Lecture 13 The Romantic Period of American Literature

Lecture 13 The Romantic Period of American Literature

1. An overview of romantics

As a literary approach in literary creation, Romanticism is ever present in literature of all times. But as a literary trend or movement, it occurred and developed in Europe and America at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries under the historical background of the industrial revolution around 1760 and the French revolution (1789-1799).

2. Distinct features of American romanticism

Though foreign influences were strong, it exhibited from the outset distinct features of its own because it originated from an amalgam of factors which were altogether American rather than anything else.

①presented an entirely new experience alien to European culture. Such as the exotic landscape, the frontier life, the westward expansion, the myth of a New Garden of Eden in America

②American Puritanism as a cultural heritage:

Manifestation 1: tended to moralize, to edify rather than to entertain than their European and English brothers.

Manifestation 2: sex and love were, for instance, subjects American authors were particularly careful in approaching.

③the “newness” of Americans as a nation

American ideals of individualism and political equality, and their dream that America was to be a new Garden of Eden for man, which together produce a feeling strong enough to inspire the romantic imagination and channel it into a different vein of writing.

浪漫主义时期的作家对待生活的态度较为积极(positive)

3. Washington Irving (1783-1859)

A.Major works:

The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Gent见闻札记(1819-1820), a collection of essays, sketches and tales, of which the most famous and frequently anthologized are Rip

Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow睡谷传说

B. His style

Graceful, refined, fluent and dignified, the gentility, urbanity, and pleasantness of the man all seem to have found adequate expression in his style. His style is greatly admired even at present time. His essays are models of perfect English.

The style is the man. 文如其人

C. His contribution to American literature

①he was the first American writer to gain international fame

②father of American short stories

4. James Fennimore Cooper (1789-1851)

A. his major works

The Spy (1821) his first success

His leatherstocking tales, a series of five novels about the frontier life of American settlers. They are:

The Pioneers拓荒者(1823)

The Last of the Mohicans最后的莫希干人(1827)

The Prairie 大草原

The Pathfinder探路人(1840)

The Deerslayer杀鹿者(1841)

They illustrate the importance of the frontier and the wildness for the first time in the history of American literature. With the centre figure Natty Bumppo, these novels unfold an epic account about his adventures. The five cooper tales constitute a mythic reproduction of the whole process: the old and dying leatherstocking in the pioneers and the prairie relives another phase of middle-age maturity in the last of the Mohicans and the pathfinder and enjoys another lease of youth in The Deerslayer. Coopper presented natty Bumppo as an ideal, not realistically but romantically. This man stands for innocence and purity for the way Americans wished they could be, for what they could achieve in close identification with the rather than what the actual fact was as they were destroying nature and tearing it up as they moved farther and farther west.

B. his style

①Cooper is good at inventing plots, though sometimes quite incredible, it is intriguing. The fact that he had never been to the frontier and among the Indians and et could write five huge epic books about them is an eloquent proof of the richness of his imagination.

②a powerful yet clumsy writer. His style is dreadful, his characterization wooden and lacking in probability, and his language, his use of dialect, is not authentic

5.origin and concepts of England Transcendentalism

It derived from the Latin verb “transcendere” meaning, to rise above, or to pass beyond the limits. Transcendentalism has been defined as the recognition in man of the capacity of acquiring knowledge transcending the reach of the five senses, or of knowing truth intuitively, or of reaching the divine without the need of an intercessor(仲裁者，调解人). Emerson interpreted it as “ whatever belongs to class of intuitive thought”and as “idealism as it appears in 1842.” The major concepts that accompanied transcendentalism can be summarized in the following six points.

①it stressed the power of intuition, believing that people could learn things both from the outside world by means of the five senses and from the inner world by intuition.

②as romantic idealism, it placed spirit first and matter second.

③It took nature as symbolic of spirit or God.

④it emphasized the significance of the individual and believed that the individual was the most important element in society and that the ideal kind of individual was self-reliant and unselfish.

⑤Emerson envisioned religion as an emotional communication between as individual soul and the universal “oversoul”. The oversoul was an all-pervading power for goodness, omnipresent and omnipotent, from which all things came and of which all were a part.

⑥it held that commerce was degrading and that a life spent in business was a wasted life. Humanity could be much etter off if people paid less attention to the material world in which they lived.

6. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-82), American poet and essayist, b. Boston. Through his essays, poems, and lectures, he established himself as a leading spokesman of transcendentalism and as a major figure in American literature.

A. His works

Emerson?s fame came mainly from his ability as a speaker. Journals and speeches were the forms of communication most natural to him. His essays were usually derived from lectures he had already delivered. Hence his writing has a casual style.

Emerson?s writing falls into two types：essays and poetry. Among his best are Nature论自然(1836), Essays(1841); Essays: Second Series(1844), Representative Men代表人物(1850); English Traits英国特色(1856), The Conduct of Life生活准则(1860), and Society and Solitude社交与独处(1870), Nature has been called “the manifesto of American transcendentalism”.

The American Scholar论美国学者→America?s Declaration of Intellectual Independence

In 1847, he published Poems, the fruit of his thirty years of poetic activity. Later he turned out two more volumes of poems: May-Day and Other Pieces(1867)and Selected Poems(1876)

B. General comment

Emerson?s importance in the intellectual history of America lies in the fact that he embodied a new nation?s desire and struggle to assert its own identity in its formative period. However, his reputation has fallen somewhat in the present century. It may have to do with his seemingly unqualified acceptance of life and his cheerful optimism that stemmed from that acceptance. He firmly believes that there is a force always at work to make the best better and the worst good, as if he knew from the first the victory of good over evil and that the angel must always be stronger than the demon. He does not seem to bother distinguish good from evil. He just cannot give

much reality to evil and pain. In modern times he is sometimes dismissed as having no sense of evil.

Henry David Thoreau (1817—1862)

Walden瓦尔登湖

Civil Disobedience论公民的不服从→nonviolent struggle

7.Overview of high romantics

Early romantics were, generally speaking, “na?ve, experimental, conformist, self-conscious and imitative”. Irving followed Oliver Goldsmith, Bryant learned from William Wordsworth, and cooper emulated Sir Walter Scott. Their works were picturesque, but lacked a deeper power. American romanticism reached its peak with the appearance of the major authors of the 19th century such as Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson in poetry, and Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville in fiction. They took their departure from the complacent romantic impulse of the early 19th century and created for themselves new literary personalities. They established firm ground for their art in ell-conceived literary theories and well-structured literary forms.

8. Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

A.his works

Shaw once remarked that Poe achieved high in short stories, poetry as well as a literary critic.

His short stories generally fall into 2 kinds that of horrible stories and of ratiocinative. The Fall of the House of Usher(厄舍古屋的倒塌)

Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque(天方怪谭；怪诞奇异故事集)

His poetry: To Helen ; The Raven ;

Literary theory: Review of Twice-Told tales（评霍桑的《故事重述》）

B.his literary theory

About short stories: the short stories, he says, must be of such length as to be told to be read at one sitting (brevity), so as to ensure the totality of impression. The very first sentence ought to help to bring out the “single effect”of the story. No word should be used which does not contribute to the “pre-established” design of the work

(compression). A tale should reveal some logical truth with “the fullest satisfaction”and should end with the last sentence, leaving a sense of finality with the reader. About poetry: the poem, he says, should be short, readable at one sitting. Its chief aim is beauty, namely, to produce a feeling of beauty in the reader. He concludes that “the death of a beautiful women is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.”He is opposed to “the heresy of the didactic” and calls for “pure” poetry. The artistry of poem lies not in what is being said but in the way it is said. Poe stressed rhythm, defines true poetry as “the rhythmical creation of beauty” and declares that “music is the perfection of the soul, or idea, of poetry”

https://www.360docs.net/doc/c019025477.html,ment on his style and his contribution

Style: rational, it is too rational, too ordinary to reflect the peculiarity of his theme. Somehow he failed to carry to the newness of his idea into his style. He is not easy to read. his choice of words and his syntax may have been responsible for his difficult prose.

①To French symbolists: the devotees of “art for art?s sake” ----his aesthetics and his call for “the rhythmical creation of beauty”

②father of psychoanalytic criticism

③father of detective story

9. Herman Melville(1819-1891)

His major works: Moby Dick白鲸a name of a whale symbolism

10. Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)

His major works: novels such as Twice-Told Tales《故事重述》; Mosses from an Old Manse《古宅青苔》; The Scarlet Letter红字; The House of the Seven Gables《七个尖角阁的房子》; The Blithedale Romance《福谷传奇》; The Marble Faun《大理石雕像》

Short stories: such as Young Goodman Brown；The Minister’s Black Veil《教长的黑面纱》

作品主要以新英格兰地区为背景theme: evil and sin

11. Walt Whitman (1819-1892)

A. His major works: Leaves of Grass 草叶集Song of Myself自我之歌，第一首也是最长一首; Drum-taps《桴鼓集》

B. General comment: He devoted himself to poetry eulogizing the native American

experience. The title of leaves of grass implies rebirth, renewal, or green life. Both the form and content of his poems are revolutionary. With its frequent use of colloquial language and everyday events, his verse represents a turning point in the history of American poetry---poetry fashioned out of especially American experience in a distinctly American idiom. On e of the major principles of Whitman?s technique is parallelism or a rhythm of thought in which, the line is the rhythmical unit as in the poetry of the English bible. Another main principle of Whitman?s versification (诗律，作诗) is phonetic recurrence, i.e., the systematic repetition of words and phrases at the beginning of the line, in the middle or at the end.

free verse 自由诗极大地影响了美国现代诗歌的发展

12. Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) concerns death and immortality

A. Her major poems(total 1775 poems): Because I Could Not Stop for Death；I Heard a Fly Buzz---When I Died; My Life Closed Twice before Its Close; Wild Nights—Wild Nights; A Narrow Fellow in the Grass;

General comment

B. Dickinson differs from Whitman in a variety of ways. For one thing, Whitman seems to keep his eye on society at large; Dickinson explores the inner life of the individual. Whereas Whitman is “national”in his outlook, Dickinson is regional (“because I see new-englandly”). In formal terms the two poets are vastly different: Whitman?s endless, all-inclusive catalogs contrast with the concise, direct and simple diction and syntax which characterize Dickinson?s poetry. By far the largest portion of Dickinson…s poetry concerns death and immortality, themes which lie at the centre of Dickinson?s world.

C. The characteristics of her poetry: her choice of words, her verbal constructions, even her spelling all seems to be unconventional. To her poetry is “a bodying forth by means of concrete images”of an inspired thought. Her poetry abounds in telling images. In the best of her poems every word is a picture seen. A salient feature of her technique was a severe economy of expression. Her poetic idiom is noted for its laconic(简洁的) brevity, directness and plainest words. All these characteristics of her poetry were to become popular through Stephen crane and with the imagists such as Ezra Pound in the 20th century. She became, with Stephen Crane, the precursor of the imagist movement.