1.

What were the burning issues that were treated at the

lyceums in the early nineteenth century?
The burning issues that were treated there in the early 19th century
were: who should be able to vote, chattel slavery versus wage
slavery, the demon rum, whether married women could hold property,
Americas manifest destiny to extend its boundaries. People would
congregate at the movies and heard lectures on the Oregon Trail and
the South Seas, Napoleon and Black Elk, the new science of
daguerreotyping and the pseudoscience of phrenology.

2. How and why did evangelical Christians bring about social

betterment?
They developed a social gospel, which engaged them in efforts to
eradicate the sources of human misery: poverty, alcoholism, war,
discrimination against women, and above all slavery. They wanted to
bring about social betterment because they wanted to follow Christs
entailed working to eradicate sin from the world.
3. In economic terms, how did the USA change as far as
agricultural sites and exploitations were concerned?
There were shifts of the countrys economic base from agriculture to
industry, and the population, from rural to urban. Moreover, the
smaller, self-sufficient eastern-style family farm began to decline due
to the fact that growers turned to producing cash crops, like cotton,
sugar and whet, for national and international markets.

4.There was no international Copyright law until 1891. What

problems did this create in the USA in the early nineteenth
century?
Until the law was not adopted in 1891, readers preferred to buy
cheaper editions of popular British writers like Sir Walter Scott and
Charles Dickens to home-grown products. As a result, publishers
helped American writers economically or were themselves paid by
better-known authors to distribute their books.

5. What effect did the end of the importations of slaves from

Africa 1808 have upon the slaves in the USA?
As the importation of slaves ended, masters were forced to look after
their property better. One of the steps taken was to make slave
women to have more babies and therefore to increase the number of
future slaves.

6. What is the American Renaissance?

It is the period from the 1830s roughly until the end of the American
Civil War in which American literature, in the wake of the Romantic
movement, came of age as an expression of a national spirit.

7. What main argument/s did the defenders of slavery

display?
The defenders of slavery argued that it was an institution as old as
human history and that it was even sanctioned by biblical texts. Then
they added that slavery helped civilize and Christianize the barbaric
people. They defended that the system was more humane than the
wage slavery of the North and of Britain, based on competition
among workers for a wage. They insisted that the several States had
the right to define for themselves their forms for social organization
without interference from a federal government. They also used racist
theories implying that black people were less than human, incapable of
full development even in freedom, and thus by nature cut out only to
be drawers of water and hewers of wood.

8. What main problems did the abolitionists have both in the

north and in the south? Why were they consistently criticised?
Abolitionists could not preach or pamphleteer the South into
repenting its sin; and in the North, when they were not being attacked
as nigger lovers, they were avoided as bores and denounced as
agitators. They were criticized because their activities threatened the
harmony of North and South in the Union.
9. What was the main attraction of religious communities on
the frontier?
The Americans were in search for community and a source of order in
a dangerous and often lawless society. Some new denominations and
sects, like the Mormons were founded in order to organize their
converts into communities at once secular and religious.

10. Why did the laws the protected slaves remain unenforced?
In general, the laws that existed to protect slaves were unenforced
because of white solidarity. Slaves could not testify at court. Only
white people could testify in favor of them but they never wanted to
defend slaves. Therefore the law was useless because they could not
get any benefit from it.
1. Why did the Southern aristocracy establish an alliance with
the poor whites as far as the defence of slavery is concerned?
The Southern aristocracy established an alliance with the poor whites
due to the fact that the latter ones shared contempt and fear of the
Afro-Americans and could not contemplate liberating slaves, who, as
free men, would compete with them for land and profit.
2. Credibility was a very important issue for slave narratives
in general and for Frederick Douglasss Narrative of the Life
of Frederick Douglass An American Slave in particular. Why?
In that period it was believed that stories about slavery were written
by white people. Moreover, by 1844, the credibility of Frederick
Douglass was under attack by those who insisted that he did not look,
act, think or speak like a man who had recently escaped slavery. That
is why, William Lloyd Garrison wrote the preface to The Narrative of
the Life of Frederick Douglass. He wanted people to believe that its
author was actually Frederick Douglass himself.
6 Frederick Douglass in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass, An American Slave places great emphasis on the
evolution of one of his mistresses, Sophia Auld, as a
consequence of her contact with slavery. What is his main
intention in this? What does he want to prove?
Douglass emphasizes the evolution of this character to point out how
people can change when they are in contact with slavery and achieve
power. His main intention is to show that slavery has negative
consecuences over white people too: the problem of having too much
power and cannot control it.
7 What literary techniques and traditions did Douglass have
available for writing his Narrative of the Life of Frederick
Douglass, An American Slave?
The narrators found available and used the techniques and tradition

of the plantation novels, sentimental romances, sermons, reprinted

lectures of self-improvement, ryhymed moralising verse, biographical
accounts of lives of great men, Sunday-school moral tales, frontier
travel accounts, Old South-western humorous sketches and other
forms that constituted the mass reading of the day. But the main
literary influence came from Puritan confessional accounts and
Methodist conversion narratives.

8. Frederick Douglass in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick

Douglass, An American Slave says of the Southern churches
that they strain at a gnat and swallow a camel. What does
he mean by that?
This sentence belongs to the Appendix. Douglass wrote it in order to
clarify his position about religion. He points out that there is a great
gap between the pure and peaceful Christianity of Christ and the
corrupt Christianity of slaveholding America. Douglass articulates his
understanding of the hypocrisy of Southern Christians who whip
slaves, prostitute female slaves, and steal the wages of working
slaves while professing Christian values of humility, purity, and virtue.
Douglass implies that the Southern church and slaveholders support
each other. The church accepts the slave money of slaveholders.
Douglass takes this quotation from the Bible.
9 Frederick Douglass access to freedom in his Narrative of
the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave is
established and explained form a gender point of view.
Please, explain this statement and relate it to events
developed and explained in the Narrative.
Douglass suffers an evolution from being a slave without any rights to
be a free man (bildungsroman). Slavery diminished his capacity of
being a man. According to the Narrative he achieves on learning to
read and write, giving him the key to runaway. Later he confronts Mr.
Covey: he becomes a man after the struggle, a man to runaway and
be free.

What are the main differences between naturalism and

realism from a literary point of view? Please, mention
some examples to illustrate the differences.
As intellectual and artistic movements, 19th century Realism and
Naturalism are both responses to Romanticism. Naturalism is based
on Darwinism and its implications seem to be that:
a)
heredity and environment control people
b)
nobody is responsible, since forces are beyond control.
c)
The credit or blame must go to society
d)
Progress is the same as improvement or evolution; it is
inevitable and can be hastened by the application of the
scientific method
e)
Man is reduced to a natural object
Darwin provided a biological analogy for the struggle for survival
within the social world. According to Emile Zola, literature must
become scientific or perish; it should illustrate the inevitable laws of
heredity and enviroment or record case studies. To experiment with
the same detachment as a scientist, the writer could become like a
doctor, (seeking the cause of disease to cure it, bringing the disease
in the open to be examined), aiming to cure social ills.
The new scientist novel would be created by placing characters with
known inherited characteristics into a carefully defined enviroment
and observing the resulting behaviour.
2. Stephen Cranes Maggie, a Girl of the Streets is considered
an example of literary environmental determinism in the
literary history of the United States. Please, explain and
illustrate this statement.
According to Determinism, fate rules our lives. There is no God.
Nature, far from being a place of comfort, is indifferent. There is no
hope: everybody dies. Through Maggies actions, her social
environment and her beauty we discover that her only destiny is to
become a prostitute. Maggie goes out with the wrong man. When Pete
leaves her, her family rejects her because she is disgraced. She has
gone to live with a man without being married. She has nowhere to go
and that is why she becomes a prostitute. She had no options There is
no hope for her and she finally dies.
1.

3.

Stephen Cranes Maggie, a Girl of the Streets displays a

very strong criticism towards the way women (especially
poor women) were treated in the latter section of the
nineteenth century. Please, explain how this criticism is
articulated quoting sections from the text and using your
own words.

Crane establishes his criticism about young womens situation

through Maggie. When she is only a girl she is afraid of her mother,
maybe because she had beaten her before. We can notice when
Maggie breaks a plate in Chapter II and the reaction of her mother
towards her: her eyes glittered on her child with sudden hatred. The

fervent red of her face turned almost to purple

Maggie was also tempted by Pete and that is one of the reasons why
she fails. He abandons her at the end and becomes a prostitute
because his family rejects her.
4.

Irony and understatement are two rhetorical devices used

by Stephen crane in his Maggie, a Girl of the Streets.
Please, find examples from the text to exemplify these
devices.

There is a lot of irony through the novella, some of the examples are,
when she said he was a formidable and he was a knight. This is
Maggie's description about Pete. We discover at the end that he is not
a knight at all because he abandons her. Maggie has a distorted
perception of reality. She is so attracted to him that she idealises him.
And when Maggie perceived that Pete brought forth all his elegance.
It is also ironic because it is Maggie's misperception. Pete is not
elegant at all.
Crane also uses understatement to shock the reader when he said
that the babe Tommie had died. There are not details about the
baby's death and the reader has to fill the gaps.
5. How does Stephen Crane articulate his criticism of
melodrama in his Maggie, a Girl of the Streets? What
negative elements does he find in this aesthetic
construction?
When Pete and Maggie go to the theatre Maggie notices how a poor
person becomes a hero and how the high-class characters are
considered scoundrels. She wonders if the rise from poverty to
wealth, from sadness to joy that she witnesses on the stage would be
possible for a girl from the Bowery such as herself. This idea opens
her mind to the possibility of a better future, specifically a future in
which Pete, in the role of the hero, can provide for her happiness and
makes possible her departure from home. The noisy theater
audiences which catcall the villains and yell advice to the hero mirror
the Johnson's neighbors who view the spectacle of Maggie's downfall
as though it were entertainment. Crane wants to point out this
romantic perception of Maggie that unable her to see reality and
therefore one of the consecuences why she fails.
Although Crane constructs Maggie, one of his main
characters in his Maggie, a Girl of the Streets, as mainly a
victim, there are certain character traits in her that lead
her toward her final destruction. Which are these character
traits?
Maggie is the victim of the story. She is completely steered by events
and circumstances, so much so that even her decision to leave home
is less of choice between her family and Pete than it is a necessary
step to escape her abusive alcoholic mother. As such, Maggie is never
truly cognizant of the forces that bring her to ruin, rather she is
6.

mystified by the machinations of fate and completely submissive to

the world. She also has a misperception of reality, for example, she
sees Pete as a blue prince who is going to provide her the happiness
she never had.

Stephen Cranes main character in his novella Maggie, a

Girl of the Streets is characterised as a rather voiceless
character. What effect did he want to create? What does he
imply by it?
The author wanted Maggie to be a voiceless character on purpose in
order to emphasize that the story is not about a girl but about a whole
community. That is why there is a subtitle with the name: and Other
Tales of New York.
It is also a way to show her as a weak character who cannot defend
herself and is destined to fail.
7.

8.

Maggies mother, one of the main characters in Stephen

Cranes Maggie, a Girl of the Streets, is probably the most
villainous character in the novella. How does Crane
characterise her? What aspects of her behaviour does he
criticise most?

She epitomizes both the animalistic determinism and the hypocritical

morality of the slums. She is a drunkard and vacillates between
violent outrage and mournful emotional displays. Although she beats
and insults her children and regularly runs afoul of the law she
assumes the moral virtue to judge her daughter guilty of sin for
having taken up with Pete. She denounces Maggie as a fallen woman
and refuses allow her to return home after Pete rejects her. Upon
learning of Maggie's death she melodramatically and loudly mourns
for her daughter and at the urging of her neighbors forgives her. She
even uses her daughter to excuse herself when she is in trial.
Crane wants to emphasize how cruel and bad she is making her a
guilty part of her daughter's decay. She is also a hypocrite person.

Stephen Crane incorporates the voice of the people of the

Bowery in his novella Maggie, a Girl of the Streets. What
function does this voice play in this piece of fiction? What
does he want to achieve through them?
He is using the voice of the people of the Bowery to show how they
provide moral judgement just by perception and how they do not take
into account if she is actually a prostitute or not. They comment what
they see because privacy does not exist there and they also judge.
She has become one because people have made her so. It does not
matter if she really is or not a prostitute. People commenting with
their gossips have choose for her so. It is a question of perception
9.

more than a question of reality.

1. Francis Scott Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby is structured
around parties both big and small. How many are
actually held? What function do they play within the
novel?
Francis Scott Fitzgeralds The Great Gatsby is structured in three
parties. The first one takes place in New York and the other two take
place in Gatsbys house.
Parties are important because we get to know about the characters,
the people and the mood.
In the first party we witness how deceitful is Tom as he is cheating his
wife with Myrtle. That is why we, as readers, accept Daisys affair with
Gatsby.
The excess, related to the mood of the Happy 20s, is represented by
the parties organized by Gatsby. However, Gatsby does not like these
parties. He organized them not only because he wants people to like
him but also to attract Daisys attention to him. He knows that the
only way to be with her is to be rich and to have a position in high
society.
2. Nick Carraway, the narrator of Francis Scott Fitzgeralds
The Great Gatsby, says the following about Tom
Buchanan: As far as Tom, the fact that he had some
woman in New York was really less surprising that he
had been depressed by a book. Something made him
nibble at the edge of stale ideas. Please, comment
about this passage paying especial attention to the
stale ideas and the way these affect the construction
of this particular character.
Powerfully built and hailing from a socially solid old family, Tom is an
arrogant, hypocritical bully. Tom tries to interest the others in a book
called The Rise of the Colored Empires by a man named Goddard. The
book espouses racist, white-supremacist attitudes that Tom seems to
find convincing. These ideas are very old-fashioned and can be linked
to the fact that he is a conservative. Tom's " scientific" book claims
that the colored races will submerge the white race eventually. He is
obssessed with an inevitable downfall of society. He is very insecure
and his attempts at intellectualism are rather fumbled.
His social attitudes are laced with racism and sexism, and he never
even considers trying to live up to the moral standard he demands
from those around him.
As in that period people were losing their morality as a response to
the end of the I World War, it is more surprising for Nick that Tom is
linked to old-fashioned ideas rather than having an affair with another
woman.

3. Honesty/dishonesty is one of the many oppositions

developed by Francis Scott Fitzgerald in his The Great
Gatsby. How is it constructed and developed within the
novel? Please, answer this question making references
from the text.
The novel is structured mainly in two places called the East Egg and
the West Egg. Both places are inhabitated by rich people but their
have their differences. The East Egg is where people from the
aristocracy live and it is represented by Daisy and Tom Buchanan. On
the other hand the West Egg is where new rich people live and it is
represented by Nick Carreway and Jay Gatsby.
If we continue reading the novel we get to know that Tom is cheating
his wife and he is dishonest in this way. However although Gatsby is
erarning money in an illegal way, he does it in order to achieve
Daisys love. Thats why we, as readers, like Gatsby and hate Tom.
Gatsby seems more a honest person in morally terms than Tom. They
are both corrupted but Gatsby has a good purpose for it.
Daisys affair with Gatsby is justified because Tom has cheated her
before.