Robert Beverly: Contribution as American Author

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      Robert Beverly (1673-1722) was another wealthy planter and author of the History and Present State of Virginia Colony in a Humane and Vigorous of the Virginia (1705, 1722) which records the history of the Virginia colony. Like Byrd, he praised the Indians and remarked on the stage European superstitions about Virginia — for example, the belief that “the country turns all people black who go there.” He noted the great hospitality of southerners, a trait maintained today humorous satire—a literary work in which human vice or folly is attacked through irony or derision. Vit— appears frequently in the colonial south.

      A group of original settlers lampooned Georgia’s philanthropic founder, General James Oglethorpe in a tract entitled A True and Historical Narrative of the Colony of Georgia (1741). They pretended to praise him for keeping them so poor and overworked that they had to develop “the valuable virtue of humility” and shun “the anxieties of any further ambition.” The rowdy, satirical poem “The Stowed Factor” satirizes the colony of Maryland where the author, in Englishman named Ebenezer Cook, had unsuccessfully tried his hand as a tobacco merchant. Cook exposed the Hide ways of the colony with high-spirited humor and accused the colonists of cheating him. The poem concludes with an exaggerated curse: “May wrath divine then laid those Regions waste / where no man’s faithful or a woman chaste.” In general, the Colonial South may fairly be linked with a light, worldly, informative, and realistic literary tradition; light imitative of English literary fashions. The southerners attained imaginative heights in witty, precise observations of distinctive New World conditions.

      Although the eighteenth century witnessed a growing will end towards the secular it is also wrong to deny the importance of the some religious influences on the writing. There was the nativization of Mary, the Immaculate of the catholic religions in the form of the dark goddess of Guadalupe”. A cathedral was built in the place of the worship. It shows that majority of Americans were far away from the class of the Enlightenment. Elizabeth Ashbridge mid John Woollman, two Quaker writers, in true sense are remarkably noteworthy.

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