Romanticism

1800-1860
Genres and Style of Romanticism
Character sketches
 Slave narratives
 Poetry
 Short stories

Effects and Aspects of
Romanticism
Value feeling and intuition over
reasoning
 Journey away from corruption of
civilization and limits of rational thought
toward the integrity of nature and
freedom of the imagination

Historical Context
Expansion of magazines, newspapers,
and book publishing
 Slavery debates
 Industrial revolution brings ideas that the
old ways of doing things are now
irrelevant

Authors and Titles
Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle”
 Dunbar’s “We Wear the Masks”
 Emily Dickinson
 Walt Whitman

American
Renaissance/Transcendentalism

1840 – 1860

Note the overlap in time period with
Romanticism. Some consider the
transcendentalists to be the dark
romantics or gothics
Genres and Style of Am.
Renaissance/Transcendentalism
Poetry
 Novels
 Anti-transcendentalists
 Holds readers’ attention through dread
of a series of terrible possibilities
 Feature landscapes of dark forests,
extreme vegetation, concealed ruins
with horrific rooms, depressed
characters

Effects and Aspects of
Transcendentalists
True reality is spiritual
 Comes from the 18th century
philosopher of Immanuel Kant
 Idealists
 Self reliance and individualism
 Emerson and Thoreau

Effects and Aspects of
Anti-Transcendentalism
Used symbolism to great effect
 Sin, pain, and evil exist
 Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville

Historical Context
Portrayal of alluring antagonists whose
evil characteristics appeal to one’s
sense of awe
 Stories of the persecuted young girl
forced apart from her true love
 People seeking beauty in life and in
nature, a belief in true love and
contentment

Authors and Titles
Poems, aphorisms, and essays of
Thoreau and Emerson
 Edgar Allen Poe
 Nathaniel Hawthorne*

Realism and Regionalism
1855 – 1900
 Civil War period and post Civil War

Styles and Genres
Novels and short stories
 Objective narrator
 Does not tell reader how to interpret the
story
 Voices from around the country
 Local color stories

Effects and Affects
Social realism seeks to change a social
problem
 Aesthetic realism: art that insists on
detailing the world as one sees it

Historical Context

Civil War brings demand for a truer type
of literature that does not idealize people
or places
Authors and Titles
Mark Twain’s The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn (some say it is the first
American novel)
 Ambrose Bierce
 Stephen Crane
 The Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass
 Jack London
