American Romanticism
1800 to 1860 (Jacksonian Period to War)
British Romanticism (1785 to 1832)
The period when American literature experienced its coming of age
Began in Germany and England
1800-1860: Why this
nature worship?
Population explosion
New immigrants
Move to the city (urbanization)
Industrial Revolution (factory work)
Westward Expansion (gold, etc.)
A pining for the country life
Idealism
Idealism refers to any theory that emphasizes the spirit, the mind, or language over matter – thought has a crucial role in making the world the way it is.
Immanuel Kant, a German philosopher, held that the mind forces the world we perceive to take the shape of space-and-time.
Rationalism versus
Romanticism
Romanticism was a reaction against the rationalism of Franklin, Jefferson, and other Founding Fathers.
Rationalists valued science and reason, whereas romantics valued nature and the imagination.
Famous Romantics:
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
American Romantic Poet
“The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls”
“A Psalm of Life”
William Wordsworth/
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
British Romantic poets and literary critics
They published Lyrical Ballads in 1798
Literature as organic and not just a mirror to nature
The Gothic
Sorry, buddy, Alice Cooper, Bauhaus, and The Cure were playing the Gothic card long before you wrote your first compare/contrast essay in high school.
The Satanic Strain
Frankenstein and many other Romantic and Victorian novels derive from this tradition, as well as from the Byronic Antihero developed by Lord Byron, which, itself, derives from Satan in Milton’s epic poem Paradise Lost. The Romantics also were influenced by Goethe’s play Faust, the story of a genius scholar who sells his soul to the devil for knowledge.
Edgar Allan Poe
The Raven
American literary critic
Short stories including “The Tell-Tale Heart”
Writer in the Gothic tradition
School dropout
Father of the detective story
Herman Melville
Novelist
Wrote Moby Dick
Used symbolism in his novels
Affiliated with Nathaniel Hawthorne
Noted for his tales of adventure on the sea
James Fenimore Cooper
Romantic novelist
Wrote novels about Europeans and Indians
Noble Savage portrayed in his novels.
The Deerslayer (The Last of the Mohicans)
Romantic Genres
Poetry
“The Fireside Poets” included Longfellow, Whittier, Holmes, and Lowell
Novels (Cooper, Hawthorne, Melville)
Essays (Emerson, Thoreau, Poe)
The Romantic Hero
Intuition
Has intuitiveunderstanding of people--not formally schooled (ok, ok, he did attend USC briefly)
Transcendentalism
Asian,Greek, and Puritan influence
Centered in New England
Intuition: “God in us worships God.”
We are all reflection of the Over-Soul or Divine Soul.
Brook Farm (commune)
Romanticism, the term
roman =
the antecedent of the novel, a folk genre or form outside the rules and forms of Classicism (drama, oratory, poetry, history)
Romanticism =
Anti-Classical
Classical emphasis (Age of Reason) was on Greek and Roman style and subject while romanticism focuses on Medievalism, nature, and the exotic.
Artist King/ Artist as Hero
Based on a mystical conception of art and the artist.
Art gave entry into a spiritual world.
Thus, artists (not scientists) were to be elevated, even worshiped.
Romantic Music
Romantic (not Classical) Composers:
Beethoven, Chopin, Strauss, Wagner,
Mendelssohn, Grieg
Please respond in writing:
Benjamin Franklin would have found more creative stimulation in the countryside than America’s Romantic writers did.
Agree? Disagree? Strongly disagree?