American Romanticism
Ⅰ. American Romanticism stretches from the end of the 18th century through the outbreak of the civil War. / It started with the publication of Irving’s The Sketch Book in 1819 and ended with the publication of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in 1855.
Ⅱ. Radical Changes of the Age
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1.Its population: in 1810 the population totaled little more than 7,000,000. 51 years later, the number of Americans had reached to more than 31,000,000.
2.Its land: in 1810 there were 17 states, at the beginning of the Civil War (1861-1865), the number of the states had doubled.
3.The fast spread of industrialism and urbanization
4.The sudden increa of population, including the flux of immigrants.
5. The pioneers pushing the frontier further west.
All the produced something of an economic boom and with it, a tremendous n of optimism and hope among the people. A nation bursting into new life cried for literary expression.
Ⅲ.American Literature of the Age
1. As a European literary movement, Romanticism originated and strengthened in Germany, France and England in the middle of the 18th century as a rebellion against the prevailing Neo-classicism and Rationalism during the Age of Reason.
2. Features of Romanticism
1) emphasis on imagination;
2) emphasis on individualism – personal feelings, emotionsand freedom, no hero worship, natural goodness of human beings;
3) colloquial language;
4) back to nature
3.American Romanticism is one of the most important periods in the history of American literature, It is a rebellion against the objectivity of rationalism.
4. Features of American Romanticism
1)As a logical result of its foreign and native factors at work, American Romanticism was both imitative and independent.
imitative 1. works of Sir Walter Scott
2. works of English Romantist poets
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3. works of the graveyard poets
Independent: new and alien
2)There is the American Puritanism as a cultural heritage to consider. The American Romantic authors tended more to morali than to entertain.
Ⅳ. Comments on this period
It was an age of great westward expansion, of the increasing gravity of the slavery question, of an intensification of the spirit of embattled ctionalism in the South, and of a powerful impul to reform in the North.
In literature it was America’s first great creative period, a full flowering of the romantic impul on American soil(The First American Renaisnce). Although foreign influencrs were strong, American romanticism exhibited from the very outt distinct features of its own.
Ⅴ.American Romantists include such literary figures as Irving, Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman, Dickinson, etc. The American writers had made a great literary period by capturing on their pages the enthusiasm and optimism of that dream.
Of the writers who traveled to Europe and kept clo touch with European Romanticism, Washington Irving was the most important.
Washington Irving(1783-1859)
1. veral names attached to Irving
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(1) first American writer
(2) the mesnger nt from the new world to the old world
(3) father of American literature管理培训班
2. His masterpiece
The Sketch Book (He won a measure of international recognition/fame.), which consists of Rip van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
3.His style – beautiful and lucid
酸枣仁的副作用与禁忌
(1) gentility, urbanity, pleasantness
(2) avoiding moralizing – amusing and entertaining世界杯夺冠热门
(3) enveloping stories in an atmosphere
(4) vivid and true characters
(5) humour – smiling while reading
(6) musical language
All the have placed his stories among the best of American short stories.
James Fenimore Cooper
1. works
(1)印度电影起跑线 Precaution (1820, his first novel, imitating Austen’s Pride and Prejudice)
(2) The Spy (1821, his cond novel and great success)
(3) Leatherstocking Tales (his masterpiece)
Leather Stocking Tales, which is considered his masterpiece ,is a ries of five novels,
The Pioneers (I823), The Last of the Mohicans (1826 ), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840) and The Deerslayer (1841).
2. His point of view
the theme of wilderness vs. civilization, freedom vs. law, order vs. change, aristocrat vs. democrat, natural rights vs. legal rights
3. His style
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(1) highly imaginative
(2) good at inventing tales
(3) good at landscape description
(4) conrvative
(5) characterization wooden and lacking in probability
(6) language and u of dialect not authentic
4. literary achievements
He created a myth about the formative period of the American nation. If the history of the United States is, in a n, the process of the American ttlers exploring and pushing the American frontier forever westward, then Cooper’s
