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

Feeling

Imagination

The creative faculty.

Not escapism, but

moral action.

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 first gothic novel.

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

Individualism

Sense of honor not based on society’s rules.

The Romantic Hero

Innocenceof Youth

The Romantic Hero

Inspirationfrom nature

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)

Famous

Transcendentalists

Emerson

Thoreau

Anti-Transcendenatlists: Hawthorne,

Poe, Melville

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)

Folklore

Medievalism, Eastern thought, Celtic/Germanic lore

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.

Nationalism

The French Revolution

Down with the King!

Heroism

Nietzsche's Overman or Übermensch

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?

Respond in writing:

Emerson would agree with Jonathan Edwards’ sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.”

Yes, no, maybe so?