AMERICAN ROMANTICISM
Edgar Allen Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne
LECTURE OVERVIEW
Romanticism and American literature

American Romanticism and the Gothic

American Romanticism and Transcendentalism
Copyright R. SIbley, University of Warwick
2013

WHAT IS ROMANTICISM?

Caspar David Friedrich, The Wanderer (1818)




Copyright R. SIbley, University of Warwick
2013

Inspired by change and
limitless aspiration
towards good.
Inspired by the natural
world.
Favoured innovation
rather than traditionalism.
Engages with the
supernatural and the
ancient or exotic.
Protagonists are often
solitary outcasts or nonconformists.
Focus on imagination –
poet/writer as visionary.
1798
1808
1814
Wordsworth/ Coleridge
Lyrical Ballads
Walter Scott, Marmion
Walter Scott, Waverley
1832
1847
Emily Bronte, Wuthering
Heights & Charlotte
Bronte, Jane Eyre
1824
Death of Sir Walter Scott
Passing of the Reform Bill
Lord Byron, Don Juan
1820
1789
French Revolution
John Keats, Lamia,
Isabella, The Eve of St.
Agnes and other poems
1774
Goethe, The Sorrows of
Young Werther
ROMANTICISM TIMELINE
THE ROMANTIC ANTI-HERO
Roderick Usher
Copyright R. SIbley, University of Warwick
2013
A cadaverousness of
complexion; an eye large,
liquid and luminous beyond
comparison; lips somewhat
thin and very pallid, but of a
surpassingly beautiful curve;
a nose of a delicate Hebrew
model [...] hair of a more
than weblike softness and
tenuity.
Edgar Allen Poe
TWO ELEMENTS OF ROMANTICISM
The Pastoral
Focuses on the power
and might of natural
world
 Extreme landscapes
(mountains, polar
regions, high seas)
 Emphasises man’s
powerlessness

Copyright R. SIbley, University of Warwick
2013
Focuses on the beauty
of the natural world
 Landscapes usually
populated (people
and/or buildings)
 Idealises rural life
 Man is seen in
harmony with nature

The Sublime
THE PASTORAL VS THE SUBLIME
Copyright R. SIbley, University of Warwick
2013
Theodore Gericault, Evening: Landscape with
an Aquaduct (1818)
Horace Vernet, Stormy Coast Scene After a
Shipwreck (1830s)
1798
1826
1832
1840
1846
Wordsworth/ Coleridge
Lyrical Ballads
James Fennimore Cooper,
The Last of the Mohicans
Death of Sir Walter Scott
Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of
the Grotesque and
Arabesque
Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Mosses from Old Manse
Start of the American Civil
War
1865
1854
1850
1789
French Revolution
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The
Scarlett Letter
Henry David Thoreau,
Walden
1776
America declares its
independence
AMERICAN ROMANTICISM TIMELINE
ROMANTICISM AND AMERICAN
LITERATURE
•
•
This partly due to Romantic use of distant places,
but also reflects anxiety about validity of
American literature and culture.
America gained independence in 1776 but Poe
and Hawthorne (writing 1840s) show cultural
independence took far longer.
Copyright R. SIbley, University of Warwick
2013
•
Poe and Hawthorne use Romanticism to keep to
European literary tradition – stories not usually
set in America.
AMERICAN ROMANTICISM AND THE
GOTHIC
•
•
•
Copyright R. SIbley, University of Warwick
2013
•
Gothic romance prevalent in England between
1787 and 1799.
These stories often uncanny, macabre,
melodramatic and violent – atmosphere of gloom
and terror
Usually involve a vulnerable figure, often female,
who needs protection from a male character.
Narrative resolution is not usually attained –
death or alienation the only outcome for Poe and
Hawthorne.
Casper David Friedrich, Cloister Cemetery in the Snow (1817-19)
1818
1820
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
Charles Maturin, Melmoth the
Wanderer
1847
1796
Matthew Lewis, The Monk
Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
1794
Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of
Udolpho
1840
1786
William Beckford, Vathek
Edgar Allan Poe, Tales of the
Grotesque and Arabesque
1764
Hroace Walpole, The Castle of
Otranto
GOTHIC FICTION TIMELINE
James Gillray, Tales of Wonder 1802
Copyright R. SIbley, University of Warwick
2013
THE AGE OF TRANSCENDENTALISM
Transcendentalism (1836-1860s) was a
philosophical and literary movement that:




was a reaction against C18th Rationalism and
empiricism, (which derived all knowledge from sense
impressions).
was also a reaction again Calvinism and other highly
formalized religion.
stood against social conformity, materialism and
commercialism and promoted individualism
valued knowledge grounded in intuition.
viewed the natural world, which is seen as a
representation of the human spirit as well as a
physical fact.
Copyright R. SIbley, University of Warwick
2013

Copyright R. SIbley, University of Warwick
2013
Thomas Cole, “View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm” (1836)
TRANSCENDENTALISM AND LANGUAGE
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Nature”
http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/emerson/nature-emerson-
Copyright R. SIbley, University of Warwick
2013
Words are signs of natural facts. […] Every word which is
used to express a moral or intellectual fact, if traced to its
root, is found to be borrowed from some material appearance.
Right means straight; wrong means twisted. Spirit primarily
means wind; transgression, the crossing of a line;
supercilious, the raising of the eyebrow. We say the heart to
express emotion, the head to denote thought; and thought
and emotion are words borrowed from sensible things, and
now appropriated to spiritual nature. Most of the process by
which this transformation is made, is hidden from us in the
remote time when language was framed; but the same
tendency may be daily observed in children. Children and
savages use only nouns or names of things, which they
convert into verbs, and apply to analogous mental acts.
Copyright R. SIbley, University of Warwick
2013
T. H. MATHESON,
THE SCARLETT
LETTER (1860)
QUESTIONS FOR THE SEMINAR



What is the relationship between the individual
and society in these stories?
Is the influence of Transcendentalism apparent
in Poe and Hawthorne’s stories?
How reliable are the narrators of these stories?
Copyright R. SIbley, University of Warwick
2013

How do Poe and Hawthorne reflect the Gothic
impulse in their stories?
QUESTIONS FOR NEXT WEEK’S CLASS


Who is creating meaning in these stories – the
reader or the narrator?
How do the concepts of good and evil function in
these stories?
Copyright R. SIbley, University of Warwick
2013

How are these stories developing the Gothic
genre – what are the key differences and
similarities with Poe and Hawthorne?