Romantic Literature
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- Romanticism's context
- Is a reaction against rationalism and the growing industrialization and urbanization of society
- Walt Whitman
- Bold strokes, broad canvas; Bold strokes, broad canvas; "Leaves of Grass", "I Hear America Singing", "Song of Myself"
- Edgar Allan Poe
- Critic, poet, horror and detective stories
- Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
- New England of the past-sin, guilt, and other profound moral issues (concerned about good/evil through his puritan past)
- Typical hero of American Romantic fiction
- Youth or child-like qualities, innocence, love of nature, distrust of town life, uneasiness with women (civilization/impulse to domesticate), need to engage in quest for some higher truth in natural world
- Aspects of American Romanticism—attitudes and tendencies
- Distrust of civilization, nostalgia for the past, concern with individual freedom, interest in the supernatural, profound love for the beauties of natural landscape
- Herman Melville (1819-1891)
- Writes about the sea, considers evil in the world, his issues go unresolved to a large extent, famous for writing Moby Dick
- Significant (but not exhaustive) list of writers
- William Wordsworth-poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge-poet, Charles Lamb (Elia)-essayist, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats-all 3=romantic poets, Mary W. Shelley (author of Frankenstein), Jane Austen (writes about family life), Sir Walter Scott (adventure stories)
- Washington Irving
- Involved in interest of the past; Rip Van Winkle, The Headless Horseman, Old Dutch New York
- Where Romanticism starts
- Starts in Germany
- Byron
- "She walks in Beauty" - idealization of women
- Oliver Wendell Holmes
- 1809-1894; New England poets whose writing is decidedly American in topics, settings, and language
- What Romanticism explored
- Exotic settings in the past or in a world far removed from the sooty, noisy industrial age
- William Cullen Bryant
- Poet ; "Thanatopsis" - still somewhat british
- Declaring who we are
- We begin by stating who we are not
- What Romantic writers value
- Originality and emotional sincerity
- What Romanticism contemplated
- The natural world until dull reality falls away to reveal underlying beauty and truth (becomes an escape)
- Source of the movement
- Traced back to Rousseau
- Emily Dickinson
- Precise, meticulous choice of words, "I died for beauty—but was Scarce"
- Role of the countryside
- Associated with independence, straightforward moral certainty and health
- Strengths and weaknesses
- Strong=poetry and the novel; weak=drama
- James Russell Lowell
- 1819-1891; poet
- Role of the city
- Often a place of moral ambiguity, corruption, and death
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Acknowledge spokesperson for group of New England philosophers and reformers, very influential within group, essayist first
- American Romanticism
- Appeal to emotion rather than reason, interest in nature (rural/good city/bad), interest in the picturesque and unusual, a spirit of nationalism
- 2 common literary types
- Gothic novels & lyric poems (all about emotion)
- Shelley
- "Ozymandias" - "I met a traveler who said..."; catches us up with interest in the past
- James Fenimore Cooper
- Natty Bumppo, The Leatherstocking Tales
- Henry David Thoreau
- 1817-1862
- Keats
- "When I have Fears" - "Before my pen..."; melancholy
- Role of poetry
- Highest work of the imagination
- Relationship between literary society and rest of society
- There was separation between the romantic writers and the rest of society, society was contemptuous of them and they were contemptuous of society
- What marks beginning of Romantic period in England
- Publication of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads
- What route it follows
- Moves to England, then to Russia & elsewhere, later to France, still later to the Americas
- Transcendentalism
- Man, God, and the universe; View that basic truths of the universe lie beyond the knowledge we gain from our sense; you and God have a personal relationship; they are not scientists, nor religious...(Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, etc.) - intellectual movement of the time
- 4 features of English Romanticism
- Champions of freedom, interested in the past, idealizing of women, melancholy
- Where literature and other art forms do (or don't) occur
- In a vacuum, everything that occurs within a context
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
- 1807-1882; poet