Chapter 2 Literature of American Romanticism
A Brief Introduction
The American Romantic period is considered one of the most important periods, the first literary Renaissance, in the history of American literature. It stretches from the end of the eighteenth century through the outbreak of the Civil War. It started with the publication of Washington Irving's The Sketch Book空调功能>登单于台 and ended with Whitman's Leaves of Grass源头活水来.
辣木籽怎么食用 American romantic literature is best explained by referring to certain stirring events of American national history. Historically, it was the time of western expansion. The western boundary had reached to the Pacific by 1860; the number of states had incread from the original thirteen at the time of independence to twenty-one by the middle of the 19th century; its total population incread from four million people in 1790 to thirty million in 1860. Economically, the whole nation was experiencing an industrial transformation, which affected American people's lives. The growth of industrialization helped restructure economic life. The sudden influx of immigration gave a big push to the booming industry. Po
litically, democracy and political equality became the ideals of new nation, and the two-party system came into being. Literarily and culturally, the new nation needed to express its own experiences: their early Puritan ttlements, their confrontations with the Indians, their frontiersmen's life, and the wild west. Besides, the ever-increasing numbers of newspapers, magazines, journals and books reviews provided a great market. All the produced a strong n of optimism for American romanticism.
This surging romanticism also had support abroad. In Europe, the Romantic Movement which had flourished earlier in the century both in England and Europe added incentive to the growth of Romanticists in America. The American writers who traveled to Europe and kept in touch with European Romanticism were greatly influenced. Washington Irving was the most important. The greatest benefit for Irving during his travels in Europe was his contact with Sir Walter Scott, one of the most important British writers of his period. Scott introduced Irving to the Tales of German Romances海的故事, upon which Irving wrote some of his best-known short stories. In addition, Scott's border tales and Waverley romances inspired such Americans as James Fenimore Cooper. The Gothic tradition and the cult of
solitude and gloom came through interest in the works of writers like Mr. Radcliffe, E. T. A. Hoffman, James Thomson and the “graveyard” poets. Robert Burns and Byron both inspired and spurred the American imagination for lyrics and passion and despair. The impact of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads added, to some extent, to the nation's singing strength.
American Romanticism was modeled on English and European works but exhibited from the very outt distinct features of its own. For instance, the American national experience of “pioneering” into the west proved to be a rich fount of material for American writers to draw upon. Then, there is American Puritanism as a cultural heritage to consider. American moral values were esntially Puritan, and its influence over American Romanticism was conspicuously noticeable. American romantic authors tended more to moralize than their English and European brothers, and many American romantic writers intended to edify more than they entertained. Another thing merits attention with American Romanticism--the “newness” of America as a nation. The ideals of individualism and political equality, and the dream that America was to be a new Garden
西湖限行
of Eden for man were distinctly American.
妞妞碰As a result of the immer influence of European Romanticism and the American writers' efforts in popularizing it, American Romanticism grew rapidly, bringing into American literature a swelling tide of newness, freedom, and individuality. Basically, Romanticism is often described as “emotion rather than reason, the heart oppod to the head,” as “imagination contrasted with reason and the n of fact,” and as “a n of mystery of the univer and the perception of its beauty.” They most highly value is originality and emotional sincerity.
American Romanticism can be divided into two periods. The first period or the early National Period stretches from 1800 to 1830. During this period some American writers began to attract notice abroad. Although English literature was still influential, and was admired and followed, American writers began to u their own scene, their own culture, and their own history as the material in their writings. In this period, the important writers were Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper and William Cullen Bryant, who are
en as a trio, the first truly successful American writers. Irving's Sketch Book (1819-1820) is the first work by American writer to win financial success on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
The cond period stretches from 1830 to 1865, which has been called by some scholars the “American Renaissance”. Ralph Waldo Emerson's The American Scholar (1837) proved to be a declaration of American literature, in which he announced that: “Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws a clo.” And he told his countrymen that: “We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds” Writers in this period can be divided into three groups: Transcendentalists, “brooding” Romantics and the Brahmins (literally, a member of the very highest caste of Hindu society). Although all of them share the general Romantic ideas, they each have their own special emphasis. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were the spokesmen of transcendentalism. Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville are called “broodings” or disnters. They were filled with a deep awareness of the human capacity for evil. They stresd the pre
nce of evil in the univer and rejected the philosophy of transcendentalism. Henry Wordsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and James Rusll Lowell are the three Brahmins, the members of the genteel school. They were, to some degree, New England aristocrats, socially important men for whom literature was an accomplishment as well as a vocation. It should be pointed out that John Whittier and Emily Dickinson fall outside the classification.
