Download - The Writers and Thinkers
European Romanticism Causes of Change
American Romanticism
Structure of Romanticism Lecture
The Writers and Thinkers
The Romantic Period1812(20) – 1860
What is it?• It’s a world wide
movement*
• Reaction to the Enlightenment
• Appears in different ways in multiple countries.
• Emerged partly from the ideas of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. (1789 –1815)
Rejection of Reason•All powerful movements
create a powerful backlash.
•Return to nature and “emotions” as keys to truth.
•The individual heart/soul/spirit as the force that determines right and wrong.
•The senses over reason and intellect.
European Romanticism•English novels
focused on carefully described, full-bodied, passionate characters who nevertheless continue the social structure.
•A good marriage
•Discovery of an aristocratic past
“I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.”
In America, combined with Transcendentalism
• Transcendentalism was a 19th century movement that believed the individual is the spiritual center of the universe.*• This movement made the individual responsible for
salvation, not the church.
Other Causes• The absence of settled,
traditional community life in America.• History of strife and
revolution• Geography of vast
wilderness• A fluid and relatively
classless democratic society.
The American Novel•America was still an
undefined, moving frontier
• Strange immigrants with foreign customs and languages
• “Alien” and “crude” ways of life.
•American protagonists faced amazing challenges.
American Touches•Americans were still looking to
break away from England.
•Didn’t carefully define realistic characters
•Didn’t follow the traditional social structure: They challenged it.
•Americans shaped heroic figures larger than life, burning with mythic significance.
How Did it Look?
•In the case of novels, this vision expressed itself as something Hawthorne called a “Romance.”
•A heightened, emotional, and symbolic form of the novel.
•Romances were not love stories, but serious novels that used metaphor and allegory to communicate complex and subtle meanings.
America invented new forms•American writers didn’t follow
the “traditional” novel style.
•Melville (a writer on the cusp of two styles) created a sprawling, wandering tale called Moby Dick.
•Poe created the detective story, as well as a dreamy, surreal, macabre style still emulated.
Psychological Nightmare•The Romance was dark,
forbidding. •Nobody was safe, nothing was
certain. • People were all alone.•Most of the Romantic heroes
die in the end•All the sailors except
Ishmael drown in Moby-Dick.• Poe killed nearly everyone
First Americans to be world-recognized
•Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville were the primary fictional authors of the age.
The Transcendentalists
•Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau.