The New England Renaissance

1830 - 1860

ROMANTICISM A literary and artistic movement of the 18th

and 19th centuries that placed value on emotion or imagination over reason, the individual over society, nature and wildness over human works, the country over the town, common people over aristocrats, and freedom over control or authority.

ROMANTICISM Focused on a “higher reasoning” which was

the ability to grasp metaphysical truths in the physical world. Metaphysical: abstract concepts such as being,

knowing, cause, identity, time, and space.

ROMANTIC WRITERS Edgar Allan Poe

The Tell-tale Heart The Pit and the Pendulum The Raven The Fall of the House of

Usher Nathaniel Hawthorne

The House of the Seven Gables

The Scarlet Letter Rappaccini’s Daughter

Herman Melville Moby Dick Bartleby the Scrivener

Charles Dickens A Tale of Two Cities A Christmas Carol

Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Tom’s Cabin

EDGAR ALLAN POE Accomplishments

Co-created the modern short story (along with Nathaniel Hawthorne)

Invented detective fiction Wrote lyric poetry Pioneered the psychological horror story.

Modern-day psychological horror stories: The Sixth Sense Silence of the Lambs

ROMANTICISM The most famous outcome of the Romantic

Era was TRANSCENDENTALISM

TRANSCENDENTALISM Transcend: be or go beyond the range or

limits of Transcendentalism was a belief in a realm

of spiritual or transcendent truths beyond sense perception and material existence.

TRANSCENDENTALISM Transcendentalist Values

Spiritual over material success Opposed materialism, or the desire for increased

wealth (which had already become the core of American values)

Dismissed tradition and social convention--any authority beyond that of the individual conscience.

It is more important to be true to your own convictions than to those of society

TRANSCENDENTALIST WRITERS

Ralph Waldo Emerson Self-Reliance

Henry David Thoreau Walden

NEW ENGLAND RENAISSANCE POETRY A group of poets during this era became

known as The Fireside or Schoolroom Poets because their work was quite popular among families reading in the evening around the fire and because their work came to be recited and memorized widely in American schoolrooms.

FIRESIDE/SCHOOLROOM POETS Henry Wadsworth Longfellow James Russell Lowell John Greenleaf Whittier Oliver Wendell Holms Their most popular poems were songlike,

containing regular rhymes that made the poems easy to recite and remember. These poets offered mostly idealized, romantic, morally uplifting views of the nation and its past, in lyric and narrative verse.

EMILY DICKINSON Dickinson’s style was completely different

from that of the Schoolroom Poets’ Dickinson’s poetry does not follow the regular

rhythmic patterns of the Schoolroom poets; it is full of interrupted thoughts and sudden bursts of awareness, often jarring the reader through irony and paradox into a wholly different, more unsettling view of the world.