I. American Romanticism
1. Background
对领导评价(1) Political and economic influence at home
铜火锅的做法(2) Foreign influence--Romantic movement in European countries
2. Three periods of American Romanticism
Period 1 Early Romantic Period
--Washington Irving & James Fenimore Cooper
Period 2 Summit of Romanticism – American Transcendentalism
--Ralph Waldo Emerson & Henry David Thoreau
Period 3 Late Romanticism
--Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville & Edgar Allen Poe
3. Distinctive Features of American Romanticism
(1) expression of “a real new experience”
-- “the spirit of the place” was radically new and alien.
保护环境画(2) American Puritanism as a cultural heritage
-- American romantic authors tended more to moralize than entertain.
(3) The “newness” of Americans as a nation
-- the American ideals of individualism and political equality; the dream of America to be a new Garden of Eden were distinctly American.
(4) Being both imitative and independent
4.Washington Irving--American Goldsmith
范守善(The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1820)
The Sketch Book marked the beginning of short story as a genre in American literature and the beginning of Romanticism.
⏹ Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow 糯米饭的做法were the most popular stories in The Sketch Book with American landscape.
5. James Fenimore Cooper（1789-1851）
Major works
Cooper’s fame in American literature lies in the fact that he created a myth about the adventurous frontier life of the early American ttlers in his Leatherstocking Tales, a ries of five novels — his masterpiece, the first true romance of the frontier in American literature)
It is a vivid depiction of the antithesis between nature and civilization, between freedom and law
The Pioneers,1823 拓荒者
The Last of the Mohicans,1826 最后的摩希干人
The Prairie, 1827 草原
The Pathfinder, 1840 探路者
The Deerslayer, 1841 杀鹿者
⏹ the basic conflict of the story is esntially one between Leatherstocking who insists on man’s old forest freedom and Judge Temple, standing at the head of the squirearchy on the frontier, to whom man remains savage without law and order and so should be governed by rules.
⏹ It was a romantic story about the life in upstate/frontier New York ten years after the Revolution.
⏹ The central figure in Leatherstocking Tales马寅初简介 is Natty Bumppo
⏹ He has various names in different parts of Leatherstocking Tales, such as Leatherst
ocking, Deerslayer, Pathfinder and Hawkeye.
⏹ He is a mythic and symbolic character typical of the early pioneers in their expansion to the west. He was more than a hunter living in the jungle, conforming to its natural rules with sacred respect to nature, he was like an angel guarding the virgin forest.
Features related to Cooper
(1) a mythic writer good at inventing tales—Natty Bumppo, as the mythic figure, had become a type, a reprentation of America struggling to be new, sloughing from old age to rebirth and growth into its independent youth.
(2)“The American Scott” good at landscape description—Sir Walter Scott
6. Summit of Romanticism—New England Transcendentalism
6.1. What is Transcendentalism?
“What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us is idealism; idealism as appeared in 1842.”—Emerson
emphasis on the spirit or the Oversoul (against the neglect of spiritual growth as a result of craze for material wellbeing – materialism)
importance of individualism (emphasis on lf-reliance, lf perfection,1)against Calvinist idea of God being the only savior; 2) against the dehumanization of individualism due to industrialization )
nature as symbolic of the Spirit or God (basis of American symbolism)
绿豆海带
the Transcendentalist Club
--against the materialistic-oriented life of their time
--an informal club
--Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott and Fuller
The Dial -- to express their Transcendentalist views
6.2. Source Ideas:
Influence from German and French idealist philosophers such as Kant, Shelling, Fichte , Cousin and Collard.
Oriental mysticism as embodied in Hindu works
Doctrine and philosophy of Chine Confucius and Mencius.
Dual heritage of American Puritanism
1) Edwardian notion of man’s inward communication of the soul with God and divine symbolism of nature and lf-improvement as best exemplified by the success story of Franklin—America’s first lf-made man.
6.3. Significance of American Transcendentalism
1. It rves as ethical and cultural guide for the nation冒失
