Transcript American Literature Lecture Three 030533/4/5, 26 Sep. 2006

American Literature
Lecture Three
030533/4/5, 26th Sep. 2006
The American Romanticism
(I)
I. What is Romanticism
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

Simply speaking, Romanticism is a literary movement flourished
as a cultural force throughout the 19th C and it can be divided into
the early period and the late period. Also it remains powerful in
contemporary literature and art.
Romanticism, a term that is associated with imagination and
boundlessness, as contrasted with classicism, which is commonly
associated with reason and restriction. A romantic attitude may be
detected in literature of any period, but as an historical movement
it arose in the 18th and 19th centuries, in reaction to more rational
literary, philosophic, artistic, religious, and economic standards....
The most clearly defined romantic literary movement in the U. S.
was Transcendentalism.
The representatives of the early period includes Washington
Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, and those of the late period
contain Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt
Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan
Poe.
II. The reasons on the rise of American Romanticism
 Internal causes:
1) American burgeoned into a political, economic and
cultural independence. Democracy and political equality
became the ideals of the new nation. Radical changes
came about in the political life of the country. Parties
began to squabble and scramble for power, and new
system was in the making.
2) The spread of industrialism, the sudden influx of
immigration, and the pioneers pushing the frontier
further west, all these produced something of an
economic boon and, with it, a tremendous sense of
optimism and hope among the people.
3) Ever-increasing magazines played an important
role in facilitating literary expansion in the
country.
 External causes:
1) Foreign influences added incentive to the
growth of romanticism in America.
2) The influence of Sir Walter Scott was
particularly powerful and enduring.
III. Characteristics of American Romanticism (b)
1) Sentimentalism, primitivism and the cult of the noble
savage
2) Political liberalism
3) The celebration of natural beauty and the simple life
4) Introspection
5) The idealization of the common man, uncorrupted by
civilization
6) Interest in the picturesque past and remote places
7) Antiquarianism
8) Individualism
9) Morbid melancholy
10) Historical romance
IV. The Representatives
of the early
American romanticism
A. Washington Irving
(1783-1859 )
1. About the Author
1)
2)
3)
4)
Washington Irving was born in New York City on April 3, 1783
as the youngest of 11 children. His parents, Scottish-English
immigrants, were great admirers of General George Washington,
and named their son after their hero.
Early in his life Irving developed a passion for books. He studied
law privately but practiced only briefly. From 1804 to 1806 he
travelled widely in Europe. After returning to the United States,
Irving was admitted to the New York bar in 1806.
He was a partner with his brothers in the family hardware
business and representative of the business in England until it
collapsed in 1818. During the war of 1812 Irving was a military
aide to New York Governor Tompkins in the U.S. Army.
Irving's career as a writer started in journals and newspapers. His
success in social life and literature was shadowed by a personal
tragedy because his engaged love died at the age of seventeen. So
he never married or had children.
5) After the death of his mother, Irving decided to stay in
Europe, where he remained for seventeen years from
1815 to 1832.
6) In 1832 Irving returned to New York to an enthusiastic
welcome as the first American author to have achieved
international fame. Between the years 1842-45 Irving
was the U.S. Ambassador to Spain.
7) Irving spent the last years of his life in Tarrytown. From
1848 to 1859 he was President of Astor Library, later
New York Public Library. Irving's later publications
include Mahomet And His Successors (1850), Wolfert's
Roost (1855), and his five-volume The Life of George
Washington(1855-59). Irving died in Tarrytown on
November 28, 1859.
2. His Major Works
1) His earliest work was a sparkling, satirical History of
New York (1809) under the Dutch, ostensibly written by
Diedrich Knickbocker (hence the name of Irving’s
friends and New York writers of the day, the
“Knickbocker School”.)
2) The Sketch Book (1819-20 as Geoffrey Crayon) contains 'Rip Van Winkle' and 'The Legend of Sleepy
Hollow'
3) The Life of George Washington (1855-59, five
volumes)
3. Evaluation to him
1)
2)
3)
American author, short story writer, essayist, poet, travel book
writer, biographer, and columnist. Irving has been called the
father of the American short story. He is best known for 'The
Legend of Sleepy Hollow,' in which the schoolmaster Ichabold
Crane meets with a headless horseman, and 'Rip Van Winkle,'
about a man who falls asleep for 20 years.
The first American writer of imaginative literature to gain
international fame, so he was regarded as father of American
literature.
The short story as a genre in American literature probably began
with Irving’s The Sketch Book, A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS,
SKETCHES, AND TALES. It also marked the beginning of
American Romanticism.
B. James Fenimore Cooper
(1789-1851)
1. His Major Works
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1)
In his life Cooper wrote over thirty novels which can be divided
into frontier novels, detective novels and reference novels. He
considered The Pathfinder (1840) and The Deerslayer (1841)
his best works.
The unifying thread of the five novels collectively known as the
Leather-Stocking Tales is the life of Natty Bumppo. Cooper’s
finest achievement, they constitute4 a vast prose epic with the
North American continent as setting. Indian tribes as Characters,
and great wars and westward migration as social background.
The novels bring to life frontier America from 1740 to 1804.
The Pioneers(1823): Natty Bumppo first appears as a seasoned
scout in advancing years, with the dying Chingachgook, the old
Indian chief and his faithful comrade, as the eastern forest
frontier begins to disappear and Chingachgook dies.
2) The Last of the Mohicans(1826): An adventure of
the French and Indian Wars in the Lake George
county.
3) The Prairie(1827): Set in the new frontier where
the Leatherstocking dies.
4) The Pathfinder(1840): Continuing the same border
warfare in the St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario
county.
5) The Deerslayer(1841): Early adventures with the
hostile Hurons on Lake Otsego, NY.
2. Contributions of Cooper
 The creation of the famous Leatherstocking saga has
cemented his position as our first great national novelist
and his influence pervades American literature. In his
thirty-two years (1820-1851) of authorship, Cooper
produced twenty-nine other long works of fiction and
fifteen books - enough to fill forty-eight volumes in the
new definitive edition of his Works. Among his
achievements:
1) The first successful American historical romance in the
vein of Sir Walter Scott (The Spy, 1821).
2) The first sea novel (The Pilot, 1824).
3) The first attempt at a fully researched historical novel
(Lionel Lincoln, 1825).
4) The first full-scale History of the Navy
of the United States of America
(1839).
5) The first American international novel
of manners (Homeward Bound and
Home as Found, 1838).
6) The first trilogy in American fiction
(Satanstoe, 1845; The Chainbearer,
1845; and The Redskins, 1846).
7) The first and only five-volume epic
romance to carry its mythic hero Natty Bumppo - from youth to old age.
3. His Skills
1) He is good at making plots.
2) All his novels are full of myths.
3) He had never been to the frontier and among the
Indians and yet could write five huge epic books
about them is an eloquent proof of the richness of his
imagination.
4) He created the first Indians to appear in American
fiction and probably the first group of noble savages.
5) He hit upon the native subject of frontier and
wilderness, and helped to introduce the “Western”
tradition into American literature.
V.American Renaissance
1. The Concept
1) It also called New England Renaissance period from
the 1830s roughly until the end of the American Civil
War in which American literature, in the wake of the
Romantic movement, came of age as an expression of a
national spirit.
2) The literary scene of the period was dominated by a
group of New England writers, the “Brahmins”. They
were aristocrats, steeped in foreign culture, active as
professors at Harvard College, and interested in creating
a genteel American literature based on foreign models.
3) One of the most important influences in the period was
that of the Transcendentalists, including Emerson,
Thoreau and so on.
4)
5)
The Transcendentalists contributed to the founding of a new
national culture based on native elements. They advocated
reforms in church, state, and society, contributing to the rise of
free religion and the abolition movement and to the formation of
various utopian communities, such as Brook Farm. The abolition
movement was also bolstered by other New England writers,
including the Quaker poet Whittier and the novelist Harriet
Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) dramatized the
plight of the black slave.
Apart from the Transcendentalists, there emerged during this
period great imaginative writers—Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman
Melville, and Walt Whitman—whose novels and poetry left a
permanent imprint on American literature. Contemporary with
these writers but outside the New England circle was the
Southern genius Edgar Allan Poe, who later in the century had a
strong impact on European literature.