The American Romanticism as a literary trend

The American Romanticism as a literary trend

Romanticism as a literary trend appeared in Western civilization over a period from the late 18th to the mid-19th century. The strongholds of the Romantic Movement were England and Germany.

The early Romantic period thus coincides with what is often called the "age of revolutions"--including, of course, the American (1776) and the French (1789) revolutions. A revolutionary energy was at the core of Romanticism, which quite consciously set out to transform the theory and practice of writing, and the very way we perceive the world.

The development of slums and poverty due to the Industrial Revolution turned people from Rationalism. Romanticism is a reaction against Rationalism.

1) The rationalistic view of urban life was replaced by the Romantic view. Rationalists saw cities as a place to find success and self-realization while Romantics saw the city as a place of moral corruption, poverty, and death

2) The Romantic journey is to the countryside. The Romantics associated the country with independence, moral clarity, and purity(The Gothic Romantic, E.A. Poe, saw the country as a place of phantasm; Irving saw the country as idyllic and as an escape)

American Romanticism is characterized by the following attitudes:

1) a deepened appreciation of the beauties of nature

("Nature" meant many things to the Romantics. Romantics believed in becoming one with the natural world. The nature accorded the status of an organically unified whole. Particular perspectives with regard to nature varied considerably

· nature as a healing power,

· nature as a source of subject and image,

· nature as a refuge from the artificial constructs of civilization, including artificial language

Romantics gave greater attention both to describing natural phenomena accurately and to capturing "sensuous nuance". Accuracy of observation, however, was not sought for its own sake. Romantic nature novel is essentially a novel of meditation.)

2) a general exaltation of emotion over reason and a general exaltation of the senses over intellect;

(Romantics generally called for greater attention to the emotions, emphasized on the importance of intuition, instincts, and feelings.)

3) a turning in upon the self

(In Romantic theory, the ultimate source of writing is located in the individual artist; art was valuable as a source of illumination of the internal world. The interior journey and the development of the self recurred everywhere as subject material for the Romantic artist. The artist-as-hero is a specifically Romantic type.)

4) a heightened examination of human personality and its moods and mental potentialities;

5) a focus on the hero’s passions and inner struggles;

Individualism: The Romantic Hero

The Romantics asserted the importance of the individual, the unique. Romanticism created its own literary types. There were the hero-artist and the heaven-storming types from Prometheus to Captain Ahab (Herman Melville Moby-Dick), outcasts from Cain to Hester Prynne (Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter)They also put more effort into the psychological development of their characters, and the main characters typically displayed extremes of sensitivity and excitement.

The New American Hero was youthful, innocent, intuitive, handsome, brave, moral and honorable, he was one with nature (Natty Bumppo), he was a loner(uneasy around women).

6) an artist is a supremely individual creator, whose creative spirit is more important than strict adherence to formal rules and traditional procedures;

7) an emphasis upon imagination as a gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual truth;

The Romantics tended to present the imagination as the supreme faculty of the mind as our ultimate creative power, the approximate human equivalent of the creative powers of nature or even deity. it is also the faculty that helps humans to constitute reality. Uniting both reason and feeling imagination is praised as the ultimate synthesizing faculty, enabling humans to reconcile differences and opposites in the world of appearance. The reconciliation of opposites is a central ideal for the Romantics. Finally, imagination is presumed to be the faculty which enables us to "read" nature as a system of symbols.

8) an obsessive interest in folk culture, national and ethnic cultural origins, and the medieval era;

Romantic writing looked for comforting settings from the past. This was found in the supernatural, in nature, and in folk legends and Gothic novels. The Gothic novels had wild, haunted landscapes, they had supernatural events in the plot, was often mysterious. Romantic Gothic literature made an early appearance with Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820) and Rip Van Winkle (1819), Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories.

In the Romantic view, symbols were the human aesthetic correlatives of nature's emblematic language. They were valued too because they could simultaneously suggest many things, the desire to express the "inexpressible"--the infinite--through the available resources of language led to symbol at one level and myth (as symbolic narrative) at another.

9) a predilection for the exotic, the remote, the mysterious, the weird, the occult, the monstrous, the diseased, and even the satanic (Edgar Allan Poe's tales of the macabre and his balladic poetry)

(Characteristics of Romanticism: American writer values feelings over intuition, values the power of the imagination seeks the beauty of unspoiled nature, values youthful innocence, values individual freedom, values the lessons of the past, finds beauty in exotic locales, the supernatural, and in the imagination, values poetry as the highest expression of the imagination, values myth, legend, and folk culture)

Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.

American Romanticism embraced the individual and rebelled against the confinement of neoclassicism and religious tradition. the Romantics generally rejected absolute systems of philosophy and religion, in favor of the idea that each person must create the system by which to live.

the Romantics preferred

· boldness over the preceding age's desire for restraint,

· maximum suggestiveness over the clarity,

· free experimentation over the "rules" of composition, genre, and decorum

· the artist as "inspired" creator over the artist as technical master.

The Romantic movement in America created a new literary genre that continues to influence American writers. Novels, short stories, and poems replaced the sermons and manifestos of yore. The American Novel: At first most American Romantic writers imitated the European writing style. But later as American novelists explored the vast unknown lands (something the Europeans could not do), they broke away from the European tradition and discovered uniquely American topics and settings.

James Fenimore Cooper was the first American novelist to break from European tradition. His novels were set in the American frontier. The central character, Natty Bumppo, was the first American literary hero. Bumppo appeared in a series of Cooper novels as other characters: Hawkeye, Deerslayer, Leatherstocking, etc. He was virtuous, moral, distrustful of city life, one with nature, etc. His skills were almost superhuman Cooper’s series of novels were called The Leatherstocking Tales

The everyday and the exotic:

The attitude of many of the Romantics to the everyday, social world around them was complex. they advanced certain realistic techniques, such as the use of "local color" (through everyday language, colloquialisms, or through popular literary forms, such as folk narratives. There are picturesque "local color" elements in Washington Irving's essays and especially his travel books.). Yet social realism was usually subordinate to imaginative suggestion, and what was most important were the ideals simplicity or innocence. By the 1880s, however, psychological and social realism was competing with romanticism in the novel.

The Romantic Artist in Society

The works of the Romantic Era also differed from preceding works in that they spoke to the “common” people. Romantics strove towards literature and arts that were for everyone, not just wealthy aristocracy. Romantics writers were reaching out for a connection with their equals, not to those above them, the ones fueling the wars.^[36]

the Romantics were ambivalent toward the "real" social world around them.They were often politically and socially involved, but at the same time they began to distance themselves from the public. In their private lives, they often asserted their individuality and differences in ways that were to the middle class a subject of intense interest, but also sometimes of horror. Thus the gulf between "odd" artists and their sometimes shocked, often uncomprehending audience began to widen.

The main periods of the American Romanticism

In the development of the American Romanticism three main stages are usually distinguished. The early American Romanticism from 1820s till 1830s.

The main American writers of the this period were Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, William Cullen Bryant, John Pendleton Kennedy and others.

This period is characterized with

· An international recognition of the American literature

· An intercommunication of American and European romanticism

· an increasing desire to produce uniquely American literature and culture

· an appearance of the main themes (The American Revolutionary War, settlement of new territories, life of Native Americans, etc)

· an optimism connected with heroic period of wars and future prospects of the country

· Common man as hero

· Nature as refuge, source of knowledge or spirituality

· description providing a "feeling" of the scene

Both W. Irving and J. F. Cooper took part in the political and social life of the country, trying to influence its development.

The second stage is the mature American Romanticism from 1840s till 1850s

The main American writers of the this period were Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau.

This period is characterized with

· the exploration of such themes as guilt, pride, and emotional repression

· feelings of imperfection of the world and human (Nathaniel Hawthorne)

· an appearance of such themes as obsession, the nature of evil, and human struggle against the elements (Herman Melville)

· grotesque, gothicism, sense of terror, fear; use of the odd and queer, mystery and fantasy (Edgar Allan Poe)

· symbolism and occult incidents(Edgar Allan Poe)

The third stage of the development of the American Romanticism took place in 1860s. This period is characterized with the division within the American Romanticism that is inseparably connected with the Civil War between the Northern and Southern States.

· The American Romanticists who protested against slavery (abolitionism in literature): William Lloyd Garrison and his paper The Liberator, poet John Greenleaf Whittier and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom's Cabin)

· The American Romanticists who support slavery.

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