The photograph above is from Old Sturbridge Village, a Massachusetts museum where my family spent a lot of time when I was a child. If you've been to Williamsburg in Virginia, Old Sturbridge Village is smaller but similar.
I also want to include a picture of Louisa May Alcott's home and museum in Concord, MA. Her father was associated with the Transcendentalists, and she was intrigued by Thoreau, one of her teachers. I wish that we had been able to read her "Brothers"!
-- realism – mostly summary; in fiction (Hawthorne, Sedgwick, Beecher Stowe, Melville), trying to prove a point—social criticism; also journalism (Fern, Fuller) – why do women write social criticism & realism? -- Thoreau (observation of nature in Walden) -- realism in poetry (Whitman, Dickinson) -- how do writers & their readers handle the country's conflict over slavery, states' rights, and union?
looked at Irving's depiction of Rip Van Winkle's village & woods to compare with Sedgwick's description of H. and Ralph Hepburn's farm -- could compare with Melville's depiction of NYC
Unfortunately, I could not find a picture of Wall Street from Bartleby or Melville's era, but here is a depiction of Lower Manhattan in the 1880s.
Ah, here is a 19th or early 20th century picture of Wall Street:
We also compared Fern's approach to describing Blackwell's Island & its institutions with Margaret Fuller's. How journalism has changed since Ms. Fern's day! Bear with me as I include some pictures of this place. The first is the Octagon Tower of the "Insane Asylum," parts of which would have been standing in the 1840s. (The picture dates from the 1890s.) Next is a picture of the women's almhouse or poorhouse. It gives you an idea of how rural the area was. Finally, below is a much more recent picture of a farmhouse that predates all of the institutions on Blackwell's Island. (It then became the administrative center for the island.)
-- fantasy –difference from 1st half – Poe & Irving – go beyond fiction, stretch the imagination a little more – more psychological – what’s going on inside of the mind instead of the world around us -- Hawthorne also -- "Young Goodman Brown," a world where one may walk with the devil -- "The Birth Mark" -- symbolism--Aylmer as alchemist -- Dickinson's poems about death? -- the importance of Gothic -- Poe is creating/establishing American literature -- how do writers and their readers handle the conflict over slavery, states' rights, and union? -- is fantasy an escape?
Does it really matter where Poe's works are set? Does it really matter that the characters in "The Fall of the House of Usher" are flat?
Who was Irving's audience? (Consider that he did much of his writing outside America.) By the way, I happened to see that Irving was friendly with Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein!
differences among folk tales/fairy tales, tales, and short stories -- note that the Brothers Grimm & Washington Irving were contemporaries -- and that the modern short story with its epiphany (Chekhov, Joyce) was years in the future
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