American Romanticism
American Romanticism was a literary movement in the early 19th century that emphasized emotion, imagination, and individualism. It rejected the rationalism of the Enlightenment and focused on the beauty of nature, the supernatural, and the exotic. Key themes included the celebration of the individual, the exploration of the unknown, and the rejection of societal norms. Notable authors of this period include Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Washington Irving.
7 Key excerpts on "American Romanticism"
eBook - ePubLiterary Criticism from Plato to the Present
An Introduction
- M. A. R. Habib(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...Part IV Romanticism and the Later Nineteenth Century Chapter 10 Romanticism Romanticism was a broad intellectual and artistic disposition that arose toward the end of the eighteenth century and reached its zenith during the early decades of the nineteenth century. The ideals of Romanticism included an intense focus on expressing human subjectivity, an exaltation of nature, of childhood and spontaneity, of primitive forms of society, of human passion and emotion, of the poet, of the sublime, and of imagination as a more comprehensive and inclusive faculty than reason. The most fundamental philosophical disposition of Romanticism has often been seen as irony, an ability to accommodate conflicting perspectives of the world. Developing certain insights of Kant, the Romantics often insisted on artistic autonomy and attempted to free art from moralistic and utilitarian constraints. It was in the fields of philosophy and literature that Romanticism - as a broad response to Enlightenment, neoclassical, and French Revolutionary ideals - initially took root. Romanticism bore a complex connection to the predominating bourgeois world views, which were broadly rationalist, empiricist, individualist, and utilitarian. Some of the Romantics, such as Blake, Wordsworth, and Holderlin, initially saw the French Revolution as heralding the dawn of a new era of individual and social liberation. Schiller and Goethe in their own ways exalted the struggle for human freedom and mastery of knowledge. Shelley, Byron, Heine, George Sand, and Victor Hugo were passionate in their appeals for justice and liberation from oppressive social conventions and political regimes. Underlying nearly all Romantic views of literature was an intense individualism based on the authority of experience and, often, a broadly democratic orientation, as well as an optimistic and sometimes utopian belief in progress...
eBook - ePub- Jacob Stratman(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Research & Education Association(Publisher)
...And, although this idea is similar to that espoused by the Enlightenment, the romantics reacted against a life of reason for a life of sentiment and feeling. For the romantics, individuals are the very center of the literary act; therefore, expressing feeling, emotion, and attitude are the key components of the literary act. As a result of this freedom of expression, writers at this time did not feel constrained by traditional conventions of literature, nor did they feel trapped by the politics and social mores of the day. Take note that romanticism (like most other literary movements) was a reaction to a previous cultural era (the Age of Enlightenment). Sparked by the French Revolution in 1789 and also influenced by the Industrial Revolution, romanticism rejected scientific reasoning as the only way to understand the universe or human nature, and claimed the idyllic life of the rural areas of America instead of the growing urban sections. Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) There is simply not enough room in this study guide to appropriately and effectively depict Emerson’s importance and influence on American letters and social thought. Born in Boston in a Unitarian family, Emerson was raised by his Calvinist aunt, Mary Moody Emerson, and sent to Harvard College to become a minister. He was ordained in 1829 as one of the pastors at Boston’s Second Church (the same church where Cotton Mather preached); however, New England Unitarianism was certainly more popular than the Calvinist theology brought over by the Puritans. Although Unitarians at this time still held onto the Bible as God’s revealed word, they rejected the Puritan idea that humans were totally depraved, and many Unitarians started to strongly question the divinity of Christ. Scholars have spilled a lot of ink discussing the causes for Emerson’s struggles with and criticisms of Christianity...
eBook - ePub- Gregory Claeys(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- CQ Press(Publisher)
...Matthew Wilson Matthew Wilson Romanticism Romanticism 710 714 Romanticism The origins and nature of the movement known as romanticism have been much discussed, although with little fundamental consensus as to how they should be defined. The chief difficulty here is the great diversity of the movement, whose principal centers at the peak of its influence, c. 1800–50, were Germany and Britain, with notable developments elsewhere in later periods. Reacting to scientism, rationalism, the commercial and Industrial revolutions, and then also in part the French Revolution, the romantics were active in literature, poetry, painting, and music. Some of their concerns, such as a fascination with horror, awe, and the sublime; the gothic and macabre; and the peculiarity and intensity of feeling that accompanied these perceptions, had relatively little political purchase. In other areas, notably a focus on reconstructing the past, on the role played by heroic individuals in history, on the dangers of mob rule and its subsequent suppression of individuality, and on the primacy of feelings in understanding the sense of self, of location, and of obedience and loyalty, political implications abounded. Some of these tended to be reactionary, others radical, or both at the same time; nationalism often shared both attributes. Despite their differences, some common intellectual themes shared by them that have important political bearings included a fascination with the past and alarm respecting the future; a focus on nature, particularly as contrasted with the city, as a source of awe, inspiration, and evidence of God’s presence; an aesthetic concern with individual and especially artistic creativity, originality, and genius as an expression of human uniqueness; and a philosophical focus on intuitive, emotional, or religious insights by contrast with those gained from mere reason...
eBook - ePub- Aidan Day(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Its writers include Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82), Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–64), Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49), Henry David Thoreau (1817–62), Herman Melville (1819–91), Walt Whitman (1819–92) and Emily Dickinson (1830–86). The key document in the emergence of a fully fledged American Romanticism was an essay, ‘Nature’, published by Emerson in 1836. ‘Nature’ became an informal manifesto for an association of New England thinkers and writers, a kind of initiating sub-group within the Romanticist tendency of nineteenth-century American writing, which was centred around Emerson who lived near Boston in the town of Concord. The group, which first met for discussion in the year ‘Nature’ was published, came to be known as the Transcendental Club because of its philosophically idealist orientation, a disposition that largely went along with left of centre political sympathies. It included Frederick Henry Hedge (1805–90), an expert in German philosophy and literature, the writer Thoreau, the noted abolitionist Theodore Parker (1810–60) and Margaret Fuller (1810–50), feminist and journalist, whose major work was Woman in the Nineteenth Century (published as a book in 1845) and who edited the Transcendentalist journal The Dial from 1840 to 1842. It was Emerson’s ‘Nature’ that first gave intellectual form to Transcendentalism. The Romantic idealism of ‘Nature’ draws to a notable extent on the writings of Coleridge. In an essay, ‘Emerson’s Indebtedness to Coleridge’, Frank T...
eBook - ePub- Benedetto Croce(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...III. THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT C ONTEMPORARY with the rise and growth of idealism and liberalism, and often in the same individuals, was the birth and expansion of romanticism; a simultaneity that is not a mere juxtaposition, but a relation or a multiplicity of relations, as it will be advisable to make clear and to keep in mind. To this end it is necessary, first of all, to emphasize a distinction that has almost always been lost sight of by those (and they have been of late years and still are many) who talk of romanticism and write histories of it. Without this distinction it is inevitable that certain spiritual manifestations of a positive character fall, as it were, under a cloud of disapproval, and others of a negative character are illumined in a favourable light, so that the history one sets out to write comes forth contradictory and confused. The distinction is between romanticism in the theoretic and speculative sense and romanticism in the practical, sentimental, and moral field: these are two diverse and even opposite things to one who does not wish to limit himself to the surface and to appearances. Theoretic and speculative romanticism is the revolt, the criticism, and the attack against literary academicism and philosophic intellectualism, which had dominated in the illuminist age. It awakened the feeling for genuine and great poetry, and set forth the doctrine thereof in the new science of the imagination called aesthetics. It realized the great importance of spontaneity, passion, individuality, and gave them their place in ethics. It knew and made known the right of what exists and operates in all its varieties according to time and place, and founded modern historiography, interpreting it no longer as mockery and derision of past ages, but as understanding of these as parts of the present and of the future. And it reintegrated and retouched all the aspects of history, civil and political history no less than religious, speculative, and artistic...
eBook - ePub- Lilian R. Furst(Author)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...2 The pre-history of the Romantic movement The roots of the Romantic movement lie in the eighteenth century in a series of interlocking trends of cumulative effect: the decline of the Neo-classical system led to the questionings of the Enlightenment, which in turn was conducive to the infiltration of the new notions current in the latter half of the century. Although the appellation ‘pre-Romantic’ is generally reserved for certain writers and thinkers who were direct forerunners of the Romantics in ideas or style (e.g. Rousseau, Young, Macpherson, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre), in a wider sense the term is appropriate to the entire line of development in the eighteenth century, in so far as it paved the way for the crystallization of the Romantic movement. A major reorientation of critical standards and methods was an essential pre-condition for the blossoming of Romanticism, and this took place in the course of the eighteenth century. Thus the Romantic movement, though it effected a literary revolution at its decisive break-through, was in itself in fact the product of a protracted process of evolution. The direction and form of this evolution points to the nature of the Romantic revolution. The decline of the Neo-classical system The period that equated ‘romantic’ with ‘chimerical’ and ‘ridiculous’ was that of Neo-classicism, which was at its height in the seventeenth century, notably in France. Since the revival of Classical standards in the Renaissance, the main concern had been the establishment, elaboration and spread of a view of literature inherited from Greek and Roman antiquity. The chief sources of aesthetic ideas were, for over two centuries, Aristotle, Horace, Quintilian and Longinus. The major topic of discussion was the revival and imitation of the Ancients, who enjoyed unlimited authority and inspired a strong craving to conform to their patterns...
- Susan J. Matt, Susan J. Matt(Authors)
- 2020(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
...For example, “to uncover why the myth of the melancholy female poet continues to have cultural resonance,” Claire Knowles returns to the literature of sensibility from 1780 to 1860. What she finds is a template established early: in the wake of the phenomenal success of Charlotte Smith’s melancholy and introspective Elegiac Sonnets (1784), many of the most popular female poets of the era—women like Mary Robinson and Letitia Landon—felt it necessary to exploit the pathos generated by their displays of feminine distress in order to gain entry into a literary sphere that was often overtly hostile to female poetic endeavor. —Knowles 2013: 2 Knowles’ work traces that path from Smith to the twentieth century’s confessional poets and our own present. ROMANTICISM AND REVOLUTIONARY EMOTIONS Sometimes conceived as a sharp break from the Enlightenment and the Age of Sensibility, the period in Western literary history known as Romanticism is at its core a mode of literary expression that values the expression of individual emotion. The term has been notoriously difficult to define with precision (Lovejoy 1924; Wellek 1949; McGann 1983: 17–20), and many attempts at a standard definition begin with comments about the impossibility of the task (Harmon and Holman 1996: 452; Murfin and Ray 2003: 415–416). Nevertheless, emotion, in author and reader, is undoubtedly a key component in Romantic definitions of writing. In his Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802), for example, the English poet William Wordsworth defines poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” (Wordsworth 2010: 562)...
