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- First appearance in Germany in the 1770s (Sturm und Drang); flowering in England in the 1790s; importation to America from the 1820s onward To a large degree, Romanticism was a reaction against the Enlightenment or Age of Reason, especially its emphasis on formal propriety, classical style, and decorum
But: the Folk Movement also produced an international language of human commonality, at whose center stood the images of home and the heart.
SHREK, anybody??? Hero/wanderer fascination also came from the Romantic identification and exploration of everything Medieval (the Middle Ages were thought to be characterized by mystery and irrationality)
Typical Romantic motifs:
Exotic lands (Melville, especially his South Sea novels and Moby Dick) Amorphous world of dreams (Coleridge, Kubla Khan) Dark terrors of the psyche (E. A. Poe!) Dizzying heightsin both nature and human creativity (Frankenstein) Sublime vistas in nature reflecting the divine and potentially terrifying powers o f the human mind, spirit, and soul
AMERICAN ROMANTICISM
Often associated with the terms American Renaissance and Transcendentalism Poets: William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson Prose Writers: Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Herman Melville.
AMERICAN ROMANTICISM
QUESTIONS:
What distinguishes American Romanticism? How was AR influenced and shaped by the political developments of the early national and ante-bellum period (circa 1820-1860)? What does the term American Renaissance (a later coinage by literary critic F. O. Matthiesen) imply about the distinctiveness of American Romanticism and its relationship to European Romanticism? Is there any connection between AR and an emerging cultural identity in the United States? How did the geographic and social landscapes of the United States influence AR?
The frontier, the wilderness, expansion Slavery, racism, sectionalism, class conflict, industrialization, gender inequality, Indian removal, etc.
RADICAL ROMANTICISM?
QUESTIONS:
General: to what degree can artists/authors both exemplify/represent and stand outside of or critique a culture at the same time? Where, how, or to what degree do the writers we are encountering sanction/affirm and/or challenge, critique, or even subvert the spirit of the age? How can we appreciate radical departures from or challenges to perceived wisdom, standard ways of thinking, political culture, power structures, tradition, and convention? To what degree do these challenges still matter to us and possibly even offer useful correctives to our own mode of thinking and living? Or: where, how, and to what degree was the Romantic challenge actually part of the machine? In other words, can the establishment ever critique itself? (E.g. the problem of the Transcendentalists obvious male bias, or the Emerson-Thoreau tension)
Thomas Cole, The Oxbow (View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm, 1836)