Exploring American Romanticism: A Journey into Individualism and Nature

1. Romanticism

2. The Literature of Romanticism from the end of the 18th century through the outbreak of the civil war

3. Class Focuses: • Characteristics of Romanticism • General Features of the Writings of American Romanticism • Washington Irving

4. General Introduction • The romantic period covers the first half of the 19th century. It started with the publication of Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book and ended with Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. It is a period of the great flowering of American literature and it is also called “American Renaissance”. • general characteristics:moral enthusiasm, faith in value of individualism, and intuitive perception, and a presumption that the natural world was a source of goodness and man’s societies a source of corruption.

5. I. Characteristics of Romanticism • Romanticism is a rebellion against the objectivity of rationalism. Romanticists affirm the inner life of the self, and want each person to be free to develop and express his own inner thoughts. They believe that the feelings, intuitions and emotions are more important than reason and common sense and that one could find truth through one’s feelings.

6. 2. Romanticists think that the world is not a ticking watch made by God but a living, breathing being. They view natureas a source of vivid physical beauty and as a manifestation of spirit in the universe. They stress the close relationship between man and nature.

7. 3. They emphasize individualism, placing the individual against the group, against authority. They see the individual at the very center of life and art. They emphasize personal freedom and freedom from formalism(形式主义), tradition, and conformity.

8. 4. They cherish strong interest in the past, (esp. the medieval), the wild, irregular, the indefinite, the remote, the mysterious, and the strange. They look at Indians as innocent and close to nature and therefore close in touch with God.

9. American Romanticism • Time: from the end of the 18th century to the outbreak of the Civil War • (2)Reasons (Why Romanticism emerged?) • A. Fast development of the new nation (flood of immigrants; pioneers pushing the frontier further west; industrialization; economic boom; a promising new land with prevailed optimistic moods) • B. Development of journalism (Some influential periodicals appeared, such as The Atlantic Monthly. They need more literary productions.) • C. Foreign influences

10. American Romanticism • General features of Romanticism • A. Stressing emotion rather than reason • B. Stressing freedom and individuality • C. Idealism rather than materialism • D. Writing about nature, medieval legends and with supernatural elements

11. III. General Features of the Writings of American Romanticism: • As a logic result of the foreign and native factors at work, American Romanticism was both imitative and independent.

12. imitative / foreign influences • Foreign influences add incentive to the growth of Romanticism in America. Many English and European masters of poetry and prose all make a stimulating impact on the different departments of the country’s literature, e.g. • Sir Walter Scott • The Gothic tradition • graveyard • Robert Burns and Byron

13. Independent / distinct features • American Romanticism exhibit from the very beginning distinct features of its own. • 1. It originated from an amalgam of factors that were altogether American rather than anything else.

14. 2. Puritan influence over American Romanticism is conspicuously noticeable. • (American moral values are essentially Puritan. Public opinions are overwhelmingly Puritan; the Puritan atmosphere of the nation predominantly conditioned social life and cultural taste.) • American Romantic authors tend more to moralize than their English and European brothers. American romantic writers intended to edify(教育、启迪) more than they entertained.

15. The “newness” of Americans as a nation Their ideals of individualism and political equality, and their dream that America is to be a new Garden of Eden for man are distinctly American. ( And their existence in any form in the minds of the people do probably produce a feeling of “newness”, a feeling strong enough to inspire the romantic imagination and channel it into a different vein of writing. Hence romanticists undertook to represent their people with the sense of mission in the new world.)

16. Features in theme and technique • In theme, American romanticists’ favorite themes include “home, family and children, nature, and idealized love”, but they exhibit an apparent apathy to the major problems of American life like the westward expansion and democracy and equality. • In technique they love traditional meters and stanza forms. In language their English is usually British. Their metaphors are sometimes stereotyped and their symbolism tends to be explicit and superficial.

17. V. Washington Irving(1783-1859)Father of American Literature • the first American author to achieve international renown, who created the fictional characters Rip Van Winkle and Ichabod Crane.

18. Life • Irving was born into a wealthy New York merchant family. From a very early age, he began to read widely and write juvenile poems, essays and plays. Later, he studied law.

19. His first book A History of New York, written under the name of Diedrich Knickerbocker, was a great success and won him wide popularity. • In 1815, he went to England to take care of his family business there, and when it failed, had to write to support himself.

20. Life • With the publication of The Sketch Book, he won a measure of international recognition. • In 1826, as an American diplomatic attaché, he was sent to Spain, where he gathered material for his writing.

21. From 1829 to 1832, he was secretary of the U.S Legation in London. • Then when he was fifty, he returned to America and bought “Sunnyside”, his famous home. There he spent the rest of his life, living a life of leisure and comfort, except for a period of four years (1842--1846), when he was Minister to Spain.

22. Significance • “Father of American literature” • “Father of the American short story” • The first American writer of imaginative literature to gain international fame. • .

23. The short story as a genre in American literature began with Irving’s The Sketch Book. • The Sketch Book also marked the beginning of American Romanticism

24. Major Works • A History of New York (1809) 《纽约外史》 • The Sketch Book (1819-1820) 《见闻札记》 • Rip Van Winkle《瑞普·凡·温克尔》 • The Legend of Sleepy Hollow • 《睡谷的传说》

25. Characteristics: • He writes to amuse and entertain; • He has a keen sense of humor; • He has an unusual power of investing his subjects with the proper atmosphere;. • His prose is clear, simple, smooth; his language is musical; • His characters are vivid and true so that they tend to linger in the readers’ mind.

26. James Fenimore Cooper(1789 -1851): • James Fenimore Cooper (September 15, 1789 – September 14, 1851) was a prolific and popular American writer of the early 19th century.

27. He is best remembered as a novelist who wrote numerous sea-stories and the historical novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales, featuring frontiersman Natty Bumppo. • Among his most famous works is the Romantic novel The Last of the Mohicans, which many consider to be his masterpiece.

28. Contributions • Finding "the West" and "the frontier life" as materials for literary works • Introducing Western tradition into American literature

29. Life story • born in a rich family • attended Yale but expelled • five years at sea • inherited fortune then a comfortable life • wrote lots of novels because he one day was disgusted by one novel

30. Major works • "Leather stocking Tales" (a series of five novels about the frontier life): The Pioneers, The Prairie, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, The Deerslayer • Central character: Natty Bumppo (several names for same character: Hawk-eye, the Pathfinder, the Deerslayer, Leatherstocking) (a typical frontier man: honest, simple, innocent, generous) (represents brotherhood of man, nature and freedom) • Theme: modern civilization advancing on the wilderness and the contradiction between them

31. Features • Good at inventing plots (Cooper had never been to the frontier area personally.) • B. Style: powerful, yet clumsy and dreadful • C. Wooden Characters • D. Use of dialect, but not authentic (criticized by Mark Twain)

32. Writing style: powerful but clumsy • Good at inventing plots. Plots are incredible sometimes but stories are intriguing. • Landscape descriptions are majestic and suggestive of Walter Scott (being called “the American Scott”). Quite conscious of associations of different locales • Rich imagination: never been to the frontier and among the Indians • His style is dreadful, characterization wooden and lacking in probability, and his language, his use of dialect, is not authentic.

33. Masterpiece: • The Leatherstocking Tales. • The Pioneers (1823), The Last of Mohicans (1826), The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840), The Deerslayer (1841) The Leatherstocking Tales, (German edition)

34. Analysis of Leatherstocking Tales • llustrate the importance of the frontier and the wilderness for the first time in the history of American literature. • With the central figure Natty Bumppo, these novels unfold an epic account about his adventures from initiation into the backwoods until his final death in old age out on the prairies in the middle of America. D. H. Lawrence calledNatty Bumppo the essential American soul.

35. In the novels, Cooper implies his discourse and social ideology into the speech of the characters. Moreover, he uses story plot and structure to indicate class hierarchy. • Cooper’s conflict between “morally right” and “practically inevitable”: he was devoted to the principles of social order and at the same time responsive to the idea of nature and freedom in the wilderness.