the Civil War. This is problematized by her depiction of African-Americans in the novel as it includes the act of Slavery as a normative practice in the ‘South’ and the life of slaves on a Southern plantation.
The poem will be analyzed based upon literary devices that the author uses to relay a message to the rest of society of his concerns of lynching ritual against African American people. “Strange Fruit” is written to create awareness to protest the lynching act and the cruelty behind it. The “Strange Fruit” is composed of a rhyme scheme that consist of aabbccdd and so on. The rhyme scheme is crucial to the poetic piece due to the fact that when
The American Slave Trade: Uncle Tom’s Cabin “Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves” ― Abraham Lincoln, Complete Works - Volume XII. In other words, no one deserves freedom, if one person does not let someone else have it. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is an anti-slavery novel written by an American author named Harriet Beecher Stowe. The book is based on a true story which talks about Tom, who suffered from slavery, considering himself as black skinned colored. Stowe, wrote this book to describe the condition of slavery in the South, aiming to inform the people of the North about what was happing to those victims.
Slavery was and has always been a topic of discussion, based on how unjust of an action it can be, whether it is the literal form that causes death and inflicts physical pain with the heavy labor that is induced into the minority group, or whether it is the metaphorical form that gives the minority group a feeling of abandonment and an unhappy isolation. Two writers of the Romantic period used their literary fame to set a flame onto the conversation of slavery. William Blake wrote The Chimney Sweeper: Songs of Innocence to render the discussion of literal slavery within the children of the chimney sweep business. Being sold by their families to work at extremely young ages to make money by being placed into dangerous and unkempt chimneys where the food was limited and sleep was rough. Mary Wollstonecraft wrote The Vindication of the Rights of Women, which gives insight to the unjust inequality that women faced during her time.
Throughout Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck’s struggle with moral alignment is continuously present. Huck faces the emotional implications of acting against the beliefs of the times as he aids Jim in escaping slavery. Though he offers assistance to Jim, Huck constantly battles with the idea of turning him in. Through this constant struggle Twain creates a contrast between morality – one’s own set of individual moral values, and moralism – the sets of moral values enforced by others. Raised in the Jim Crow south by the slave-owning Ms. Watson, Huck has been brought up on a very specific set of moral values.
In the post-war period, the art of the short story flourished in American literature. Among its most respected practitioners was Flannery o’ connor who renewed the fascination of such giants as Faulkner and Twain with the American south, developing a distinctive southern gothic esthetic wherein characters acted at one level as people and at another symbols. Most of the authors interested to give many moralistic short stories in American literature. In this session we have to discuss about two short stories based as the theme of isolation. That the novels are The Furnished Room by o’ Hendry and The Tell-Tale Heart by Poe.
Chase Clark Dr. Jane Wessel English 2330 3 March 2018 The Plea for Freedom The poems “The Negro’s Complaint” by William Cowper and “On Sugar” by the Tyler Family Papers gives us a perspective on pain and suffering that every slave experienced, and although these poems are different in perspective, both of them speak in a dark emotional tone by questioning the white slave owners if what they are doing is morally justified. These two poems will be compared and contrasted to each other, and then converge to make the reader feel immoral and guilty. The slave within each poem plead together to the reader to look at the slaves equally to them, such as if their color did not exist. While comparing the tactics of these two poems, you must imagine yourself in the position of the slave. You must visualize the hardships they have had to endure and see that the slaves have feelings just like the white men who possess them.