While most critics and writers during the period viewed poetry as the most important literary genre, the American Renaissance is now better known for its prose works. The short story as a form first came into its own in the United States with writers such as Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and others exploring the aesthetic and thematic possibilities of compact prose works of fiction.
Completing this unit should take you approximately 10 hours.
Read this introduction to the short story in general and to Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville's particular roles in developing the form and what would later become known as its conventions.
To better understand some of the context surrounding these writers, read this short biography of Hawthorne.
Read Poe's influential review of Hawthorne's collection Twice-Told Tales.
Read one of Poe's most famous short stories, "The Cask of Amontillado".
Read this story, which is one of the stories Poe mentions in his review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales. Like a lot of Hawthorne's works, "The Minister's Black Veil" provides the backdrop for an exploration of sin, repentance, and morality. In his review of Hawthorne and his works, Poe echoes the principles he outlines in "The Philosophy of Composition", which you read in Unit 2, arguing for the short story's artistic superiority to the novel.
In literature, "the gothic" broadly refers to works that emphasize or explore the supernatural or psychological in terms of a darker underside, works that embody a perspective of the world and/or human nature as fraught with uncertainty, dark forces – whether natural, supernatural, or human – beyond rational control, and danger both from without (from deceptive villains) and within (from immoral instincts and desires). More narrowly, the gothic refers to a literary movement emerging at the end of the eighteenth century in England with the publication of novels such as Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), which is often cited as the first Gothic novel. Read this introductory essay on the Gothic in the antebellum American short story.
Read this Gothic short story alongside the other works in this subunit.
Read this Gothic short story alongside the other works in this subunit.
Read this Gothic short story alongside the other works in this subunit. In this story, pay particular attention to Poe's theorization of human psychology.
In this story published in 1835, Hawthorne focuses on the tensions within Puritan culture, particularly the sense of sin. In a symbolic fashion, the story follows Young Goodman Brown's journey into self-scrutiny, which results in his loss of virtue and belief. Read this story and identify the elements that locate this story in the Gothic tradition. Think also about the power that evil and secrecy play in the narrative. How are the characters developed around these themes?
For further exploration of the Gothic, read this account to see Hawthorne's power of suggesting the darkness of life despite a sunny veneer to his stories – which is as applicable to Melville himself as to Hawthorne.
This period also saw the rise of another genre: the detective story. Crime fiction attends to the investigation of a crime by a character acting in the role of detective, whether he or she is a professional or an amateur. The crime in question is typically a murder – in addition to being the most thrilling and frightening crime of all, murder is an archaic and fundamental aspect of every society, a destroying force that is present everywhere and across all time boundaries. Most importantly, though, murder is highly variable. There are an infinite number of motives, methods, punishments, and emotions associated with the act of taking another's life. Consequently, detective fiction established and followed a definitive formula that readers never tired of, since authors can spin unlimited original variations. Read this essay on the relationship between romanticism and rationalism in detective fiction.
To prepare for the next short story, read this biography of Herman Melville.
Building on what you have learned about the short story, the Gothic, and the detective genre, read this famous novella, a mystery featuring an obtuse major character and a relevant political context. You should take notes while reading; when you finish, write a paragraph about your own interpretation of the events of the story.
After reading "Benito Cereno" and writing out your own interpretation, read this short essay, which provides an overview of recent interpretations of Melville's story, and see how your ideas compare to those expressed by scholars of the text.
Take this assessment to see how well you understood this unit.