Moses Coit Tyler

Moses Coit Tyler

Moses Coit Tyler (born August 2, 1835 in Griswold, Connecticut ; died December 28, 1900 in Ithaca , New York ) was an American historian and literary scholar.

Life

Tyler had an unsteady childhood in various small towns in New York and Michigan; In 1842 his family settled permanently in Detroit . In 1850 he left his parents' house and at the tender age of fifteen became a teacher at a country school in the village of Romeo, around 50 km north of Detroit, later made his way as a traveling bookseller and finally began studying at the University of Michigan in 1853 . In the second year of study he moved to the renowned Yale College , where he received his BA in 1857 and his MA in 1863 . In the meantime he studied at the Yale Divinity School (1857-1858) and the Andover Theological Seminary (1858-1859) for the congregational priesthood and also worked as a pastor in Owego and Poughkeepsie , but gave up this career because of health problems. After a nervous breakdown in October 1862, he recovered with the help of a gymnastic therapy program from a certain Dr. Dio Lewis and thus became a confident Representative Lewis' patented "musical gymnastics" ( musical gymnastics ). In 1863 he traveled to England to market Lewis' therapy program there. In his lectures, however, he was soon faced with numerous curious questions about the nature and history of the USA and was soon also giving lectures on these topics.

After returning to the United States, he was appointed Professor of Rhetoric and English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan in 1867. 1873-74 he interrupted his teaching activities and worked in New York as the responsible editor of the literature section of the magazine Christian Union , which was led by Tyler's role model Henry Ward Beecher . When Cornell University was the first ever to endow a chair in American history, Tyler was appointed to the post; In 1884 he was one of the founders of the American Historical Association . In 1883 he was ordained as a priest of the Episcopal Church , but did not work again as a parish priest . In 1898 he was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters .

plant

Tyler wrote two comprehensive works on American literary history during the colonial and revolutionary periods. It is true that in the 19th century there were already attempts to present American literary history - in particular Samuel Knapp's Lectures on American Literature (1829), Henry Theodore Tuckerman's Abriss A Sketch of American Literature (1852) and, above all, the Cyclopedia of American Literature ( 1855) by the brothers George and Evert A. Duyckinck - but Tyler's works were the first systematic literary stories in book length. In contrast to the alphabetically ordered and harmless descriptive-bibliographic Cyclopedia of the Duyckincks, Tyler proceeded chronologically and placed greater emphasis on the aesthetic-literary qualities of the authors discussed. Even if Tyler's judgments are often quite impressionistic due to the lack of a fixed method apparatus, they can still be read with profit, at least because of their stylistic brilliance.

Tyler contributed so much to the fact that American literature was subsequently increasingly understood as an independent national literature different from English , and as such also became the subject of academic research and teaching. He is often seen as one of the founding fathers of American Studies .

Fonts

• (Ed.) The Brawnville Papers: Being Memorials of the Brawnville Athletic Club. Fields, Osgood, & Co., Boston 1869 ( digitized version ).
• History of American Literature during the Colonial Period, 1607-1765. 2 volumes. GP Putnam's Sons. New York 1879 ( digitized ).
• (Ed.) In Memoriam: Edgar Kelsey Apgar. Ithaca, NY 1885.
• Patrick Henry. Houghton & Mifflin, Boston 1888 ( digitized version ).
• Three Men of Letters. GP Putnam's Sons, New York 1895 (essays on George Berkeley , Timothy Dwight and Joel Barlow ; digitized ).
• Literary History of the American Revolution, 1763-1783. 2 volumes. GP Putnam's Sons, New York 1897 ( digitized volume 1 ).
• Glimpses of England: Social, Political, Literary. GP Putnam's Sons, New York 1898.
• Jessica Tyler Austen (Ed.): Moses Coit Tyler, 1835-1900: Selections from his Letters and Diaries. Doubleday, Page & company, Garden City, NY 1911 ( digitized ).

literature

• Donald E. Houghton: Vernon Louis Parrington's Unacknowledged Debt to Moses Coit Tyler . In: New England Quarterly 43: 1, 1970, pp. 124-30.
• Howard Mumford Jones and Thomas Edgar Casady: The Life of Moses Coit Tyler. University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 1933.
• Michael G. Kammen: Selvages and Biases: Fabric of History in American Culture. Cornell University Press, Ithaca, NY 1989, ISBN 0801494044 , pp. 222-251.
• Kermit Vanderbilt: The Literary Histories of Moses Coit Tyler. In: Beverly R. Voloshin (Ed.): American Literature, Culture, and Ideology: Essays in Memory of Henry Nash Smith . Peter Lang, New York 1990, pp. 299-330.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Members: Moses Coit Tyler. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 30, 2019 .