Introduction to Romanticism Essay -- essays research papers

For many years, this period and these writers were known as the American Renaissance, a coin terminal figureed by F.O. Matthiessen in his set aside of that name in 1941. This book set the parameters of how to read and connect these writers until relatively recently, when its limitations, especi anyy in toll of defining the "canon" of literary giants and what made them (all male) "giants" have been recognized and challenged. However, the term is still useful to some degree. It is a misnomer, if atomic number 53 thinks of the period as a m of rebirth of some earlier literary greatness, as the European Renaissance, because there was nothing to be "reborn." The great writers of this period, roughly 1840-1865 although to a greater extent particularly 1850-1855, marked the first maturing of American letters. It was a Renaissance in the sense of a flowering, excitement over human possibilities, and a high-pitched regard for individual ego. It was definitely an d even defiantly American, as these writers struggled to rede what "American" could possibly mean, especially in terms of a literature which was distinctively American and not British. Their inability to resolve this struggle--and it was even more(prenominal) a personal one than a nationalistic one, for it questioned their identity and ordinate in society--did much to fire them creatively. However, we will call this American romanticism, though it shares many characteristics with British romanticism. It flourished in the glow of Wordsworths poetic encounter with nature and himself in The Prelude, Coleridges literary theories about the reconciliation of opposites, the romantic posturings and irony of Byron, the drenching imagery of Keats, and the transcendental lyricism of Shelley, even the Gothicism of Mary Shelley and the Bronte sisters. Growing from the rhetoric of salvation, guilt, and providential visions of Puritanism, the wilderness reaches of this continent, an d the fiery rhetoric of freedom and equality, though, the American target of romanticism developed its own character, especially as these writers tried self-consciously to be new and original. The glory years were 1850-1855. What was it in American agriculture and British influences that led to the incredible flowering of masterpieces in this era Emersons exemplar Men, Hawthornes The Scarlet Letter, The House of Seven Gables, Melvilles Moby-Dick and Pierre,... ...arative contact, but they are useful and chief(prenominal) ones. Perhaps we will risk some confusion here and for plastered we will have to neglect some biographical context as we "mix and match" writers. But we will be able to concenter on those ideas which united (and even divided) them that makes us able to call them all "romantics." After we have read a work, we will "revive" it in discussions of later topics, taking the different perspective, for there must a certain arbitrariness in &q uotassigning" a work to only one theme. Great and complex works must not be peculiar(a) like that So rather than progressing through time and historical/biographical contexts, we will keep circling recursively (as Emerson says we must), seeing how the different works and writers explore the major(ip) aspects of romantic thought and art. Our base is necessarily Emerson, the literary giant of his time in America, for better or worse. Though his writing is often thorny to read, it was, in fact, the match that lit all of the creative fires of his time. He posture his pen on all of the sensitive spots in the American creative psyche Whitman was not the only one to "boil."