CHARACTERISTICS

WRITERS

HISTORICAL EVENTS  

v      Explored what it meant to be an American, an American artist

v      Looked at American government and political problems

v      The problems of war and Black slavery

v      Emerging materialism and conformity

v      Influence of immigration, new customs and traditions

v      Sexuality; relationships between men and women

v      The power of nature

v      Individualism, emphasis on destructive effect of society on individual 

v      Idealism

v       Spontaneity in thought and action

v      Not an optimistic vision of America; pictures of human frailty, weakness, limitation

v      Writers spoke not directly but obliquely, ambiguously

v      Christianity a valuable source of symbols

v      Stories built around dreams

v      Stories of emblematic pilgrimages or journeys

v      Hero seems to represent a general type of person

v      Belief that evil is merely the absence of good

v      Through the symbolism of writing, portrayal of the reality beyond what’s visible, thus putting into practice the central notion of Transcendental thought.

v      Critique of formalized church, faith must come from within

TRANSCENDENTALISM  (1835 – 1860)

A New England movement rooted in Romanticism and post-Kantian idealism. Basically religious, emphasized role and importance of individual conscience and value of intuition in matters of moral guidance and inspiration. Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Fuller. Critical of formalized religion. All constructive practical activity, great literature viewed as an expression of the divine spirit. An ambition to achieve vivid perception of the divine as it operates in common life which would lead to personal cultivation. Insistence on authority of individual conscience

A trust in the individual, democracy, possibility of continued change for the better

A need to see beyond what is before our eyes, to see a deeper significance, a transcendent reality

Intellectual eclecticism; a vague conception  of the God-like nature of human spirit

Nature conceived of not as a machine but as an organism, symbol and analogue of the mind

Spontaneous activity of the creative artist seen as the highest achievement

GOTHIC ROMANCE:

·         More interest in action than in the development of character

·         Action often fantastic, allegorical, interest in the supernatural, terror, madness

·         Characters have mysterious origins; tend to be ideal, exaggerated, more types

·         Suspense and mystery involving fantastic and supernatural, interest in light and shade

·         Interest in evil, its origins

·         Descriptions of various mental states often verging on the abnormal

 Prose:

Washington Irving   (1783 – 1859)

James Fennimore Cooper  (1789 – 1851)

William Cullen Bryant   (1794 – 1878)

 Edgar Allan Poe   (1809 – 1849)

Ralph Waldo Emerson   (1803 – 1882)

Nathaniel Hawthorne   (1804 – 1864)

Margaret Fuller   (1810 – 1850)

Henry David Thoreau   (1817 – 1862)

Herman Melville   (1819 – 1891)

Harriet Beecher Stowe   (1811- 1896)

Louisa May Alcott  (1832 – 1888)

Poetry:

“The Boston Brahmins”

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 

                                              (1807–1882)

Oliver Wendell Holmes  (1809 – 1894)

James Russell Lowell  (1819 – 1891)

Walt Whitman   (1819 – 1892)

Emily Dickinson   (1830 – 1886)

1812 – War with England

1815-50 – Westward Expansion

1846-48 –  Mexican War

1849 –   California gold rush

1861-1865 – Civil War

Emerson,  Nature (1836)

Poe, The Raven (1845)

Hawthorne,  The Scarlet Letter (1850)

Melville,   Moby Dick (1851)

Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852)

Thoreau      Walden  (1854)

Whitman, Leaves of Grass (1855)