Enlightenment Period: Literary Genres

Autobiographies: The story of a person’s life as written by that person.  Although a common loose use of the term includes memoirs, diaries, journals, and letters, distinctions among these forms need to be made.  Diaries, journals, and letters are not extended, organized narratives prepared for the public eye; autobiographies and memoirs are.  But, whereas memoirs deal at least in part with public events and noted personages other than the author, an autobiography is a connected narrative of the author’s life, with some stress on introspection.

Rags-to-Riches Tales: Akin to parts of Franklin’s autobiography and/or the Horatio Alger “Ragged Dick” series.  Usually, a poor boy goes to the city, makes the most of his chances, encounters good fortune and events to prove himself, and advances to inevitable success.  The conventional rags-to-riches story contains:

• An early life of deprivation and hardship or of benign simplicity.
• An abrupt departure from family and friends.
• Travel to unfamiliar places.
• Confrontations with different cultures and different customs.
• Reports of innocence encountering sophistication, disregard, and cruelty.
• Triumph over adversity through hard work and the help of friends.
• Achievement of financial success and public esteem.

Slave Narratives: From 1760 to 1947, more than 200 book-length slave narratives were published in the United States and England, and more than 6,000 briefer slave narratives, some as short as a page, are known to exist.  The ante-bellum (period before a war) slave narrative:

• Generally attempted to arouse the sympathy and humanitarian impulses of readers.
• Emphasized traditional Christian religious ideas.
• Showed the acceptance of the ideals of the dominant white society.
• Emphasized the cruelty of individual slave owners.

Slave narratives traditionally:

• Are episodic in form, like picaresque tales (see below).
• Are marked by passages of emotional rhetoric and fervid appeals (often in the form of direct address) to the conscience of the narrative reader.
• Emphasize the narrator’s rise to greater understanding, greater self-reliance, and greater awareness of self-worth.
• Serve a propagandizing function by arousing sympathy for the individual narrator and antipathy to slavery in general.
• Give detailed descriptions of the cruelties of slavery and the harm done both to whites (in their spiritual corruption) and to blacks (especially in their physical punishment, in their lack of freedom, and in the breaking up of slave families).
• Contrast the kindness of some individual whites to the cruelties of other individual whites and of the system of slavery as a whole.
• Contrast the brutal reality of slavery to the benign ideals of the nominally Christian society in which it exists.

Picaresque Novels: A chronicle, usually autobiographical, presenting the life story of a rascal of low degree engaged in menial tasks and making his living more through his wits than his industry.  The picaresque novel tends to be episodic and structureless.  The picaro, or central figure, through various pranks and predicaments and by his association with people of varying degree, affords the author an opportunity for satire of the social classes.  Romantic in the sense of being an adventure story, the picaresque novel is strongly marked by realism in petty detail and by uninhibited expression.  The picaresque novel has seven chief qualities:

• It chronicles a part or the whole of the life of a rogue.  It is likely to be in 1^st person.
• The chief figure is from a low social level and, if employed at all, does menial work.
• The novel presents a series of episodes only slightly connected.
• Progress and development of character do not take place.
• The method is realistic.
• Thrown together with people from every class and often from different parts of the world, the picaro serves them intimately in some lowly capacity and learns all their foibles and frailties.
• The hero usually stops just short of being an actual criminal.

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