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European Romanticism Causes of Change
American Romanticism
Structure of Romanticism Lecture
The Writers and Thinkers
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The Romantic Period1812(20) – 1860
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What is it?• It’s a world wide
movement*
• Reaction to the Enlightenment
• Appears in different ways in multiple countries.
• Emerged partly from the ideas of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. (1789 –1815)
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Rejection of Reason•All powerful movements
create a powerful backlash.
•Return to nature and “emotions” as keys to truth.
•The individual heart/soul/spirit as the force that determines right and wrong.
•The senses over reason and intellect.
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European Romanticism•English novels
focused on carefully described, full-bodied, passionate characters who nevertheless continue the social structure.
•A good marriage
•Discovery of an aristocratic past
“I must create a system or be enslaved by another man’s.”
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In America, combined with Transcendentalism
• Transcendentalism was a 19th century movement that believed the individual is the spiritual center of the universe.*• This movement made the individual responsible for
salvation, not the church.
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Other Causes• The absence of settled,
traditional community life in America.• History of strife and
revolution• Geography of vast
wilderness• A fluid and relatively
classless democratic society.
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The American Novel•America was still an
undefined, moving frontier
• Strange immigrants with foreign customs and languages
• “Alien” and “crude” ways of life.
•American protagonists faced amazing challenges.
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American Touches•Americans were still looking to
break away from England.
•Didn’t carefully define realistic characters
•Didn’t follow the traditional social structure: They challenged it.
•Americans shaped heroic figures larger than life, burning with mythic significance.
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How Did it Look?
•In the case of novels, this vision expressed itself as something Hawthorne called a “Romance.”
•A heightened, emotional, and symbolic form of the novel.
•Romances were not love stories, but serious novels that used metaphor and allegory to communicate complex and subtle meanings.
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America invented new forms•American writers didn’t follow
the “traditional” novel style.
•Melville (a writer on the cusp of two styles) created a sprawling, wandering tale called Moby Dick.
•Poe created the detective story, as well as a dreamy, surreal, macabre style still emulated.
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Psychological Nightmare•The Romance was dark,
forbidding. •Nobody was safe, nothing was
certain. • People were all alone.•Most of the Romantic heroes
die in the end•All the sailors except
Ishmael drown in Moby-Dick.• Poe killed nearly everyone
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First Americans to be world-recognized
•Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville were the primary fictional authors of the age.
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The Transcendentalists
•Ralph Waldo Emerson, Amos Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau.