Transcript American Romanticism

AMERICAN ROMANTICISM
Enter Imagination
A PERIOD OF GREAT
CULTURAL CHANGE
 Romanticism focused on emotions and the individual
 Writers in this time period (roughly 1830-1870)
emphasized…
• Intuition
• Imagination
• Human potential for social progress and spiritual
growth
 Romanticism spawned in reaction to Classicism
• Classicism = Belief that reason dominates nature
ROMANTIC
NONROMANTIC/CLASSICAL
Emotional
Reasonable and Practical
Individualistic
Public Responsibility
Revolutionary
Conservative
Loves Solitude & Nature
Loves Public, Urban Life
Fantasy/Introspection
External Reality
The Particular
The Universal
Satisfaction of Desire
Repressed Desire
Organic
Mechanical
Well-known Romanticists

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Walt Whitman

Herman Melville

Washington Irving

Emily Dickinson

James Fenimore Cooper

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Edgar Allan Poe
CHARACTERISTICS OF
ROMANTICISM IN
L I T E R AT U R E
 Nature: Beauty, strangeness, and the mystery of nature
• Washington Irving’s use of the forest as a place of savagery,
mystery and evil in “The Devil and Tom Walker”
 The Past: Rise in nationalism = Interest in American past
• Nathaniel Hawthorne’s depiction of the Puritan age in The Scarlet
Letter
 Inner World of Human Nature: Emotion, intuition, individual, and
exploration of the private inner being
• Edgar Allan Poe’s characterization of Roderick Usher’s mental
illness in “Fall of the House of Usher”
Wa s h i n g t o n I r v i n g
 Considered the first internationally best-selling
American novelist
• Advocated for writing as a profession
• Argued for stronger laws to protect writers from
copyright infringement
 Considered the first American author to place
his stories firmly in the United States
• Promoter of Nationalism
• Outspoken against slavery
 Best known works:
• “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van
Winkle”
(1783-1859)