Part 3:
The literature of Romanticism
1. Time of Romanticism
from the end of the 18th century to 1865 (the outbreak of the Civil War)
from the publication of Washington Irving's The Sketch Book and ended with Whitman's Leaves of Grass
2. Why Romanticism emerged?
?National influences ?International influences
National Influences International Influences
3. General features of Romanticism 4. American Romanticism American Romanticism
5. Characteristics of American Romanticism characteristics of American Romanticism characteristics of American Romanticism
Ⅱ. It tended to be moralize because of Puritan influence; American Puritanism as a cultural heritage exerted great influences over American Romanticism:
1. American romantic writers tended more to moralize than their English and European counterparts.
2. a preoccupation with the Calvinistic view of original sin and the mystery of evil marked the works of Hawthorne, Melville and a host of lesser writers.
characteristics of American Romanticism Ⅲ. It was both imitative and independent.
With the growth of American national consciousness, American character types speaking local dialects appeared in poetry and fiction with increasing frequency.
Ⅳ. New England Transcendentalism is the mot clearly defined Romantic literary movement in this period.
characteristics of American Romanticism
?Themes: home, family and children, nature, idealized love; Apathy to major problems of
American life
?Technique: Traditional meters and stanza forms, British English, stereotyped metaphors,
explicit and superficial symbolism Major writers of this period Poets:
Henry Wordsworth Long Fellow, Edgar Ellen Poe, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson Fiction:
?Washington Irving-- comic fables
?James Fenimore Cooper -- frontier adventures ?Nathaniel Hawthorne -- psychological romances ?Edgar Allen Poe -- Gothic tales
Transcendentalist(超验主义理论家):
? Emerson(爱默生), Thoreau (梭罗)
?Transcendentalism :A literary and philosophical movement, associated with Ralph Waldo
Emerson, asserting the existence of an ideal spiritual reality that transcends the empirical and scientific and is knowable through intuition.
?超验主义：一种文学和哲学运动，宣称存在一种理想的精神实体，超越于经验和科学之
处，通过直觉得以把握.
American romanticism美国文学之浪漫主义
