American Literature

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American Literature
Lecture Three
030533/4/5, 26th Sep. 2006
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• The American Romanticism
• (I)

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I. What is Romanticism

• Simply speaking, Romanticism is a literary
  movement flourished as a cultural force
  throughout the 19th C and it can be divided into
  the early period and the late period. Also it
  remains powerful in contemporary literature and
  art.
• Romanticism, a term that is associated with
  imagination and boundlessness, as contrasted with
  classicism, which is commonly associated with
  reason and restriction. A romantic attitude may
  be detected in literature of any period, but as
  an historical movement it arose in the 18th and
  19th centuries, in reaction to more rational
  literary, philosophic, artistic, religious, and
  economic standards.... The most clearly defined
  romantic literary movement in the U. S. was
  Transcendentalism.
• The representatives of the early period includes
  Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, and
  those of the late period contain Ralph Waldo
  Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman,
  Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan
  Poe.

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II. The reasons on the rise of American
Romanticism

• Internal causes
• American burgeoned into a political, economic and
  cultural independence. Democracy and political
  equality became the ideals of the new nation.
  Radical changes came about in the political life
  of the country. Parties began to squabble and
  scramble for power, and new system was in the
  making.
• The spread of industrialism, the sudden influx of
  immigration, and the pioneers pushing the
  frontier further west, all these produced
  something of an economic boon and, with it, a
  tremendous sense of optimism and hope among the
  people.

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• Ever-increasing magazines played an important
  role in facilitating literary expansion in the
  country.
• External causes
• Foreign influences added incentive to the growth
  of romanticism in America.
• The influence of Sir Walter Scott was
  particularly powerful and enduring.

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III. Characteristics of American Romanticism (b)

1. Sentimentalism, primitivism and the cult of the
   noble savage
2. Political liberalism
3. The celebration of natural beauty and the simple
   life
4. Introspection
5. The idealization of the common man, uncorrupted
   by civilization
6. Interest in the picturesque past and remote
   places
7. Antiquarianism
8. Individualism
9. Morbid melancholy
10. Historical romance

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IV. The Representatives of the early American
romanticism
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A. Washington Irving (1783-1859 )
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1. About the Author

1. Washington Irving was born in New York City on
   April 3, 1783 as the youngest of 11 children. His
   parents, Scottish-English immigrants, were great
   admirers of General George Washington, and named
   their son after their hero.
2. Early in his life Irving developed a passion for
   books. He studied law privately but practiced
   only briefly. From 1804 to 1806 he travelled
   widely in Europe. After returning to the United
   States, Irving was admitted to the New York bar
   in 1806.
3. He was a partner with his brothers in the family
   hardware business and representative of the
   business in England until it collapsed in 1818.
   During the war of 1812 Irving was a military aide
   to New York Governor Tompkins in the U.S. Army.
4. Irving's career as a writer started in journals
   and newspapers. His success in social life and
   literature was shadowed by a personal tragedy
   because his engaged love died at the age of
   seventeen. So he never married or had children.

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1. After the death of his mother, Irving decided to
   stay in Europe, where he remained for seventeen
   years from 1815 to 1832.
2. In 1832 Irving returned to New York to an
   enthusiastic welcome as the first American author
   to have achieved international fame. Between the
   years 1842-45 Irving was the U.S. Ambassador to
   Spain.
3. Irving spent the last years of his life in
   Tarrytown. From 1848 to 1859 he was President of
   Astor Library, later New York Public Library.
   Irving's later publications include Mahomet And
   His Successors (1850), Wolfert's Roost (1855),
   and his five-volume The Life of George
   Washington(1855-59). Irving died in Tarrytown on
   November 28, 1859.

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2. His Major Works

1. His earliest work was a sparkling, satirical
   History of New York (1809) under the Dutch,
   ostensibly written by Diedrich Knickbocker (hence
   the name of Irvings friends and New York writers
   of the day, the Knickbocker School.)
2. The Sketch Book (1819-20 as Geoffrey Crayon) -
   contains 'Rip Van Winkle' and 'The Legend of
   Sleepy Hollow'
3. The Life of George Washington (1855-59, five
   volumes)

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3. Evaluation to him

1. American author, short story writer, essayist,
   poet, travel book writer, biographer, and
   columnist. Irving has been called the father of
   the American short story. He is best known for
   'The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,' in which the
   schoolmaster Ichabold Crane meets with a headless
   horseman, and 'Rip Van Winkle,' about a man who
   falls asleep for 20 years.
2. The first American writer of imaginative
   literature to gain international fame, so he was
   regarded as father of American literature.
3. The short story as a genre in American literature
   probably began with Irvings The Sketch Book, A
   COLLECTION OF ESSAYS, SKETCHES, AND TALES. It
   also marked the beginning of American
   Romanticism.

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B. James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851)
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1. His Major Works

• In his life Cooper wrote over thirty novels which
  can be divided into frontier novels, detective
  novels and reference novels. He considered The
  Pathfinder (1840) and The Deerslayer (1841) his
  best works.
• The unifying thread of the five novels
  collectively known as the Leather-Stocking Tales
  is the life of Natty Bumppo. Coopers finest
  achievement, they constitute4 a vast prose epic
  with the North American continent as setting.
  Indian tribes as Characters, and great wars and
  westward migration as social background. The
  novels bring to life frontier America from 1740
  to 1804.
• The Pioneers(1823) Natty Bumppo first appears as
  a seasoned scout in advancing years, with the
  dying Chingachgook, the old Indian chief and his
  faithful comrade, as the eastern forest frontier
  begins to disappear and Chingachgook dies.

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1. The Last of the Mohicans(1826) An adventure of
   the French and Indian Wars in the Lake George
   county.
2. The Prairie(1827) Set in the new frontier where
   the Leatherstocking dies.
3. The Pathfinder(1840) Continuing the same border
   warfare in the St. Lawrence and Lake Ontario
   county.
4. The Deerslayer(1841) Early adventures with the
   hostile Hurons on Lake Otsego, NY.

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2. Contributions of Cooper

• The creation of the famous Leatherstocking saga
  has cemented his position as our first great
  national novelist and his influence pervades
  American literature. In his thirty-two years
  (1820-1851) of authorship, Cooper produced
  twenty-nine other long works of fiction and
  fifteen books - enough to fill forty-eight
  volumes in the new definitive edition of his
  Works. Among his achievements
• The first successful American historical romance
  in the vein of Sir Walter Scott (The Spy, 1821).
• The first sea novel (The Pilot, 1824).
• The first attempt at a fully researched
  historical novel (Lionel Lincoln, 1825).

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1. The first full-scale History of the Navy of the
   United States of America (1839).
2. The first American international novel of manners
   (Homeward Bound and Home as Found, 1838).
3. The first trilogy in American fiction (Satanstoe,
   1845 The Chainbearer, 1845 and The Redskins,
   1846).
4. The first and only five-volume epic romance to
   carry its mythic hero - Natty Bumppo - from youth
   to old age.

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3. His Skills

1. He is good at making plots.
2. All his novels are full of myths.
3. He had never been to the frontier and among the
   Indians and yet could write five huge epic books
   about them is an eloquent proof of the richness
   of his imagination.
4. He created the first Indians to appear in
   American fiction and probably the first group of
   noble savages.
5. He hit upon the native subject of frontier and
   wilderness, and helped to introduce the Western
   tradition into American literature.

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V.American Renaissance
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1. The Concept

1. It also called  New England Renaissance   period
   from the 1830s roughly until the end of the
   American Civil War in which American literature,
   in the wake of the Romantic movement, came of age
   as an expression of a national spirit.
2. The literary scene of the period was dominated by
   a group of New England writers, the Brahmins.
   They were aristocrats, steeped in foreign
   culture, active as professors at Harvard College,
   and interested in creating a genteel American
   literature based on foreign models.
3. One of the most important influences in the
   period was that of the Transcendentalists,
   including Emerson, Thoreau and so on.

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1. The Transcendentalists contributed to the
   founding of a new national culture based on
   native elements. They advocated reforms in
   church, state, and society, contributing to the
   rise of free religion and the abolition movement
   and to the formation of various utopian
   communities, such as Brook Farm. The abolition
   movement was also bolstered by other New England
   writers, including the Quaker poet Whittier and
   the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe, whose Uncle
   Tom's Cabin (1852) dramatized the plight of the
   black slave.
2. Apart from the Transcendentalists, there emerged
   during this period great imaginative
   writersNathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and
   Walt Whitmanwhose novels and poetry left a
   permanent imprint on American literature.
   Contemporary with these writers but outside the
   New England circle was the Southern genius Edgar
   Allan Poe, who later in the century had a strong
   impact on European literature.