美国文学(浪漫主义)

American Romanticism

Ⅰ. American Romanticism stretches from the end of the 18th century through the outbreak of the civil War. / It started with the publication of Irving’s The Sketch Book in 1819 and ended with the publication of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in 1855.

Ⅱ. Radical Changes of the Age

1.Its population: in 1810 the population totaled little more than 7,000,000. 51 years later, the number of Americans had reached to more than 31,000,000.

2.Its land: in 1810 there were 17 states, at the beginning of the Civil War (1861-1865), the number of the states had doubled.

3.The fast spread of industrialism and urbanization

4.The sudden increase of population, including the flux of immigrants.

5. The pioneers pushing the frontier further west.

All these produced something of an economic boom and with it, a tremendous sense of optimism and hope among the people. A nation bursting into new life cried for literary expression.

Ⅲ.American Literature of the Age

1. As a European literary movement, Romanticism originated and strengthened in Germany, France and England in the middle of the 18th century as a rebellion against the prevailing Neo-classicism and Rationalism during the Age of Reason.

2. Features of Romanticism

1) emphasis on imagination;

2) emphasis on individualism – personal feelings, emotionsand freedom, no hero worship, natural goodness of human beings;

3) colloquial language;

4) back to nature

3.American Romanticism is one of the most important periods in the history of American literature, It is a rebellion against the objectivity of rationalism.

4. Features of American Romanticism

1)As a logical result of its foreign and native factors at work, American Romanticism was both imitative and independent.

imitative 1. works of Sir Walter Scott

2. works of English Romantist poets

3. works of the graveyard poets

Independent: new and alien

2)There is the American Puritanism as a cultural heritage to consider. The American Romantic authors tended more to moralise than to entertain.

Ⅳ. Comments on this period

It was an age of great westward expansion, of the increasing gravity of the slavery question, of an intensification of the spirit of embattled sectionalism in the South, and of a powerful impulse to reform in the North.

In liter ature it was America’s first great creative period, a full flowering of the romantic impulse on American soil(The First American Renaissence). Although foreign influencrs were strong, American romanticism exhibited from the very outset distinct features of its own.