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1、American Literature,2011.9,Lecture Three,The American Romanticism(I),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
2、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 19
3、th 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
4、late period contain Ralph Waldo Emerson,Henry David Thoreau,Walt Whitman,Nathaniel Hawthorne,Herman Melville,Edgar Allan Poe.,Internal causes:American burgeoned into a political,economic and cultural independence.Democracy and political equality became the ideals of the new nation.Radical changes ca
5、me 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
6、,a tremendous sense of optimism and hope among the people.,II.The reasons on the rise of American Romanticism,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 Americ
7、a.The influence of Sir Walter Scott was particularly powerful and enduring.,III.Characteristics of American Romanticism(b),Sentimentalism,primitivism and the cult of the noble savagePolitical liberalismThe celebration of natural beauty and the simple lifeIntrospection(反省）The idealization of the comm
8、on man,uncorrupted by civilizationInterest in the picturesque past and remote placesAntiquarianism（古物研究，好古癖）IndividualismMorbid melancholy（病理，病态的忧郁）Historical romance,IV.The Representatives of the early American romanticism,A.Washington Irving(1783-1859),Washington Irving was born in New York City o
9、n 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.Early in his life Irving developed a passion for books.He studied law privately but practiced only briefly.From 1804 to 1806 he
10、travelled widely in Europe.After returning to the United States,Irving was admitted to the New York bar in 1806.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 aid
11、e to New York Governor Tompkins in the U.S.Army.Irvings 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.,1.About the Author,Aft
12、er the death of his mother,Irving decided to stay in Europe,where he remained for seventeen years from 1815 to 1832.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
13、to Spain.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.Irvings later publications include Mahomet And His Successors(1850),Wolferts Roost(1855),and his five-volume The Life of George Washington(1855-59).Irving d
14、ied in Tarrytown on November 28,1859.,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”.)The Sketch Book(1819-20 as Geoffrey Crayon)
15、-contains Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow The Life of George Washington(1855-59,five volumes),2.His Major Works,3.Evaluation to him,American author,short story writer,essayist,poet,travel book writer,biographer,and columnist.Irving has been called the father of the American short stor
16、y.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.The first American writer of imaginative literature to gain international fame,so he was regarded as father of Ameri
17、can literature.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.,B.James Fenimore Cooper(1789-1851),In his life Cooper wrote over thirty novels which can be div
18、ided 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 v
19、ast 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
20、 dying Chingachgook,the old Indian chief and his faithful comrade,as the eastern forest frontier begins to disappear and Chingachgook dies.,1.His Major Works,The Last of the Mohicans(1826):An adventure of the French and Indian Wars in the Lake George county.The Prairie(1827):Set in the new frontier
21、where the Leatherstocking dies.The Pathfinder(1840):Continuing the same border warfare in the St.Lawrence and Lake Ontario county.The Deerslayer(1841):Early adventures with the hostile Hurons on Lake Otsego,NY.,The creation of the famous Leatherstocking saga has cemented his position as our first gr
22、eat 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 firs
23、t 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).,2.Contributions of Cooper,The first full-scale History of the Navy of the United States of America
24、(1839).The first American international novel of manners(Homeward Bound and Home as Found,1838).The first trilogy in American fiction(Satanstoe,1845;The Chainbearer,1845;and The Redskins,1846).The first and only five-volume epic romance to carry its mythic hero-Natty Bumppo-from youth to old age.,He
25、 is good at making plots.All his novels are full of myths.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.He created the first Indians to appear in American fiction and probably the fi
26、rst group of noble savages.He hit upon the native subject of frontier and wilderness,and helped to introduce the“Western”tradition into American literature.,3.His Skills,V.American Renaissance,It also called New England Renaissance period from the 1830s roughly until the end of the American Civil Wa
27、r in which American literature,in the wake of the Romantic movement,came of age as an expression of a national spirit.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 Colleg
28、e,and interested in creating a genteel American literature based on foreign models.One of the most important influences in the period was that of the Transcendentalists,including Emerson,Thoreau and so on.,1.The Concept,The Transcendentalists contributed to the founding of a new national culture bas
29、ed 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 Qu
30、aker poet Whittier and the novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe,whose Uncle Toms Cabin(1852)dramatized the plight of the black slave.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.,
