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.