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 The Focus of
Study :
 Romanticism
 The Rise of
American
Romanticism
 Early Romantics
 Its Distinct
Features
 Major Literary
Achievements
 Transcendentalism
 High Romantics
Early Romantics: the Rise of a
National Literature
 1. What’s your
comprehension of the
term “Romanticism”?
 2. What are the
characteristics of
“Romanticism”?
 3. The background of
the rise of American
“Romanticism” and
its features ？
 Romanticism
 This literary trend
occurred and developed
in Europe and America
at the turn of the 18th
and 19th centuries.
 Romantics stressed
individual creative
function of imagination.
It placed individual at
the very center of all
life and all experience
and at the center of art.
 The Characteristics of
Romanticism
 1. Romanticism was a rebellion against the objectivity
of rationalism.
 2. For romantics, the feelings, intuitions and emotions
were more important than reason and common sense.
 3. Romantics did not think of the world as a ticking
watch made by God. They stressed the close
relationship between man and nature.
 4. They emphasized individualism, placing the
individual against the group, against authority. They
saw the individual at the very center of life and art.
They emphasized personal freedom and freedom from
formalism, tradition, and conformity.
 5. They affirmed the inner
life of the self, and wanted
each person to be free to
develop and express his own
inner thoughts.
 6. They cherished strong
interest in the past, especially
the medieval.
 7. They were attracted by the
wild, the irregular, the
indefinite, the remote, the
mysterious, and the strange.
 8. They were interested in
variety. They aspired the
sublime and the wonderful,
and tried to find the absolute,
the ideal by transcending the
actual.
 The Rise of American
 Romanticism
Background:
 American romanticism
stretched from the end of the
18th century to the Civil
War.
 The buoyant mood of the
nation called for a new
literary expression, and
romanticism answered the
call.
 European influences, of
course, also played an
important role in forming
and promoting the romantic
movement in America.
 The ever-increasing numbers
of magazines provided the
playground for romantics.
 Distinct features
 American romantics tended
to moralize, to edify rather
than to entertain.
 American romanticism
presented an entirely new
experience alien to European
culture.
 The exotic landscape, the
frontier life, the westward
expansion, the myth of a
New Garden of Eden in
America, and the Puritan
heritage, etc.
 Major Literary
Achievements of
Early Romantics
 New England poets
William Cullen
Bryant(1794-1878) --
America' s earliest naturalist
poets called "the American
Wordsworth." American
people appreciate him because
he made American subjects
worthy of celebration.
 Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow (1807-1882)
“Fireside poet”
 Major Novelists
 James Fenimore Cooper(1789- 1851)
 His literary career--an answer to the challenge of his
wife. In his fiction he dealt with the themes of
wilderness versus civilization, freedom versus law,
order versus change, aristocrat versus democrat, and
natural rights versus legal rights.
 The Leatherstocking Tales are five novels set in the
early frontier period of American history about the
American wilderness: The Pioneers (1823), The Last of
the Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827) The Pathfinder
(1840) and The Deerslayer (1841). They illustrate the
importance of the frontier and the wilderness for the
first time in the history of American literature.
 The central figure Natty Bumppo is a symbol of the
American desire for unity with nature. He seems to be
related to the deepest meaning of the American
national experience of adventure into the wilderness of
the American West.
 Washington Irving (1783- 1859)-- "the father of
American literature," as the first internationally
recognized American writer and he made great
contributuion to the form of short story in American
literature. He was extremely popular in Europe.
 He is indifferent to the immediate reality and wrote
for pleasure and to produce pleasure as he regards
literature as a self-contained amusement. He gave an
impetus both to the American humor and to the
urbane wit.
 In his Sketch Book appeared the first modern
American short stories and the first great American
juvenile literature.
 His style reflected the shift in American literature
from the rationalism of the 18th century to the
sentimentalism 19th century. His essays are models of
perfect English.
 Transcendentalism
Practitioners:
 Ralph Waldo Emerson
 Henry David Thoreau
 Walt Whitman
 Emily Dickinson
 High Romantics
 American romanticism reached its peak with the
appearance of the major authors of the 19th century
such as Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman and Emily
Dickinson in poetry, and Nathaniel Hawthorne and
Herman Melville in fiction.
 They took their departure from the earlier complacent
romantic impulse and created new literary
personalities.
 Except Whitman, other writers presented dark and
brooding pictures of the country.
 Their literary fame has been on the rise since the 20th
century and their works have been regarded as classics
of American literature.
 They laid the foundation for a native American literary
tradition of conscious art .
 Study Questions
 What is the background of Romanticism?
 What are the main features of
Romanticism?
 What is the thread of the Leatherstocking
Tales ?
 What is Washington Irving’s contribution
to American literature?
 How do you understand high Modernism?
 Reference
 George McMichael et al., ed. Anthology of
American Literature. New York: Macmillan
Publishing Co., Inc., 1980.
 James D. Hart, The Oxford Companion to
American literature 4th ed. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1978.
 Perkins, et al. ed., The American Tradition in
Literature. New York: Random House, 1985.
Thank You Very Much for
Attending This Lecture