The New American Culture:Art, Literature,

TranscendentalismGoal 2

American Culture

• A clear American culture begins to emerge in the 1830s.

• Art and literature began to reflect American themes and ideals rather than mirror European style and design.

Hudson River School•The Hudson River

School was a group of artists that focused on portraying the beauty of the American landscape.

•The paintings revealed the truth in human emotion.

Buffalo Bull's Back Fat, head chief, Blood Tribein the National Museum of American Art, Washington D.C.

By George Catlin

Asher DurandKindred Spirits, 1849The New York Public Library, New York City

A Lake in the Sierra Nevada by Albert Bierstadt

Frederic Church Niagara1857Oil on canvasThe Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington

•Transcendentalism was a philosophical group that was reflected in American literature.

•Emphasized:•Simple living

•Celebrating nature

•Optimism

•Freedom

•Self-reliance

Transcendentalism

Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Emerson was a transcendentalist New England writer

• Wrote about simple living, nature, and personal emotion and imagination

Henry David Thoreau

• Lived in solitude at Walden Pond in Massachusetts, writing the book Walden

• Urged the concept of civil disobedience, protesting by refusing to obey the law (essay “Civil Disobedience).

• Gandhi & Martin Luther King adopt this view in their protests in the 20th century)

Other American Writers

James Fenimore Cooper• Wrote about the

American frontier & Native Americans

• The Last of the Mohicans

• Leatherstocking Tales

Edgar Allen Poe• Anti-

transcendentalist

• Helped create the mystery genre.

• “The Raven”• “Tell-Tale

Heart”

Nathaniel Hawthorne

• Anti-transcendentalist

• Books dealt with the problems of human nature, sin, and punishment for sins (Puritan roots)

• The Scarlet Letter

Washington Irving

• “The Father of American Literature”

• Wrote about the American common man

• Legend of Sleepy Hollow

• Rip Van Winkle

James Fenimore Cooper• Wrote about the

American frontier & Native Americans

• The Last of the Mohicans

• Leatherstocking Tales