Unit 4 The Literature of Romanticism

(1781—1865)

l        Key Words: Romanticism, Transcendentalism, American Renaissance,

l       Target: This unit aims at introducing the American Literature in the 18^th century —the Literature of Romanticism, including the literary history and the leading writers, together with their famous works.

l       Study Points:

1.       Early Romanticism;

2.       Transcendental Romanticism;

3.       High Romanticism;

4.       Transitional Figures from Romanticism to Realism

l        Teaching Hours: 16 (History: 8 hours and Reading: 8 hours) 

I.  Romanticism in Europe

◆     Background
Ø         Industrial Revolution (1760s—)
Ø         French Revolution (1789—1799)
Ø         Romanticism is a reaction against Neoclassicism.
Ø         Neoclassicism (John Dryden, Alexander Pope—An Essay on Criticism) Conciseness, elegance, good taste and wit, combined pleasure with instruction and matched content with style.
Ø         Romanticism (Wordsworth & Coleridge: Lyrical Ballads in 1798) Stressed individual and creative function of imagination
　

II. American Romanticism

◆      Background

Ø         The expansive spirit suits the needs of a new nation that was expanding:

Ø         physically (vast frontiers/ nature/ wilderness /population)

Ø         economically (industrialization /technology/ one-man flour-mill/ the cotton gin/ sewing machine/ the telegraph

Ø         politically (nationalism/ egalitarian belief)

Ø         optimism

◆ Romantic Subject Matter

Ø         The quest for beauty: non-didactic, "pure beauty."

Ø         The use of the far-away and non-normal - antique and fanciful:

Ø         In historical perspective: antiquarianism; antiquing or artificially aging; interest in the past.

Ø         Characterization and mood: grotesque, gothicism, sense of terror,

•   fear; use of the odd and queer.

•   Escapism - from American problems.

•   Interest in external nature - for itself, for beauty:

•   Nature as source for the knowledge of the primitive.

•   Nature as refuge.

•   Nature as revelation of God to the individual.

◆ Romantic Attitudes

Ø         Appeals to imagination; use of the "willing suspension of disbelief."

Ø         Stress on emotion rather than reason; optimism, geniality.

Ø         Subjectivity: in form and meaning. 

◆ Romantic Techniques

Ø         Remoteness of settings in time and space.

Ø         Improbable plots.

Ø         Inadequate or unlikely characterization.

Ø         Authorial subjectivity.

Ø         Socially "harmful morality;" a world of "lies."

Ø         Organic principle in writing: form rises out of content, non-formal.

Ø         Experimentation in new forms: picking up and using obsolete patterns.

Ø         Cultivation of the individualized, subjective form of writing.

◆ Definition

The Romantic period covers the first half of the nineteenth century. A rising America with its ideals of democracy and equality, its industrialization, its westward expansion, and a variety of foreign influences were among the important factors which made literary expansion and expression not only possible but also inevitable in the period after political independence. Romantics frequently shared the certain general characteristics: moral enthusiasm, faith in value of individualism and intuitive perception, and a presumption that the natural world was a source of goodness and man’s societies a source of corruption. Irving deserves credit for the part he played in inspiring the American romantic imagination. American Romanticism culminated around the 1840s in what has come to be known as “New England Transcendentalism” or “American Renaissance”. The major literary figures are such as Emerson, Hawthorne etc.

◆ Classification of Romanticism

◇ Early Romantic Representatives

•   William Cullen Bryant (poetry)

•   Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (poetry)

•   Washington Irving (fiction)

•   James Fennimore Cooper (fiction)

◇ Transcendental Romanticism

•   Ralph Waldo Emerson (prose and poetry)

•   Henry David Thoreau (prose)

◇ High Romanticism

•   Edgar Allan Poe (poetry, fiction, criticism)

•   Nathaniel Hawthorne (fiction)

•   Herman Melville (fiction)

◇ Transitional Figures from Romanticism to Realism

•   Walt Whitman (poetry)

•   Emily Dickinson (poetry)

◆ Characteristics of the romantic movement exemplified in American literature

Ø         sentimentalism (The Sketch Book);

Ø         primitivism and the cult of the “noble savage” (Hiawatha);

Ø         political liberalism (Jefferson, Paine);

Ø         the celebration of natural beauty and the simple life (Cooper, Emerson, Thoreau);

Ø         introspection (Poe, Thoreau);

Ø         idealization of the common man, uncorrupted by civilization (Whittier, Cooper);

Ø         interest in the picturesque past (Irving, Hawthorne);

Ø         interest in remote places (Melville); medievalism (Longfellow);

Ø         antiquarianism leading to the revival of the popular ballad (Longfellow, Whittier);

Ø         concern with a crepuscular (dim) world of mystery (Poe);

Ø         individualism (Emerson, Thoreau, Whittier);

Ø         technical innovation (Whitman's prosody);

Ø         morbid melancholy (Poe);

Ø         native legendry and the historical romance (Cooper).

II. The post revolutionary period

(1781—1836) — Early Romantics

(1) James Fennimore Cooper

 (1789—1851)

 ◆ Life

Ø        the first American novelist who set the pattern of a quite different sort of individualism, romantic individualism

Ø        son of Judge Cooper, born and grew up on one of an enormously landed estate in northern New York, where the judge founded Cooperstown

Ø        attended Yale, and expelled for playing too many practical jokes instead of studying in his third year. 

Ø        sent him to sea as a sailor and later became a midshipman aboard a navy vessel. 

Ø        left the navy and married Susan De Lancy.

Ø        a humorous bet with his wife provided him with a successful career. 

Ø        when reading an English novel to his wife, he threw the book away in disgust, declaring that he could write a better one. 

Ø        Mrs. Cooper challenged him to do so. The result was the not quiet successful novel Precaution, imitating Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1820). 

Ø        In 1821, his second book The Spy was an immediate success, based on a real hero of The American Revolution, hanged as a traitor, but was later shown to be a patriot employed by George Washington

Ø        Two years later he followed up this initial success with The Pioneer (1823), placed on Lake Otsego at his own childhood hometown Cooperstown (In the book, it is the Templetown and Judge Templeton).

Ø        In the story, there are two things worthy of note:

Ø        Cooper's genuine love for the magnificent virgin forests of his youth

Ø        the figure of an old hunter, Natty Bumppo.

Ø        The way in which the advance of civilization infringed on the beautiful wilderness, with Natty as spokesman for the laws of nature and the judge representing the manmade laws necessary in an organized society, provided the central conflict of the book.

Ø        In The Pioneer he unconsciously formulated a, or perhaps the central American myth---the image of an independent, self-reliant solitary man, the quintessence of individualism, in the untroubled, unimaginably huge, virgin forest. 

Ø        Cooper's hero Natty has no more human history than the forest in which he lives.  We know nothing of his birthplace, his parents, his education, his religion, how he came to be a forest dweller, whether there is anyone anywhere who misses or remembers him.

Ø        Cooper did not realize the significance of the character he had created and had no intention of writing another book about Bumppo. 

Ø        However, the enormous public response made him follow up this success with The Last of the Mohicans. 

Ø        In this we go back in time.  The woodsman is only 30, and shares the stage with a young Indian friend, Uncas (son of the later forlorn Chingachgook), who is killed by a treacherous Indian enemy.

Ø        In 1826, Cooper moved his family to Europe where he spent the next 7 years.  There he responded again to popular demand for more of Natty by writing The Prairie in which Natty is found to be 80 years old. 

Ø        In 1841 The Pathfinder came out.  It deals with earlier history and tells a story of the American's exploits as a scout (侦察员，守望员) in French and Indian Wars. 

Ø        In 1843, Cooper concluded the whole thing in reverse by presenting the twenty-year-old Deerslayer at his first setting out in life in Deerslayer.  In it we meet him already alone and at home in the forest.

◆     Literary Achievement

Ø        Cooper is not a skilful writer. 

–   His dialogue is wooden and inconsistent,

–   his Indians are hopelessly unreal (daubed over with read)

–   his descriptions are often longwinded and pretentious

–   his plot depends heavily on improbable accidents and absurd mistakes. 

Ø        However, the solitary figure of Natty Bumpoo became the prototype of varied incarnations of this solitary figure, the romantic individualist, in Ishmael, Huck Finn, Isabel Archer, Henry Fleming, Sister Carrie and Lieutenant Henry.

Ø        The creation of the famous Leatherstocking saga has cemented his position as the first great national novelist and his influence pervades American literature.

Ø        Cooper produced twenty-nine other long works of fiction and fifteen books - enough to fill forty-eight volumes in the new definitive edition of his Works.

Ø        The first successful American historical romance in the vein of Sir Walter Scott (The Spy, 1821). 

Ø        The first sea novel (The Pilot, 1824).

Ø        The first and only five-volume epic romance to carry its mythic hero -- Natty Bumppo -- from youth to old age.

Ø         The Leatherstocking Tales in their chronological sequence (not in the order they were published) are

–     Deerslayer (1843)

–     The Last of Mohicans (1825)

–     Pathfinder (1841)

–     The Pioneer (1823)

–     The Prairie (1827).

◇ Deerslayer

Natty Bumppo known as Deerslayer, set in the 1740s.  Natty Bumppo helps Hutter, tramper, to resist an Iroqois attack and return to his fortress. He is joined by the Mohican chief Chigachgook.  Trying to rescue his friend, Natty is captured and saved by Hetty, Hutter's daughter and Chingachgook.  Natty is loved by Judith, another daughter of Hutter.  Although Judith disappears and marries a British officer, Natty treasures romantic memories of the affair.

◇The Last of Mohicans

Natty as Hawkeye, set in 1757.  Cora and Alice going to their father in Fort William.  Henry, accompanied by Dancan Heyward, Alice's fiance, and the treacherous Indian Magua who secretly serves the French.  His plan to betray the party to the Iroqois is discovered by Hawkeye and Chingachgook and his son Uncas, the only survivor of the Mohican aristocracy.  Magua promises them safety on the condition that Cora will be his wife.  In the end, Uncas and Cora are killed, and Hawkeye shoots Magua and continues his frontier career.

◇ Patherfinder

set in 1759 with Natty as Pathfinder.  Mabel Dunham is on her way to join her father at the British Fort at Osuego, Lake Ontario, accompanied by her uncle, Charles Cap, and Pathfinder aged 40, Chingachgook.  In the end, some were captured and wounded by the Iroqois, and Mabel promises to wed Pathfinder if he protects her father.  Dunham dies, hoping Mabel and Pathfinder will marry, but Jasper has won Mabel's love.

◇ The Pioneer

Judge Temple accidentally shoots Edwards, young companion of Natty.  The Judge and his daughter befriended the young man who persists in his mysterious association with Natty and Chingachgook.  Natty was imprisoned for shooting deer out of season, and after his release, Elizabeth visits him and is trapped by a forest fire.  She is saved by Edwards, and Chingachgook dies after his rescue by Bumppo.  Elizabeth them married Edwards who proved to be the grandson of the Judge's friend Edward Effingham.

◇ The Prairie

Natty is nearly 90 in 1804.  He encounters an emigrant train led by Ishmael Bush and his rascally brother-in-law Abiram White, in whose party is a woman captive concealed in a wagon. The old trapper barely averts an Indian raid on the train, which he them guides to a safe camp.  He is joined by a young soldier, Duncan Uncas Middleton seeking his betrothed kidnapped for ransom. Discovering she is Ishmael's captive, he rescues her with the help of the trapper. Natty has saved these people again and again, but he himself finally yields to the weakness of his years, and dies quietly, surrounded by his friends.

Points for Further Research

Ø         Women characters in the Leather Stocking Tales

Ø         Cooper's concepts of Indians and his creation of Indian characters

Ø         Conflicts between nature and civilization in Cooper's epic romance 

(2) Washington Irving

(1783—1859)

◆ Life

Ø         Born on Wall Street, NY, April 3, 1783, son of a rather wealthy merchant family;

Ø         In his early age he started to read widely in English literature at home and write juvenile poems;

Ø         He studied law in 1799.

Ø         He wrote satirical essays on the theater and the New York society in 1803.

Ø         He was in Europe for his health from 1804—1805.

Ø        Collaborating with his brother, he started an anonymous satirical magazine Salmagundi (1807—1808) and wrote sketches, poems and essays on a great range of topics.

Ø         In 1815 he went to England and took up authorship as a profession after the failure of the family business in 1818. He remained in Europe for 18 years.

Ø         He was attaché to the American envoy to Spain from 1826 to 1829.

Ø         He served as secretary to the American legation in London from 1829 to 1832.

Ø         In 1832 he returned to America and traveled extensively.

Ø         He was appointed Minister to Spain (1842—1846).

Ø         He went to England in 1850.

Ø         He died on November 28, 1859.

◆     Literary Achievement

Ø         His first book: A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty，by Diedrich Knickebocker [《纽约外史》or 《迪德里奇·尼克博克所著的纽约史，自开天辟地起至荷兰王朝末为止》](1809.)

Ø         The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon [《见闻札记》] (1819—1820): Thirty-three essays and stories, like Rip Van Winkle, The Legend of Sleep Hollow.

Ø         The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus [《克里斯托弗·哥伦布的生平和航行》] (1828), A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada [《攻克格拉纳达》] (1828), Voyages and Discoveries of the Companions of Columbus [《哥伦布的伙伴们的航行与发现》] (1831)

Ø         The Life of oliver Goldsmith [《奥列佛·哥尔斯密》] (1849)

Ø         Life of George Washington [《乔治·华盛顿传》] (1855-1859)

◆      Style

Ø         Graceful, refined, fluent and dignified;

Ø         Sentimental emotion in the matter;

Ø         The theme of change, of mutability

◆      Comment

Ø         Irving was the central figure in the American literary world between1809 and the Civil War;

Ø         His works win him the acclaim as the first prose stylist of American romantic writer;

Ø         He wrote for pleasure and to produce for pleasure. He gave an impetus both to the American humor and to the urbane wit;

Ø         He was the first American author to win international recognition, and was extremely popular in Europe;

Ø         He introduced the familiar essay to America, and enriched his nation's culture with his cosmopolitan reflection of the themes and modes of British and continental romanticism.

Ø         Irving created humor by the way he said things. He delighted in making ironic, tongue-in-check remarks which say just the opposite of what he meant.

Ø         He used dignified words to produce a half-mocking effect.

Ø         He was also fond of exaggerating the seriousness of situations.

Ø         He not only provided a young nation with humorous, fictional accounts of the colonial past but also helped create an American mythology which is made up of stories about the American past so widely read as to be familiar to nearly every American.

◆      Literary Appreciation—Rip Van Winkle

Ø         Man couldn't fall behind the advancing age;

Ø         Man couldn't escape from one's responsibilities;

Ø         Man couldn't lose his identity 

Ø         Contradictory impulses in America towards work—the Puritan attitude as opposed to the American desire for leisure.

Part 1 || Part 2 || Part 3

Reference Books:

q      Chang Yaoxin: A Survey of American Literature, the 2^nd edition. Tianjin: Nankai University Press, 2003.12

q      Liu Cunbo: Selected Readings in British and American Literature, Beijing: Higher Education Press, 2001

q      陈新选著：《英美名家短篇小说精品赏析》，北京：中国对外翻译出版公司，

q       李翠葶，李正栓：《美国文学学习指南》，北京：清华大学出版社，2002

q       万　莉，陈范霞：《英美文学选读》，北京：光明日报社，2001

q    吴定柏：《美国文学大纲》，上海：上海外语教育出版社，1998

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