So I'm posting this at the end of the week instead of the beginning of the week... if I get sued, that's cool. But seriously, though, I just forgot about the whole blogging thing until yesterday and I would've done this (as well as the Mary Rowlandson one) yesterday, but I didn't have time.
What I found intriguing from the first readings we had to do (the introduction thing, Christopher Columbus, and First Encounters - I read Hernan Cortés) is just how much most of it is in the same genre. That genre is nonfiction. It's nonfiction because most of the early American writings were letters sent back and forth from explorers and the monarchs who sent them, journals of the explorers or their crew members, documentations of colony life, and other things of the sort.
Was it all nonfiction? No. It's just that a vast majority of it (or at least what we've read) was nonfiction. The main stuff that isn't nonfiction would be the Native American folk tales/legends/creation stories, which to them were actually nonfiction.
One thing that really stuck out to me, though, was that I didn't think about most of this stuff being American literature. I didn't consider American literature to have actually started until the Revolutionary War time period, mostly because when I think "American," I think of the United States of America and it's history. So it was slightly surprising to me that we started with the early explorers and that some of the early explorers (or at least Cortés) said that the Natives were even aware that they had come from other lands and didn't know what they used to believe so they had to come up with their own stories about what to believe and how they came about.
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