Title: AMERICAN ROMANTICISM: INTRODUCTION
1AMERICAN ROMANTICISM INTRODUCTION
2ROMANTICISM THE MOVEMENT
- - dominated cultural thought from the last decade
of the 18th century well into the first decades
of the 20th century - 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
3ROMANTICISM THE MOVEMENT-2
- The Enlightenment faith in a perfectible material
and spiritual universe through the power of human
reason was shaken by the revolutions that ended
the century (The American Revolution, The French
Revolution, and the Napoleonic Warssome Romantic
artists actuallyfor a whileexalted Napoleon as
the ultimate Romantic heroe.g., Beethoven in his
Eroica Symphony, which later was used in
Hitchcocks Psycho)
4ROMANTICISM THE MOVEMENT-3
- Question What comes to mind or what do you
associate with the term Romanticism?
5ROMANTICISM THE MOVEMENT
- Although we usually associate a quaint or
exaggerated effusion of emotion with Romanticism
(hence, the shift in meaning of the word
Romantic to everything relating love), the
Romantic age brought about concepts of the
individual and his/her relationship to the
world/society that we still largely subscribe to,
even champion today.
6ROMANTICISM THE MOVEMENT-4
- Romanticism is the cult of the individual--the
cultural and psychological birth of the I--the
Self - Belief in an inner spark of divinity that links
one human being to another and all human beings
to the larger Truth - In poetry, visual art, and music, artists became
increasingly preoccupied with articulating the
personal experience that becomes, in turn, a
representative one - IMAGINATION becomes the source of artistic
vision/creativity (during the neo-classical age,
imagination was linked to fancy, which implied
the fantastic, fictive, and even false)
7ROMANTICISM THE MOVEMENT-5
- The artist (especially, the poet) takes on
quasi-religious status not only as prophet and
moral leader - The poet/artist as a divinely inspired vehicle
through which Nature and the common man find
their voices - Esp. See William Wordsworth, Preface to
Lyrical Ballads - Poet as Prophet
8ROMANTICISM THE MOVEMENT-6
- Concern for the common man came from both the
democratic changes of the age of Revolution, as
well as an interest in folk culture - In part, the search to preserve the stories,
songs, legends, and verse of the common people
came from a nationalistic impulse - E.g. in Germany, the Grimm brothers collected the
fairy tales of their region and country while
assembling a comprehensive dictionary of the
German language (the German equivalent of
Websters in the 19th century!) - But the Folk Movement also produced an
international language of human commonality, at
whose center stood the images of home and the
heart.
9ROMANTICISM THE MOVEMENT-6
- aesthetic changes individuality translated into
the revolution of feeling against form - Poets, painters, and musicians no longer trying
to make their expression fit conventional forms,
but carving out new forms to capture their
feelings and thoughts - Emphasis on the language of the Soul
10ROMANTICISM THE MOVEMENT-6
- Quintessential Romantic figures the hero, the
wanderer, and the genius - all journey to new lands (literally and
figuratively), defy limitations, and overcome
obstacles - 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
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- For the Romantic, nature was a constant companion
and teacher--both benign and tyrannical - Nature became
- the stage on which the human drama was played
- the context in which man came to understand his
place in the universe - the transforming agent which harmonized the
individual soul with what the Transcendentalists
would call the Over-Soul.
12ROMANTICISM THE MOVEMENT-8
- Throughout all of Romantic literature, music, and
art, Nature is a dynamic presence, a character
who speaks in a language of symbols at once
mysterious and anthropomorphic (i.e. speaking
with a voice similar to human voice, i.e. sharing
human qualities and characteristics, especially
in personification of natural objects, phenomena,
etc.) - allows man to come into dialogue with the
life-force
13ROMANTICISM MAJOR FIGURES
- Germany
- Authors Goethe (esp. The Sorrows of Young
Werther and Faust), Schiller (esp. William Tell)
Novalis, Eichendorff, Schlegel, and the Grimm
brothers - Painters Caspar David Friedrich
- Composers Beethoven, Schubert (songs),
Mendelssohn (wedding march from Midsummer Nights
Dream), Richard Wagner,
14ROMANTICISM MAJOR FIGURES
- Great Britain
- Authors Robert Burns, William Blake, William
Wordsworth, Sir Walter Scott, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley. - Painters William Blake, John Constable, Joseph
Turner
15AMERICAN 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.
16AMERICAN 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.
17RADICAL 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)
18VISUALIZING AMERICAN ROMANTICISM THE HUDSON
RIVER SCHOOL
- The first coherent school of American art, the
Hudson River painters, helped to shape the mythos
of the American landscape - Thomas Cole (1801-1848)
- Asher B. Durand (1796-1886)
- Frederick Church (1826-1900)
- Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902)
19Thomas Cole, The Falls of Kaaterskill (1826)
20Thomas Cole, The Oxbow (View from Mount Holyoke,
Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm,
1836)
21Asher Durand, Kindred Spirits (1848)
22Asher Durand, Kindred Spirits (1848)
- In it Durand depicts himself, together with Cole,
on a rocky promontory in serene contemplation of
the scene before them - In the foreground stands one of the school's
famous symbols--a broken tree stump-- what Cole
called a "memento mori - I.e. a reminder that life is fragile and
impermanent only Nature and the Divine within
the Human Soul are eternal. - Tiny as the human beings are in this composition,
they are nevertheless elevated by the grandeur of
the landscape in which they are in
23Frederic Edwin Church, The Natural Bridge
(1852)
24Alfred Bierstadt, Emigrants Crossing the Plains
(1867)
25Alfred Bierstadt, Looking Up the Yosemite
Valley (ca. 1865-67)
26VISUALIZING AMERICAN ROMANTICISM THE HUDSON
RIVER SCHOOL
- Though influenced by European Romantic painting,
they tried to define a distinct vision for
American art - Began with the grand views of the Hudson Valley
and surrounding Catskill Mountains in NY - They celebrated the vast resources and
magnificent landscapes of the new nation
(Natures Nation) - Depicting a wilderness in which man is small in
comparison but still formed an essential element
in a divine harmony - As Thomas Cole maintained, if nature were
untouched by the hand of man--as was much of the
primeval American landscape in the early 19th
century--then man could become more easily
acquainted with the hand of God
27VISUALIZING AMERICAN ROMANTICISM THE HUDSON
RIVER SCHOOL
- Influence of Transcendentalists on Hudson River
School - Emerson had written in his 1841 essay Thoughts
on Art that painting should become a vehicle
through which the universal mind could reach the
mind of mankind, - Thus Hudson River painters believed art to be an
agent of moral and spiritual transformation.
28AMERICAN ROMANTICISM THE POETRY
- William Cullen Bryant, To a Waterfowl and The
Prairies - Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney, Niagara
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, A Psalm of Life and
The Fire of Drift-wood