文档介绍：LECTURE FIVE
American Romanticism
and
Washington Irving
1
1. American Romanticism
As a movement, romanticism came to America in the 19th century. The Romantic period in American literary history is one of the most important periods in the history of American literature, which stretched from the end of the 18th century through the outbreak of the Civil War.
2
of the Age:
Belletristic literature-literature as an art-finally emerged in the 19th century. The fifty-year period from 1815 till 1865 saw miraculous achievements in American literature.
After a period of early romanticism that included Irving, Cooper and Bryant, there was a sudden outburst of creative power. Literary giants such as Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville began producing works of great vitality and distinction.
Soon their achievements would be matched by those from Whitman and Dickinson, among others.
In the half decade of 1850-1855 alone appeared Emerson’s Representative Men (1850), Hawthorn’s The Scarlet Letter
(1850) and The House of Seven Gables (1851), Melville’s Moby Dick (1851) and Pierre (1852), Thoreau’s Walden (1854), Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855), and other noted literary works.
3
of American romanticism: both imitative and independent:
1) derivative: American romantic writing was in some degree modeled on English and European works and shared the general characteristics of European Romanticism.
4
2) independent: distinct characteristics of their own:
Firstly, in essence the expression of a real new experience;
Secondly, Puritan influence over American romantics was conspicuously noticeable. One of its manifestations is the fact that American romantic writers tended more to moralize than their European brothers, and many American writings tended to edify (教诲) more than they entertained.
5
3. Romanticism and Cultural Nationalism
American romanticism did not achieve its most powerful articulations until Poe, Emerson, Thoreau, Melville, Whit