Collection 4: American Romanticism Collection 5: Gothic Fiction Unit 2 Literary Focus Essays

Collection 4: American Romanticism

Collection 5: Gothic Fiction

Unit 2Literary Focus Essays

Collection 4: American Romanticism

• Affirmation of feeling and intuition over reason

• Faith in imagination, inner experience, and youthful innocence, rather than educated sophistication

• Belief in the unspoiled natural world, as opposed to the artificiality of civilization

• Regard for individual freedom and the worth of the individual

Characteristics of American Romanticism

• After winning independence from the British, Americans began to form their own cultural identity.

American RomanticismA Reaction Against Rationalism

• Writers called Romantics helped build this identity.

• The works of the Romantic writers still influence the way Americans view themselves, their society, and the natural world.

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• Romanticism is a school of thought that values feeling and intuition over reason.


• The Romantic movement began in Germany in the second half of the eighteenth century.

• Romanticism strongly influenced literature, music, and painting in Europe and Britain.

• Romanticism developed in part as a reaction against rationalism, after the Industrial Revolution, with its squalid cities, led people to see the limits of reason.

• such truths were accompanied by powerful emotions and were associated with natural beauty.

To the Romantics,


• the imagination could discover truths that the rational mind could not reach.

• individual feelings and wild nature were more important than reason, logic, and sophistication.

American RomanticismRomantic Escapism

To rise above what Edgar Allan Poe called “dull realities” and find a realm of higher truth, the Romantics used two principal approaches:

They chose settings and situations that did not come from the real, modern world.

1

They tried to reflect on the natural world until dull reality fell away to reveal beauty and truth.

2

Romantics chose settings and situations that did not come from the real, modern world.


• Situations are from the more “natural” past.

1

• Settings show worlds that are very unlike the grimy and noisy industrial age.

• Tales include those of the supernatural.

• Stories sometimes draw from old legends and folklore.

Romantics tried to reflect on the natural world until dull reality fell away to reveal beauty and truth.


• In lyric poems, natural scenes help speakers understand and express profound emotion.

• The Romantic approach is similar to the Puritans’ efforts to draw moral lessons from nature; however, Romantic reflections lead to a more generalized emotional and intellectual awakening.

2

American RomanticismThe American Novel and the Wilderness Experience

The American Romantic novelists used distinctly American subject matter to distinguish themselves from European writers.

• Americans had a sense of limitless frontiers that Europeans did not possess.

• Westward expansion, the growth of a nationalist spirit, and the idealization of frontier life all influenced the American novel.

American RomanticismThe American Novel and the Wilderness Experience

The novels of James Fenimore Cooper explored uniquely American settings and characters.

• Cooper’s Natty Bumppo—one of the first American Romantic heroes—is a virtuous, skilled frontiersman with a simple morality, a love of nature, and a distrust of town life.

• His works featured backwoodsmen, American Indians, frontier communities, and the wilderness.

American RomanticismAmerican Romantic Poetry: Read at Every Fireside

• Romantic poetry also had some American settings and subject matter.

• However, the Romantic poets worked within European literary traditions.

• Seeking to show that Americans were a sophisticated people, they used typically English themes, meter, and imagery.

American RomanticismAmerican Romantic Poetry: Read at Every Fireside

• The Fireside Poets were a group of very popular Romantic poets.

• Their poems were meant to be read aloud at the fireside—as family entertainment.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

John Greenleaf Whittier

Oliver Wendell Holmes

James Russell Lowell

Ask Yourself

1. How does Romanticism differ from rationalism?

2. In what two principal ways did Romantics try to rise above “dull realities”?

3. How were the goals of the American Romantic novelists different from the goals of the Fireside Poets?

American Romanticism

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• Use of haunting, eerie settings and strange, chilling events

• Romantic interest in intuition, imagination, and hidden truths

• Reaction against the optimism of the Transcendentalists

• Exploration of evil and the irrational depths of the human mind

Characteristics of Gothic Fiction

Gothic FictionThe Dark Side of Romanticism

The Dark Romantics shared some of the ideas of the Transcendentalists:

• They took an interest in the spiritual world.

• They valued intuition and imagination over rationalism.

• They wanted to explore the mysteries of human existence.


However, the Dark Romantics disagreed with the Transcendentalist notions that the divine is implicit in nature and that people are essentially good.

They felt that literature should take into account

• the darker side of human nature

• the presence of suffering in the world

• the ongoing conflict between good and evil

European Beginnings

• The Gothic novel, a form of Dark Romanticism, emerged in England in the late eighteenth century.

• Two classic examples are Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.


• These tales of terror often used the setting of the medieval gothic castle to evoke fear.

European Beginnings

The term Gothic was later used to describe any fiction that


• created a haunting atmosphere

• included strange and chilling events

The emerging trend in American fiction was the short story.

American Developments

• The cast of characters was small, and the plot was generally uncomplicated.

• This structure allowed a writer to focus on the internal workings of the main character’s mind.


• Short stories were meant to be read in one sitting.

The Gothic short story was born when the form of the short story met the content of the Gothic novel.

American Developments

• Dark Romantic writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Washington Irving incorporated Gothic elements into the developing short story genre.

• Gothic short stories often show the madness and violence under the seemingly tranquil surface of civilization.


Ask Yourself

1. What did the Dark Romantics have in common with the other Romantics, particularly the Transcendentalists?

2. What two trends in literature came together to form the Gothic short story? Explain.


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Documents

Collection 4: American Romanticism Collection 5: Gothic Fiction Unit 2 Literary Focus Essays