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Title: AMERICAN ROMANTICISM: INTRODUCTION


1
AMERICAN ROMANTICISM INTRODUCTION
2
ROMANTICISM 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

3
ROMANTICISM 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)


4
ROMANTICISM THE MOVEMENT-3
  • Question What comes to mind or what do you
    associate with the term Romanticism?

5
ROMANTICISM 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.

6
ROMANTICISM 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)

7
ROMANTICISM 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

8
ROMANTICISM 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.

9
ROMANTICISM 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

10
ROMANTICISM 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

11
ROMANTICISM THE MOVEMENT-7
  • 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.

12
ROMANTICISM 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

13
ROMANTICISM 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,

14
ROMANTICISM 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

15
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.

16
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.

17
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)

18
VISUALIZING 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)

19
Thomas Cole, The Falls of Kaaterskill (1826)

20
Thomas Cole, The Oxbow (View from Mount Holyoke,
Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm,
1836)
21
Asher Durand, Kindred Spirits (1848)
22
Asher 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

23
Frederic Edwin Church, The Natural Bridge
(1852)
24
Alfred Bierstadt, Emigrants Crossing the Plains
(1867)
25
Alfred Bierstadt, Looking Up the Yosemite
Valley (ca. 1865-67)
26
VISUALIZING 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

27
VISUALIZING 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.

28
AMERICAN 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
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