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American Romanticism
Image Courtesy Library of Congress
© 2009 McGraw-Hill Higher
Education. All rights reserved.
Key Figures
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Washington Irving (1783-1859)
James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851)
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
Margaret Fuller (1810-1850)
Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864)
Herman Melville (1819–1891)
© 2009 McGraw-Hill Higher
Education. All rights reserved.
Key Dates
• 1786
• 1791
• 1820–60
Publication of Freneau’s “The Wild Honey Suckle”
Publication of Bartram’s Travels
Peak of American Romanticism
Bryant’s “Thanatopsis”
Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle”
Irving’s “Sleepy Hollow”
Cooper’s Pioneers
Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century
Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter
Emerson’s Representative Men
 1851 Melville’s Moby-Dick
 1854 Thoreau’s Walden
 1855 Whitman’s Leaves of Grass
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• 1861
1817
1819
1820
1823
1845
1850
With the Civil War, the Romantic movement and its
optimistic spirit ended
© 2009 McGraw-Hill Higher
Education. All rights reserved.
Key Facts about the Period
There are three principal reasons for the
development of American Romanticism:
• The breakup of New England Calvinist sects and the
emergence of Unitarianism as a compromise between
Calvinism and Deism.
• The influence of French, British, and German
Romanticism: Rousseau, Wordsworth, Carlyle, Scott,
Shelley, Keats, Herder, Kant, and Goethe.
• The rise of political nationalism, which fueled a cultural
nationalism.
© 2009 McGraw-Hill Higher
Education. All rights reserved.
Key Facts about American
Romanticism
Characteristics:
• A sense of wonder
• Belief in the potentiality of all life
• Adherence to the view of individuals as innately good
• Faith in the directing resource of the subconscious, inner
life
• The favoring of the emotions, intuition, and imagination
over intellect, science, and rationalism
© 2009 McGraw-Hill Higher
Education. All rights reserved.
Key Facts about American
Romanticism
• Anti-intellectual
Books are for the scholar’s idle times. When he can read God directly [in nature], the
hour is too precious to be wasted in other men’s transcripts of their readings.
—Emerson, “The American Scholar”
• A deep love of nature, a source of wisdom, guidance, consolation,
and happiness (Consider the Hudson River School of Painting.)
• Healthy contempt for traditions, conventions, and past knowledge,
all of which can be restrictive of new, individualistic approaches to
life
The books of an older period will not fit this. … Meek young men grow up in libraries,
believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacon,
have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries,
when they wrote these books.
—Emerson, “The American Scholar”
© 2009 McGraw-Hill Higher
Education. All rights reserved.
Key Facts about American
Romanticism
• Anti-authoritarianism and anti-institutionalism,
celebrating those most remote from civilization’s
corrupting influences, such as Indians and children
There is something in the character and habits of the North American
savage, taken in connection with the scenery over which he is accustomed
to range, its vast lakes, boundless forests, majestic rivers and trackless
plains, that is, to my mind, wonderfully striking and sublime.
—Washington Irving, “Traits of Indian Character”
• Intense nationalism, often calling for the development
and support of a native literature
© 2009 McGraw-Hill Higher
Education. All rights reserved.
Key Facts about American
Romanticism
• Search for more organic forms to compliment the new country
• Works of adventurous literature (sometimes boyishly so), with
stories of life among cannibals, Gothic horror tales, Indian fights,
and struggles out West
• For some, an interest in the Gothic, the mysterious, the strange
(Hawthorne and Poe)
• Often symbolic (Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe)
• Often treat of openly personal, subjective, and autobiographical
themes
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul…
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
—Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
© 2009 McGraw-Hill Higher
Education. All rights reserved.
Key Facts about American
Romanticism
• An admiration for reformers and individuals of action, like
John Brown (a hero to Thoreau, Melville, and Emerson)
• Often involved in social movements, like abolition and
women’s rights.
• Activism often took precedence over writing
My life has been the poem I would have writ
But I could not both live and utter it.
– Henry David Thoreau
© 2009 McGraw-Hill Higher
Education. All rights reserved.
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