English Test: American Romanticism
Terms
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- What was going during this time?
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1789: French Revolution marks the end of the Age of Reason (The Enlightenment. Westward Expansion.
Technological and social changes made rich get richer and poor go West. Also there was a Revolution in Transportation. (railroads) - What was expressed in writing of this time?
- The conflicting view of modernization of the nineteenth century representing progress or decline.
- What changes occured in Literacy and Literature?
- Newspaper circulation increased. Lyceum movement included buildings (Lyceum halls) where people could hear debates.
- How did religion affect the Romanticism movement?
- The Second Great Awakening occured during the late eighteenth century. Writers used religion to link their writing with the audience.
- How was slavery involved?
- Invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney in 1793 made use of cotton in the South. Slavery was the central issue during teh 19th century. Debate also was realted to states' rights. Abolitionists argued for freedom and equality. Two forms of Black art: Spirituals (blend of African and European cultures and Slave Narratives were white women's narratives of Indian captivity)
- How were Women's rights involved?
- More women attended school and some went to Women's rights conventions, including one at Seneca Falls, New York in 1848. Much more women were able to take up writing and teaching as a career.
- Name three important women?
- Catherine Beecher, Margaret Fuller, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
- What was the result of the pressue felt by Native Americans especially those east of the Miss. river?
- Extremesocial discontinuity, dispossesision, tragedy and violence.
- Removal Act of 1830
- Tribes had to give up their lands east of the Miss. in exchande for land in the West.
- What did President Jackson disagree upon with the S.C.?
- That Indian nations were "distinct political communities" as the Supreme Court ruled in 1832.
- "Trail of Tears"
- 1838-39 the Cherokee were forced to follow this distant Oklahoma territory, and 4,000 approximately died.
- "Resevations"
- Campaign to concentrate Indians.
- What did the Gold Rush of 1849 do?
- Brought devastation to NA from far West. Central conflict on the Plains.
- What was the Battle of the Little Bighorn
- Most famous battle.
- `George Armstrong Cluster
- Lietenant Colonel who, on 1876, was wiped out with his Regiment by a combined force under chiefs Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. (Sioux and Cheyenne)
- Chief Joseph
- A NA who fought in the NW and Geronimao and APaches in the Southwest.
- What happened at Wounded Knee, South Dakota?
- 1890, close to 300 Sioux warriors were slaughtered by US cavalry.
- How did writing play a part?
- Reflected tragedy.Indian Writing in English did not attempt to mask their sympothy for Indian cause.
- What was the contrast between Indian writers?
- Most tried to cut through stereotypical images of savages, nobles, or devlish while others fed into the popularity and the notion of NA as vanishing.
- Who termes the phras MANIFEST DESTINY and when?
- John Louis O'Sullivan in 1845.
- What is Manifest Destiny?
- A belief that the country's territorial expansion was not only inevitable but also divinely ordained
- Lousiana Purchase
- 1803. Helped US stretch.
- What was the controversy that lead up to conflict with Mexico?
- Mexican customs, enjoyed by natives but despised by Anglos lead to annexations, deception and the device of the Mexican War that relieved early half of Mexican territory.
- Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo?
- Ended Mexican War in 1848. Granted citizenship to new Mexican-Americans.
- What did Mexican-American writing include>
- Express displeasure with encroachment and mourning of traditions.
- Corrido
- Ballad or legend set to music to preserve accounts of cultural conflict with Anglos.
- Why was there discrimintion against Chinese-Americans?
- For racial and economic resentment. Many laws were passed against them.
- What was the only labor Chinese could take?
- Largely "women's work"
- When was the Gadsden purchade?
- 1853.
- Who first discovered gold
- James W. Marshall (random)
- What allowed for Chinese workers to gain more fame?
- transcontinental railroad. Most who came to the states were men.
- What increased the number of factories?
- New technology, shift from economic base to industrail based economy, populaton sift from
- How did this affect laborors?
- Artisans replaced by factories.
- What did writers at this time focus on?
- Bring concer for those afflicted by the changes in American society.
- The Jungle.
- By Upton Sinclair (1906) expressed unsanitary and miserable working conditions in the stockyards of Chicago.
- What helped to create in the U.S. one of the world's most heterogeneous societies?
- Many differences among Americans such as immigrants and language differences.
- Hypocrisy of Democracy? AKA?
- The Paradox of Early America. Most idealistic nation in the world (all men created equal) was committing national sins with discrimination.
- What was the conflict in the early 19th century?
- How to create our own culture.
- What did Herman Melville say in response to the growing influences from English and European heritage?
- "It is better to fail in originality than to succeed in imitation."
- The change from agricultur4-industrially based economy also did what?
- Biography and history remained strong and religious writing lost importance.
- Noah Webster
- Led a call for a unique American language and published the first dictionary in 1806.
- Americanisms
- Included American variations in usage on traditional English words.
- Washington Irving?
- One of the first successful writers of American fiction. Wrote History of New York in 1809 which was a satire on exaggeration of local histories.
- What are also among his best known legends?
- "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" both appearing in the Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon Gent (1819-1820)
- What served as the new nation's sense of itsw history?
- Biographies and autobiographies.
- Slave Narrative
- Greatest development in nineteenth century biography
- Frederick Douglass.
- Slave narrative in 1845.
- Sentimental novel
- Major form of American fiction that grew out of a response of white writers to abuse of slavery.
- Uncle Tom's Cabin
- (1851) written by Harriet Beecher Stowe.
- How did President Lincoln describe Stowe?
- "The little woman who wrote the book that made this great war" (Civil war).
- Romanticism
- Late 1700's and early 1800's was a dominant literary mode in Europe and a reaction to the Enlightenment, emphasis on emotion, imagination and subjectivity of appraoch rather than reason (enlightenment)
- Who were romantic writers?
- Nathanial Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe.
- What did historical fiction do?
- Was an expression of romanticisms with its probings of human nature and emotions and romanticizing past.
- James Fenimore Cooper
- First to master the form, one of the few writers who made a living out of writing.
- Cooper wrote?
- Leatherstocking tales, which includes the Last of the Mohicans . Presents NA as "Noble Savages"
- Romantists saw the limits of reason and celebrated instead?
- glories of individual spirit, the emotions, and the imagination (human nature)
- American Renaissance
- Between 1840 and 1855 in New England and especially Boston a group of American writers produced a remarkable body of "classics" in American lit.
- What did these include?
- Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854), and Leaves of Grass (1855) by Walt Whitman.
- Classicalism or Age of Reason was...
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reason dominates nature and human nature
scientific in nature: governed by fixed, unchanging laws
reason over imagination
social over personal
common over individual
upholds tradition; resists change
rational thought & logic: “I think; therefore, I am†- Romanticism was
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greater personal freedom for the individual
emphasis on emotions
intuition: inner perception of truth; not reason
key is imagination
social progress and spiritual growth
humanitarian reform (abolitionists, feminism)
change, growth, development
democracy - Characteristics exemplified in literature...
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sentimentalism (The Sketch Book- Washington Irving)
primitivism and the cult of the “noble savage†(James Fenimore Cooper)
celebration of natural beauty and the simple life (Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau)
introspection (Poe, Thoreau)
idealization of the common man, uncorrupted by civilization (Cooper)
interest in the picturesque past (Irving, Hawthorne)
interest in remote places (Melville)
concern with a world of mystery; morbid melancholy (Poe)
individualism (Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman)
humanitarianism (Uncle Tom’s Cabin) - What was the Gothic Revival in architecture?
- movement based on medieval styles, whose design carried the eye above the actual form and conjured up imaginative associations
- What was the Hudson River school (painting)
- emphasized the charm and grandeur of the American landscapegroup of painters, led by Thomas Cole, who painted awesomely Romantic images of America's wilderness
- Common characteristics to Romantic fiction?
- Nature, past, supernatural, and human nature.
- Indian Removal Act was passed by who and when?
- President Andrew Jackson in 1831.
- How did it pass?
- Through Congress by only one vote.
- What was Jackson convinced the only solution to the Indian "problem" was?
- The complete removal of all natives beyond the Mississippi.
- Who were the Cherokees?
- Richest and most advanced of Indian tribes.
- Who had developed the first Indian alphabet?
- Sequoyah
- How was their relationship with the whites.
- They lived in peace with their white neighbors but the whites wanted to steal their lands.
- How did Cherokees react?
- Resisted in their own way but the Court declared that the Cherokee were a people of a "domestic dependant nation" and the state of Georgia had no right to extend its laws oer them.
- What happened in 1835>
- Cherokees forced to sign a treay to sell all their lands for five million dollars and a peice of land in the west.
- How did the Cherokees react?
- Signed a petition but Jackson ignored it.
- What was the deadline?
- Jackson set for the Cherokkes to be removed. General Scott wanted them to be trated kindly but Jackson wanted them quickly removed.
- What happened finally in 1838?
- Cherokkes put on road to trek to Oklahoma and about 4,000 Cherokees died on the road. It became known as the Trail of Tears.
- St. Elmo's fire
- an omen of heavenly intervention to sialors. Divine intervention mythology surrounds this natural phenomenom.
- Doctor Johann Faustus.
- Communed with the devil. The devil would serve him and the Dr. would renounce his Christianity and surrender himself to the Devil. HE became more knowledgeable but could not revoke the twentyfour year limit to the Devil.
- How did he die?
- The students gathered around his house on the night of a storm and heard a loud scream and when they entered his room at daybreak, there were bloodstainds everywhere and bits of brain, an eye, teeth all over and the corpse was lying on a manure pile.
- What made the short story a separate role in American literature?
- Washington Irving's The Sketch Book of Geoffery Crayon, Gent. Published in 1820.
- What is Irving known as?
- The American godfather of the modern form of the short story.
- What is the short story?
- An uncertain and ambiguous genre. Not am mini-story. Not a simple tale or account of a simple incident. Not merely an anecdote or sktch
- What did William Faulker believe?
- That it was easier to write a novel than a short story because he could be more careless but in a short story every word had to be right.
- What did Poe do to the short story?
- Should be able to be read in one sitting (1/2 hr. -2 hr.s). Reader is at control during that time, free of external influences or interuptions. Writer attempts to create a "single dominant effect". Every word contributes to that "single effect".
- How are short stories reflective of America?
- The fragmentation, chaos, and diversity of Americn life. Eager, hasty, impatient country responds to the minimal requirement of the short story.
- When was Melville born?
- August 1, 1819. In 1842 he jumped ship in the Marquesa Islands in the South Pacific.
- What are romantic traits Melville is known for?
- Interest in primitive cultures. Search for spiritual truth, especially symbols of what may not be known or seen directly. Description of the sublime in nature, qualities in nature that are at the same time deeply beautiful and fearful/dangerous.
- What are unromantic traits Melville is known for/
- Belief in the doctrine of original sin. (dark side). Considered "anti transcendentalists" with Hawthorne.
- Captain Ahab
- His sole quest is to avenge loss of his leg. Commanded by fate and not commander of it. Desire ro master/conquer Moby Dick is a wish for power over nature itself. Search for meaning in life is his search for the whale. Unlike Starbuck, he lives through emotion, intuition and is romantic.
- Starbuck
- Lives through logic and reason and is more classical. Ahab's antagonist.
- What are themes in the novel?
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-good and evil are mingled and indestinguishable
-the duality of nature: it can be both beautiful and destructive
-nature is neither good nor bad; it is simply relative to the human perceiver (romantic characteristic); thus throughout the novel, Moby Dick is seen from many different points of view
-there is great irony in Ahab's death: his instrument of destruction (his harpoon) becomes the agent of his death - What is symbolism in the novel?
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-the crew of the Pequod symbolizes humanity (its search for the whale is our search for meaning in life)
-the shark's pursuit of Ahab's whaleboat suggests the malevolence of nature
-Moby Dick symbolizes the mysteries of the universe that Ahab cannot understand
-harpoons represent man's weakness against the forces of nature
-the ocean represents the unseen regions of human nature
-the color white suggests purity and innocence but it is also the pallor of illness, death, and ghosts (white fog to a sailor in which he can lose direction means mortal danger)
-name of the ship Pequod = the extermination of the Pequots by the white Christians of New England