Terms to know:

  • Renaissance: rebirth
  • American Renaissance: 1800-1870
  • Growth in America after Revolutionary War
  • Technology booms:
  • Railroad
  • Louisiana Purchase expands country
  • Gold Rush: Expansion out west
  • Democracy
  • Romanticism:
  • Literary movement during the American Renaissance
  • All about self
  • Imagination over reason
  • Feelings over fact/logic
  • Nature
  • Dark vs. Light Romanticism
  • Light: humans are innately good
  • Dark: humans are cruel and corrupt; reveal darker side of man
  • Gothic Literature
  • Grotesque vs. Arabesque
  • Violent
  • Mood, tone, setting dark
  • Supernatural element
  • Faustian Archetype: Deal with the devil
  • Based off German legend
  • Deal with devil
  • Sign in blood
  • Sell your soul
  • Trickery from Devil (devil usually wins)
  • Transcendentalism
  • Movement founded by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1830’s
  • Mankind is the most important force in the universe
  • Rejects rules/laws
  • Experience through Nature
  • Always about self-discovery
  • Emerson was Thoreau’s mentor

Texts and author’s to know:

  • “The Devil and Tom Walker” by Washington Irving
  • An example of Faustian Archetype
  • Know the deal made
  • Know what happens to Tom’s wife
  • Know how the setting is gothic
  • Know what the trees symbolize
  • Know how the devil takes Tom at the end and how Tom tries to avoid his end of the bargain (going to church, carrying bible, etc.)
  • “Hop Frog” by Edgar Allan Poe
  • Know facts about his life
  • Characters and descriptions about them:
  • Trippetta
  • Hop Frog
  • The King
  • Know how elements of the Grotesque are evident
  • Know how elements of the arabesque are evident
  • Symbols:
  • Masquerade
  • Parrot
  • Ourang-outangs
  • Chains
  • Chandelier
  • Fire
  • Know the trick Hop Frog plays at the masquerade and WHY he does that to the king and his 7 advisors
  • Know the difference between Trippetta and Hop Frog
  • Know what happens at the end of the story
  • “A Good Man is Hard to Find” by Flannery O’Connor
  • Know how elements of Southern Gothic are evident
  • Characters and descriptions about them:
  • The Grandma
  • Bailey
  • John Wesley & June Star
  • The Misfit
  • Poetry
  • Know the literal meaning of each poem
  • Know the metaphorical meaning of each poem/author’s purpose
  • Be able to identify how elements of Romanticism are evident
  • Be able to identify poetic devices
  • “The Learn’d Astronomer” by Walt Whitman
  • “Noiseless, Patient Spider” by Walt Whitman
  • “By the Bivouac’s Fitful Flame” by Walt Whitman
  • “The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
  • “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” by Emily Dickinson
  • “The Brain is Wider than The Sky” by Emily Dickinson
  • “Old Ironsides” by Oliver Wendell Holmes
  • “Self-Reliance” by Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Know the meaning behind the following quotes (we did this in groups)”
  • “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being.” (Part II)
  • “Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.” (Part IV)
  • “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of your own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world.” (Part V)
  • “No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it.” (Part VI)
  • “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall.” (Part VII)
  • Walden by Henry David Thoreau
  • Know facts about his life
  • Attended Harvard
  • Hated rules
  • Objected to corporal punishment
  • Thoreau and brother opened their own school in Concord, Massachusetts
  • 1841, Thoreau moved in to Emerson’s house
  • 1845-47: lived alone in a primitive cabin in the woods on Walden pond, wrote Walden
  • Died of tuberculosis at age 34
  • Why did Thoreau go to the woods?
  • What are Thoreau’s thoughts on life and the way it should be lived?
  • Know the meaning of the repetition of Simplicity!
  • Know the railroad metaphor
  • “Civil Disobedience” by Henry David Thoreau
  • Know why he wrote the text
  • Know what civil disobedience means
  • What metaphors are used to describe government?
  • What are Thoreau’s ideas about what government should be?

Terms to know and be able to identify in a passage:

  • Tone
  • Author’s Purpose
  • Diction
  • Dichotomous
  • Parallel Structure
  • Imagery (figurative language of any kind)
  • Poetry:
  • Form and Structure
  • Repetition
  • Personification
  • Alliteration
  • Consonance
  • Assonance
  • External vs. Internal Rhyme
  • Similes & Metaphors
  • Rhyme Scheme