AMERICAN ROMANTICISM: INTRODUCTION

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AMERICAN ROMANTICISM INTRODUCTION
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ROMANTICISM THE MOVEMENT

• - dominated cultural thought from the last decade
  of the 18th century well into the first decades
  of the 20th century
• First appearance in Germany in the 1770s (Sturm
  und Drang) flowering in England in the 1790s
  importation to America from the 1820s onward
• To a large degree, Romanticism was a reaction
  against the Enlightenment or Age of Reason,
  especially its emphasis on formal propriety,
  classical style, and decorum

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ROMANTICISM THE MOVEMENT-2

• The Enlightenment faith in a perfectible material
  and spiritual universe through the power of human
  reason was shaken by the revolutions that ended
  the century (The American Revolution, The French
  Revolution, and the Napoleonic Warssome Romantic
  artists actuallyfor a whileexalted Napoleon as
  the ultimate Romantic heroe.g., Beethoven in his
  Eroica Symphony, which later was used in
  Hitchcocks Psycho)

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ROMANTICISM THE MOVEMENT-3

• Question What comes to mind or what do you
  associate with the term Romanticism?

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ROMANTICISM THE MOVEMENT

• Although we usually associate a quaint or
  exaggerated effusion of emotion with Romanticism
  (hence, the shift in meaning of the word
  Romantic to everything relating love), the
  Romantic age brought about concepts of the
  individual and his/her relationship to the
  world/society that we still largely subscribe to,
  even champion today.

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ROMANTICISM THE MOVEMENT-4

• Romanticism is the cult of the individual--the
  cultural and psychological birth of the I--the
  Self
• Belief in an inner spark of divinity that links
  one human being to another and all human beings
  to the larger Truth
• In poetry, visual art, and music, artists became
  increasingly preoccupied with articulating the
  personal experience that becomes, in turn, a
  representative one
• IMAGINATION becomes the source of artistic
  vision/creativity (during the neo-classical age,
  imagination was linked to fancy, which implied
  the fantastic, fictive, and even false)

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ROMANTICISM THE MOVEMENT-5

• The artist (especially, the poet) takes on
  quasi-religious status not only as prophet and
  moral leader
• The poet/artist as a divinely inspired vehicle
  through which Nature and the common man find
  their voices
• Esp. See William Wordsworth, Preface to
  Lyrical Ballads
• Poet as Prophet

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ROMANTICISM THE MOVEMENT-6

• Concern for the common man came from both the
  democratic changes of the age of Revolution, as
  well as an interest in folk culture
• In part, the search to preserve the stories,
  songs, legends, and verse of the common people
  came from a nationalistic impulse
• E.g. in Germany, the Grimm brothers collected the
  fairy tales of their region and country while
  assembling a comprehensive dictionary of the
  German language (the German equivalent of
  Websters in the 19th century!)
• But the Folk Movement also produced an
  international language of human commonality, at
  whose center stood the images of home and the
  heart.

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ROMANTICISM THE MOVEMENT-6

• aesthetic changes individuality translated into
  the revolution of feeling against form
• Poets, painters, and musicians no longer trying
  to make their expression fit conventional forms,
  but carving out new forms to capture their
  feelings and thoughts
• Emphasis on the language of the Soul

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ROMANTICISM THE MOVEMENT-6

• Quintessential Romantic figures the hero, the
  wanderer, and the genius
• all journey to new lands (literally and
  figuratively), defy limitations, and overcome
  obstacles
• SHREK, anybody???
• Hero/wanderer fascination also came from the
  Romantic identification and exploration of
  everything Medieval (the Middle Ages were thought
  to be characterized by mystery and irrationality)
• Typical Romantic motifs
• Exotic lands (Melville, especially his South Sea
  novels and Moby Dick)
• Amorphous world of dreams (Coleridge, Kubla
  Khan)
• Dark terrors of the psyche (E. A. Poe!)
• Dizzying heightsin both nature and human
  creativity (Frankenstein)
• Sublime vistas in nature reflecting the divine
  and potentially terrifying powers o f the human
  mind, spirit, and soul

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• For the Romantic, nature was a constant companion
  and teacher--both benign and tyrannical
• Nature became
• the stage on which the human drama was played
• the context in which man came to understand his
  place in the universe
• the transforming agent which harmonized the
  individual soul with what the Transcendentalists
  would call the Over-Soul.

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ROMANTICISM THE MOVEMENT-8

• Throughout all of Romantic literature, music, and
  art, Nature is a dynamic presence, a character
  who speaks in a language of symbols at once
  mysterious and anthropomorphic (i.e. speaking
  with a voice similar to human voice, i.e. sharing
  human qualities and characteristics, especially
  in personification of natural objects, phenomena,
  etc.)
• allows man to come into dialogue with the
  life-force

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ROMANTICISM MAJOR FIGURES

• Germany
• Authors Goethe (esp. The Sorrows of Young
  Werther and Faust), Schiller (esp. William Tell)
  Novalis, Eichendorff, Schlegel, and the Grimm
  brothers
• Painters Caspar David Friedrich
• Composers Beethoven, Schubert (songs),
  Mendelssohn (wedding march from Midsummer Nights
  Dream), Richard Wagner,

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ROMANTICISM MAJOR FIGURES

• Great Britain
• Authors Robert Burns, William Blake, William
  Wordsworth, Sir Walter Scott, Samuel Taylor
  Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley.
• Painters William Blake, John Constable, Joseph
  Turner

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AMERICAN ROMANTICISM

• Often associated with the terms American
  Renaissance and Transcendentalism
• Poets William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth
  Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Walt
  Whitman, Emily Dickinson
• Prose Writers Washington Irving, James Fenimore
  Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe,
  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet
  Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville.

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AMERICAN ROMANTICISM

• QUESTIONS
• What distinguishes American Romanticism?
• How was AR influenced and shaped by the political
  developments of the early national and
  ante-bellum period (circa 1820-1860)?
• What does the term American Renaissance (a
  later coinage by literary critic F. O.
  Matthiesen) imply about the distinctiveness of
  American Romanticism and its relationship to
  European Romanticism?
• Is there any connection between AR and an
  emerging cultural identity in the United States?
• How did the geographic and social landscapes of
  the United States influence AR?
• The frontier, the wilderness, expansion
• Slavery, racism, sectionalism, class conflict,
  industrialization, gender inequality, Indian
  removal, etc.

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RADICAL ROMANTICISM?

• QUESTIONS
• General to what degree can artists/authors both
  exemplify/represent and stand outside of or
  critique a culture at the same time?
• Where, how, or to what degree do the writers we
  are encountering sanction/affirm and/or
  challenge, critique, or even subvert the spirit
  of the age?
• How can we appreciate radical departures from or
  challenges to perceived wisdom, standard ways of
  thinking, political culture, power structures,
  tradition, and convention?
• To what degree do these challenges still matter
  to us and possibly even offer useful correctives
  to our own mode of thinking and living?
• Or where, how, and to what degree was the
  Romantic challenge actually part of the
  machine?
• In other words, can the establishment ever
  critique itself? (E.g. the problem of the
  Transcendentalists obvious male bias, or the
  Emerson-Thoreau tension)

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VISUALIZING AMERICAN ROMANTICISM THE HUDSON
RIVER SCHOOL

• The first coherent school of American art, the
  Hudson River painters, helped to shape the mythos
  of the American landscape
• Thomas Cole (1801-1848)
• Asher B. Durand (1796-1886)
• Frederick Church (1826-1900)
• Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902)

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Thomas Cole, The Falls of Kaaterskill (1826)

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Thomas Cole, The Oxbow (View from Mount Holyoke,
Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm,
1836)
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Asher Durand, Kindred Spirits (1848)
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Asher Durand, Kindred Spirits (1848)

• In it Durand depicts himself, together with Cole,
  on a rocky promontory in serene contemplation of
  the scene before them
• In the foreground stands one of the school's
  famous symbols--a broken tree stump-- what Cole
  called a "memento mori
• I.e. a reminder that life is fragile and
  impermanent only Nature and the Divine within
  the Human Soul are eternal.
• Tiny as the human beings are in this composition,
  they are nevertheless elevated by the grandeur of
  the landscape in which they are in

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Frederic Edwin Church, The Natural Bridge
(1852)
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Alfred Bierstadt, Emigrants Crossing the Plains
(1867)
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Alfred Bierstadt, Looking Up the Yosemite
Valley (ca. 1865-67)
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VISUALIZING AMERICAN ROMANTICISM THE HUDSON
RIVER SCHOOL

• Though influenced by European Romantic painting,
  they tried to define a distinct vision for
  American art
• Began with the grand views of the Hudson Valley
  and surrounding Catskill Mountains in NY
• They celebrated the vast resources and
  magnificent landscapes of the new nation
  (Natures Nation)
• Depicting a wilderness in which man is small in
  comparison but still formed an essential element
  in a divine harmony
• As Thomas Cole maintained, if nature were
  untouched by the hand of man--as was much of the
  primeval American landscape in the early 19th
  century--then man could become more easily
  acquainted with the hand of God

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VISUALIZING AMERICAN ROMANTICISM THE HUDSON
RIVER SCHOOL

• Influence of Transcendentalists on Hudson River
  School
• Emerson had written in his 1841 essay Thoughts
  on Art that painting should become a vehicle
  through which the universal mind could reach the
  mind of mankind,
• Thus Hudson River painters believed art to be an
  agent of moral and spiritual transformation.

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AMERICAN ROMANTICISM THE POETRY

• William Cullen Bryant, To a Waterfowl and The
  Prairies
• Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney, Niagara
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, A Psalm of Life and
  The Fire of Drift-wood