Transcript Part III The Literature of Romanticism

Part III The Literature of
Romanticism
Historical Introduction
Romanticism
Transcendentalism
Historical Introduction
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I. History of the Age
II. Literary Characteristics
1. Romanticism
2. Transcendentalism
I. History of the Age
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1. Growth of population
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7 million in 1800 → 31 million at the beginning of the Civil
War
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2. Westward expansion and rise of the West
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American pioneers had pushed the frontier line of
settlement beyond the Mississippi to the Great Plaines,
and the nation’s center of population had shifted
westward from the eastern seaboard, across the
Appalachians, Ohio.
The West had risen as a sectional power to challenge the
political dominance of the East and the South. In 1828 the
election of the frontier hero Andrew Jackson had brought
en effect end to the “Virginia Dynasty” of American
presidents.
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I. History of the Age
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3. Development of democracy
By the 1840s the age of the Common Man had
arrived. Voting restrictions were ceased. The
Jeffersonian concept of a natural aristocracy had
been replaced by the egalitarian belief that all white
men were literally equal, and most were capable of
political leadership.
I. History of the Age
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4. Industrialization and urbanization
Before 1860 the United States had begun to change
into an industrial and urban society. With the
industrial revolution came the invention of various
machines and application of technology. The
numbers of “millionaires” multiplied, as did the
number of paupers. In the first half of the 19th
century the proportion of Americans who labored on
farms declined as increasing numbers left the land to
work in urban businesses and factories. New York
became America’s largest city, supplanting Boston
and Philadelphia as the economic and cultural
capital of the nation.
I. History of the Age
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5. Social reforms
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-- Through the first half of the century the pursuit of simplicity,
utility, and perfection remained an American characteristic.
-- Utopian communal societies flourished;
-- Transcendentalists and various sections of Christianity all
offered converts (皈依者) a new path to God. Churches
embarked on temperance ( 戒酒, 禁酒).
-- The Society for the Prevention of Pauperism and the
American Anti-Slavery Society were established respectively
in 1817 and 1883.
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I. History of the Age
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-- Cruel punishment for criminals and imprisonment
for debt were abolished.
-- The feminist movement blazed forth with a host of
notable women battling for their rights and for social
reform. In 1837 the first college-level institution for
women, Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, opened in
Massachusetts.
I. History of the Age
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6. Development of education and culture
-- Compulsory education
By the 1850s the level of education and literacy had risen
significantly. State legislatures had started to enact compulsory
school attendance laws.
-- Magazines
More Americans started to read books, magazines and
newspapers. By mid-century magazines were paying
contributors for their works, a swarm of professional
“magazinists” appeared, “quill drivers” and “inkslingers (耍笔杆
子的, 职业作家)”, male and female, who strove to earn a living
with a pen.
I. History of the Age
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-- Literature
In the years preceding the Civil War relatively few volumes of
imaginative literature were published in the United States.
Fiction was a prime component of ladies’ magazines. Novels
were increasingly popular, especially historical romances
written by Europeans, most notably by “the monarch and
master of modern fiction,” Sir Walter Scott. But as the century
progressed, native American writers won increasing national
and international fame.
Washington Irving, James Fennimore Cooper, William Cullen
Bryant, Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Emerson,
Whitman…
II. Literary Characteristics
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1. Romanticism
The attitudes of America’s writers were shaped
by their New World environment and an array of
ideas inherited from the romantic traditions of
Europe. A new romanticism had appeared in
England in the last years of the 18th century. It
spread to continental Europe and then came to
America early in the 19th century.
II. Literary Characteristics
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Romanticism was a rebellion against the
objectivity of rationalism. For romantics, the
feelings, intuitions and emotions were more
important than reason and common sense. They
stressed the close relationship between man and
nature, emphasized individualism and affirmed
the inner life of the self. They cherished strong
interest in the past, especially the medieval and
were attracted by the wild, the irregular, the
indefinite, the remote, the mysterious, and the
strange.
II. Literary Characteristics
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Romantics frequently shared certain
general characteristics: moral enthusiasm,
faith in the value of individualism and
intuitive perception, and a presumption
that the natural world was a source of
goodness and man’s societies a source of
corruption.
II. Literary Characteristics
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American writers shared some common features
with the English Romanticists. In most of the
American writings in the period there was a new
emphasis upon the imaginative and emotional
qua1ities of literature. They also placed an
increasing emphasis on the free expression of
emotions and displayed an increasing attention to
the psychic states of their character. The strong
tendency to exalt the individual and the common
man was almost a national religion in America.
II. Literary Characteristics
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Although foreign influences were strong, American
romanticism exhibited from the very outset distinct
features of its own. They revealed unique
characteristics of their own in their works and they
grow on the native lands. They celebrated America's
landscape with its virgin forests, meadows, endless
prairies, streams, and vast oceans. The American
Puritanism as a cultural heritage exerted great
influences over American moral values.
II. Literary Characteristics
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Different from their European counterparts, American
romantics tended more to moralize rather than to
entertain. Early American romanticism was best
represented by William Cullen Bryant and Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow in poetry and James
Fennimore Cooper and Washington Irving in fiction.
Romantic values were prominent in American politics,
art, and philosophy until the Civil War. (See Textbook
P.55)
II. Literary Characteristics
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2. Transcendentalism (超验主义)
Definition
Transcendentalism was intimately connected with
Concord, a small New England village 32 kilometers
west of Boston. Concord was the first inland
settlement of the original Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Surrounded by forest, it was and remains a peaceful
town close enough to Boston's lectures, bookstores,
and colleges to be intensely cultivated, but far
enough away to be serene. Concord was the site of
the first battle of the American Revolution.
II. Literary Characteristics
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The phase of New England Transcendentalism is
the summit of American Romanticism. It was, in
essence, romanticism on Puritan soil. It was
started by a group of people who were members
of an informal club, i.e. the Transcendental Club
headed by Ralph Waldo Emerson in New England
in the 1830s.They expressed their views,
published the journal, The Dial (日晷), which
Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller edited
at different times.
II. Literary Characteristics
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Transcendentalism is difficult to define.
It is a philosophical view, a notion, a concept, an
idea, a way of looking at things, a set of attitudes
about man, God, and the universe, a way of how to
get to the basic truth of the universe.
The representative writers of Transcendentalism
are Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David
Thoreau.
II. Literary Characteristics
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Transcendentalism has been defined
philosophically as "the recognition in man of the
capacity of knowing truth intuitively, or of
attaining knowledge transcending the reach of
the senses".
Other concepts that accompanied
Transcendentalism include the idea that nature is
ennobling and the idea that the individual is divine
and, therefore, self-reliant.
II. Literary Characteristics
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Transcendentalism is the view that the basic
truth of the universe is beyond the knowledge
one obtains from the senses, a knowledge that a
transcendentalist regards as the mere appearance of
things. In other words, basic truths lie beyond what
your eyes and ears tell you, because you can only
see and hear the appearance of things, not the truth.
Physical truth is deceptive. What you can see is not
always true.
II. Literary Characteristics
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Basic truth can be reached only through instinct and
intuition and are a matter of private experience. To arrive at
the truth, man must go beyond or transcend what his eyes
and ears tell him or what he can learn from books. He must
listen to his inner soul. He must trust in the divinity that is
in all men.
A transcendentalist is one who believes in and seeks for a
higher, deeper truth than that which is revealed through
the senses or by logical analysis.
The belief in the higher truth is the characteristic of all Romantic
writers of America.
II. Literary Characteristics
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Oversoul (超灵) by Transcendentalism
By oversoul, Emerson means God and he
believes God is everywhere. He called oversoul
the spiritual reality. He believed man’s individual
mind is part of the spiritual reality—divinity is in
all people. According to him an individual soul is
part of the universal oversoul. So when he teaches
people to trust themselves, he means to trust the
divinity in them. The relationship between God and
man is a private one. The only way to God is
through trusting the divinity that is in all people.
II. Literary Characteristics
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He said to Harvard Divinity students: “You should
throw out all authority. You should follow the divinity
of your own mind and soul. You are you own God.
You are each divine in your own minds and soul. You
should follow what you feel is correct.”
He did not believe in formal religion, but this doesn’t
mean he didn’t believe in God. He thought religion
should be an emotional communication between an
individual soul and the universal soul of which it was
a part. That is why he teaches people to believe in
themselves.
II. Literary Characteristics
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He also believed nature is part of the one spiritual
reality. That is to say, the individual and the external
world of nature surrounding him are both parts of a
single spiritual whole—the oversoul. So man can find
the way to God through nature. Man and his world
formed a perfect harmony. Nature was the great
source of inspiration.
II. Literary Characteristics
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Origin and Influence
Transcendentalists took their ideas from the
romantic literature of Europe, from neoPlatonism (新柏拉图主义), from German
idealistic (唯心论的, 唯心主义的) philosophy,
and from the revelations of Oriental
mysticism. They spoke for cultural
rejuvenation and against the materialism of
American society.
Cf. Neo-Platonism
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Neo-Platonism
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A philosophical system developed at Alexandria in the third
century a.d. by Plotinus and his successors. It is based on
Platonism with elements of mysticism and some Judaic and
Christian concepts and posits a single source from which all
existence emanates and with which an individual soul can be
mystically united.
新柏拉图主义由柏罗丁和他的后徒于公元3世纪亚历山大时期发
展起来的一种哲学体系。它以柏拉图学说为基础，带有神秘主义
色彩和一些犹太和基督概念，假定只有一个本源，万物来源于此，
单独的灵魂能由此神秘地与之统一
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Cf. transcendentalism 先验论
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A philosophy associated with Kant, holding
that one must transcend empiricism or what
is experienced in order to ascertain the a
priori principles of all knowledge.
先验论:与康德有关的一种哲学，认为人必须
超越经验主义或体验到的东西以探知所有知识
的先验原则
II. Literary Characteristics
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Transcendentalism was a powerful
expression of the intellectual mood of the
age, and the ideas it represented have
remained a strong influence on great
American writers from the days of Nathaniel
Hawthorne and Walt Whitman to the present.
Supplementary reading
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Reuben, Paul P. "Chapter 4: American
Transcendentalism: A Brief Introduction." PAL:
Perspectives in American Literature- A
Research and Reference Guide.
http://web.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/ch
ap4/4intro.html
III. The growth of cultural nationalism
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1. Art
The growth of cultural nationalism aroused American
artists to write patriotic songs, to paint vast
panorama of American scenes, and to design
monumental buildings that would register the
grandeur of the American people and their land.
---music: most American music remained derivative;
Francis Scott Key’s “Star –Spangled Banner”
---painting: the Hudson River School
---architecture: Gothic buildings
III. The growth of cultural nationalism
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2. Literature
1) Literature ceased to be primarily didactic, a
servant of politics and religion.
Novels, short stories, and poems replaced sermons
and manifestoes as America’s principal literary forms.
The playhouse was no loner considered to be wholly
a source of wickedness, but native playwrights
remained few and their works second-rate. American
drama was still underdeveloped.
III. The growth of cultural nationalism
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2) Imaginative literature became intense, personal,
and symbolic as more writers came to perceive
themselves as prophets and seers. Moved by a call
for a national literature, writers celebrated America’s
meadows, groves, and streams, its endless prairies,
dense forests, and vast oceans. The wilderness
came to function almost as a dramatic character that
illustrated moral law.
III. The growth of cultural nationalism
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3) The desire for an escape from society, and a
return to nature became a permanent convention of
American literature. e.g.
Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales; Thoreau’s Walden;
Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn; Ernest Hemingway’s
and William Faulkner’s works.
III. The growth of cultural nationalism
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4) Romantic writers displayed increasing attention to
the psychic states of their characters. Heroes and
heroines exhibited extremes of sensitivity and
excitement. The novel of terror or the Gothic novel
became the profitable literary staple that it remains
today.
III. The growth of cultural nationalism
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5) Nationalism stimulated a greater literary interest in
America’s language and its common people.
Noah Webster: An American Dictionary of the
English Language (1828)
American character types speaking local dialects
appeared in poetry and fiction with increasing
frequency. Literature began to celebrate American
farmers, the poor, the unlettered, children, and noble
savages (red and white) untainted by society.
6) New England literary renaissance (“flowering of
New England”) (See Textbook p.59)
Summary
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America, from the early 1800s to the Civil War, was a
land of paradoxes, a land stirred by spiritual dreams
and shaped by the realities of a growing materialism.
The age had rejected the ruined promise and stale
wisdom it saw in 18th century rationalism. Americans
had sought new liberties and new ideas in life and
art, but the excesses and conflicts of their society
had culminated in (以...而终结, 以...而达到顶峰)
a bloody Civil War.