American Romanticism

1. American Romanticism

2. ROMANTICISM • Civilization and progress is bad. Nature is good • Educated sophistication is bad, youthful innocence is better • INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM • Find God through NATURE • Fantastic, mystical or exotic settings • Imagination and emotion • “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.” William Wordsworth • ART LASTS FOREVER- ”BEAUTY IS TRUTH”

3. Example Poems • “She Walks in Beauty” Lord Byron • “Ozymandias” Percy Bysshe Shelley • “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer” by Walt Whitman

4. Transcendentalism • NOT REALLY RIGIDLY DEFINED • Love of nature • Everything and everyone is connected • Individuality in spirituality, acceptance of diverse beliefs (not traditional church) • Moderation and temperance • Man is essentially good • Anarchist and communal living • Rights for workers, women’s suffrage

5. Ralph Waldo Emerson • . . . that great nature in which we rest . . . that Unity, that Over-Soul, within which every man's particular being is contained and made one with all other. . . . We live in succession, in division, in parts, in particles. Meantime within man is the soul of the whole; the wise silence; the universal beauty, to which every part and particle is equally related; the eternal ONE. -Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Over-Soul” (1841)

6. Walden by Henry David Thoreau • I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. • “The indescribable innocence and beneficence of Nature, — of sun and wind and rain, of summer and winter, — such health, such cheer, they afford forever! . . . Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?”

7. GOTHIC LITERATURE • Possibly late 1700s? To 1830ish • Intense emotion- usually negative (fear, sorrow, anger, obsession, MADNESS) • Dramatic settings • often gloomy, imposing architecture (GOTHIC) • Stormy weather • Reference to the supernatural • Curses, fate • Most important works – Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818), Dracula by Bram Stoker, (1897) stories by Edgar Allen Poe

8. AMERICAN GOTHIC LITERATURE • subgenre of gothic Fiction. • Elements specific to American Gothic include: rationality/rational vs irrational, • puritianism, • guilt, strangeness within the familiar, • abhumans, ghosts, monsters, and outcasts • The roots of these concepts lay in a past riddled with slavery, a fear of racial mixing, hostile Native American relations, their subsequent genocide, and the daunting wilderness present at the American frontier. American Gothic is often devoid of castles and objects, which allude to a civilized history.