average schedule calls for twenty to twenty-five periods a week, and that any teacher may properly welcome relief from the complete original planning of all this work. It is to this end that the "machinery" of the book has been provided. The readings with each chapter are suggested rather than dictated. It stands to reason that substitutions are possible; and these may be determined not only by personal preference but by the resources of the school library or the material included in various available books of selections. In order to facilitate matters, however, a parallel book has been prepared, "Milestones in American Literature," which includes all the material listed at the heads of the chapters, with the exception of the novels. Again, the questions relative to the readings and the topics and problems for study are all in the nature of suggestion and have been supplied with the very definite idea that they are material to depart from or to select from. There is doubtless too much of this material for profitable use of all the students in any one class. A great deal of valuable help has been secured from teachers in the preparation of the book. Several chapters were given incisive criticism by summer teacher-students at The University of Chicago; others to the number of twelve or fifteen were actually used in classes at the University High School in Chicago and the Lincoln School in New York. All of these were modified if not rewritten, and basic criticism directed at these was applied to the rest of the work. PERCY H. BOYNTON CALIFORNIA AMERICAN LITERATURE CHAPTER I SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY HISTORY No reading list is supplied with this chapter-as with two other similar chapters, Chapters VIII and XIII-because no special reading for it could profitably be done in a school course. It is presented as a historical foreword to American colonial literature, and should be studied as such. CHAPTER OUTLINE American literature transplanted from England The Royalist colonists The Puritan colonists Tides of migration to Virginia and Massachusetts American literature transplanted from England. American literature differs in its beginnings from the literatures of most other great nations, because it was a transplanted product at the start. It sprang, in a way, like Minerva, full-armed from the head of Jove-Jove in this case being England, and the armor being the inheritance of English tradition and culture which the average colonist brought with him across the Atlantic. In contrast, Greek, Roman, French, German, English, and the less familiar literatures can all be more or less successfully traced back to the earliest days of history; their primitive life was interwoven with the growth of a language and the progress of a rude civilization, and the earliest writings which have come down to us from them were not the results of authorship as we know it today. They were either folk poetry, enjoyed by the people in groups and accompanied by singing or and dancing, like the Psalms and the simpler ballads,1 they were the record of folk tradition, slowly and variously developed through generations and finally collected into continuous stories like the Iliad, the Æneid, the "Song of Roland," the "Nibelungenlied," and "Beowulf." They were composed by word of mouth, and for years or generations they were not written down; they were not put into print until centuries after they had been copied by the monks or other scholars and had become familiar in quotation. The one great poem-story in American literature composed in this way from old folk legend is "The Song of Hiawatha," but this is the story of a conquered and vanishing race; it has nothing basic to do with the Americans of today; it is far less related to them than are the earlier epics2 of the European 1A ballad is a short narrative poem, adapted for singing, simple in plot and metrical structure, divided into stanzas, and impersonal in tone, not expressing any feeling for or against the people about whom the ballad centers. 2 An epic is a poetical account of great events carried out by heroic and sometimes supernatural characters and dealing with the national or religious interests of a people or of all mankind. |