AMERICAN ROMANTICISM: REVIEW
WORKS READ:
Puritan Tradition
Anne Bradstreet poems
Jonathan Edwards sermon
Hawthorne: "Young Goodman Brown" and The Scarlet Letter
Bryant: "To a Waterfowl" and "Thanatopsis"
Poe: "Sonnet - to Science"
Whitman: "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer"
Irving: "Rip Van Winkle"
Poe: "The Fall of the House of Usher"
ROMANTIC THEMES in AMERICAN LITERATURE:
Man and nature:
Nature as spirit, as good for man
Nature as ideal, as a metaphor for the Self
Nature as powerful in relation to man
Nature as an escape from society and means towards independence, but as an
ambiguous place where man is free to err as well as to become better
Nature as a way of obtaining insight, emotional and intellectual awakening
Nature as "the neutral territory where the Actual and the Imaginative may meet,"
thus an appropriate and congenial setting for romantic stories
Man as an individual:
Concern for the full development of the individual
Interest in examining the nature of man
Trust in intuition as a unique faculty of man; imagination and feeling as valid
ways of understanding the world
Non-conformity (Listen to yourself, not the crowd.)
Interest in how far the individual can go in becoming fully realized
Escape:
An interest in the past and the exotic, as different from the American present
Journey from the mundane in order to achieve self-realization
Imagination as a means of escaping a dull, unfulfilling reality
Civilization:
Place of moral ambiguity
Sometimes even a place of corruption and death
Questions to ask: How does each writer in each work deal with each theme? What is his attitude toward these
various subjects and themes?