Colonial Era

Romanticism

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  In the novel The Pioneers (1823) he shows that neither the nature man and the profit-oriented materialist are "sociable", i.e. are not to be relied on for founding a solid community.
  
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    possible only through laws, especially through law-makers, and it is here that Cooper in The Pioneers legitimizes his own family history.
    
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  Judge Temple  modeled on Cooper's own father William, who founded Cooperstown in the state of New York
  
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    a lawyer and land-owner and influential politician
    
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  Cooper's ideal of a civilizing process: regulated process founded on laws and grounded on an accepted social hierarchy. Top of hierarchy: educated, politically active land-owners, who acted as law-makers and law-enforcers, had best intentions for the settlers
  
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  This is an ideal of a class society and a legal order, and yet: the transfer of the individualist ideal into an aestheticization of nature appears as clear precursor of romanticism.
  
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  The losses of the processes of civilization are too great  process is no longer controllable
  
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    ideal of balance as foundation for individual self-reliance has become more and more suspicious for Cooper  his texts become more critical and conservative –did not hurt his lasting fame in and outside US
    
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  Cooper with his frontier novels created the myth of the West
  
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  ideal of process of civilization as regulated process based on laws and hierarchies
  
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  ideal of individualism and aestheticization of nature
  
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  increasing glorification of romantic hero
  
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  Leatherstocking series culminates in the depiction of a hero turning into manhood (individual level), in terms of history, the novel turns back to a pre-revolutionary period of chaos and wilderness, also of innocence and youth
  
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    on the collective level American history turned into legend,
    
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    anti-social state of the nation that is glorified through its romanticized hero
    
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    American Adam comes into literary being: Leaving the realism of his earlier novels, Cooper gradually moves into the realm of romance and myth
    
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    Natty Bumppo turns into a prototype of the western hero: innocent, adventurous, represents notion of America as new Eden, the American as incarnation of a new Adam
    

Why was the American landscape so essential for romantic painters and writers?

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  emotions and fantasy were being discovered and developed (diff. to sentimental novel of late 18^th century)
  
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    different interpretation of those aspects: romanticism separates sentiment and creative mind from reason and rationality, now giving them essential functions.
    
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  Romanticism develops an idea of nature, of experiencing nature, marked by aesthetic perception: from the cultivated landscape to the wilderness, these experienced natural landscapes  seen as “beautiful”, “picturesque”, or “sublime”
  
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  nature is no longer seen through lens of natural sciences but as apparition, i.e. as a visible manifestation of an invisible power  points towards an equally invisible order
  
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  laws of nature are no longer instruments to control nature or to exploit nature, but proof of a sensible creation, a creation that includes man
  
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    entails the idea of an organic whole that brings together all things into harmony: nature, man, objects.
    
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  Romanticism sees a return to faith, not confined by a church, but to be found in nature itself.
  
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    Every single individual has the capacity to communicate with a higher being through the experience of nature.
    
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  Glorification of harmony of individual and godly creation  manifests itself in image of romantic artist
  
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    special sensibility, creative imagination, is in touch with nature
    
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    able to represent the ideal of harmony through his artifact, thus repeats the communication with the godly creator  prototype of the romantic individual
    
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  not specific for America alone, but the role of nature within that concept is very American
  
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    The American scenery is the material that American romanticism is made of
    
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  Landscape artists discover nature as overpowering performance, but also as phenomenon that needs to be interpreted
  
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  conquest and civilization of new landscapes, expansion of the frontier  relationship between nature and man was in constant need to be reflected. Nature’s powers often not only caused wondrous amazement, but also fear.
  

Explain the term "American Renaissance".

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  Period of literary productivity towards mid-19^th century, between 1850 and 1855 alone, there were publications like
  
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    Emerson’s Representative Men
    
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    Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, The House of the Seven Gables and the Blithedale Romance
    
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    Melville’s White-Jacket, Moby-Dick and Pierre
    
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    Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin
    
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    Thoreau’s Walden
    
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    Whitman’s Leaves of Grass
    
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  these works were essential for the future of American literary genres
  
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    travel narrative, the essay, the novel, poetry, and the short-story
    
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  Matthiessen (literary critic, 1941): wrote fundamental study on this phase and named it American Renaissance. This label has stuck ever since and it encompasses especially the writers Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville and Whitman.
  
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  term “American Renaissance”  not entirely correct, no “renaissance” in the sense of a re-awakening of something that has occurred before.
  
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    it was a fresh start or a maturation of American literature or as Matthiessen himself says: “America’s coming to its first maturity and affirming its rightful heritage in the whole expanse of art and culture.”
    

What was the big scandal in Emerson's "Divinity School Address"?

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  in 1838: speech at Harvard Divinity School, i.e. the Theological Faculty. In the “Divinity School Address”, Emerson presented his notions of a radically individualized form of faith.
  
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  established clergy saw this as atheistic propaganda
  
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    Emerson asserted that the experience of faith and truth could only be performed in direct communication of the individual with God
    
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    Truth does not lie in the dogmas and doctrines of the church, but in the heart of man, in his intuitive connection to God
    
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  scandalous in the eyes of the theological faculty of Harvard
  

Explain the Transcendental Triad.

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  immediate encounter of the individual and nature
  
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    “original relationship” of several parts that Emerson combines to the so-called transcendental triad: self, nature, and over-soul
    
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  Emerson’s “self” is not equal to individualism as Franklin understood it in his idea of the materialist self-made man. Emerson’s self is the search for the best of all “selves”, trying to reach out for transcendence. Thus, the identity of the self grounds not on purely secular independence, but implies the reference to a higher, transcendental power.
  

In what ways do both Thoreau and Fuller go further than Emerson in their transcendental philosophy?

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  spiritual follower of Emerson, but much more radical than his leader in his non-conformist life-style of which Emerson did not approve.
  
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  Emerson remained within his world of words in his reliance on nature, but Thoreau realized that call and moved out to really experience nature.
  

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  third major figure of transcendentalism: Margaret Fuller
  
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  Her central work is pathbreaking: Woman in the Nineteenth Century 1845
  
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  contests (anfechten) the declaration of independence: "all men are created equal": Equality does not seem to include women.
  
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  Fuller wants to expose the supposed universality in which "man" includes both sexes
  
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  wants to disclose the hierarchies that really existed between the sexes and within society
  
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  called for an equal participation of women in all parts of social and political life. Individual "self-reliance" should not be a male privilege any longer, but a right for every individual.
  

In what way can Whitman's poetry be called democratic?

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  For Whitman, poetry emerges organically from the poet’s being.
  
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  Organic image: poet as a being that grows à poetry – the body of works - grows with him. Everybody could evolve to a state of spiritual perfection, he believed.
  

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  human body as equal of soul
  

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  Invention/dictum: free verse à poetic form not derived from traditional meters, but from the argument (the argument shapes the meter/rhythm of verse)
  
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  The poet finds his material not in the abstract, but in the familiar things surrounding him
  

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  The material the poet finds is ‘America’: Whitman’s poetry celebrates America both as subject (democracy) and object (common things) of his poetry.
  

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  America’s development into a perfect democracy mirrors the potential of every individual to evolve to a spiritual perfection.
  

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  equality of men and women and all races and classes
  

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  Whitman recurs to everyday language of the American people – the common man
  
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  Poetry as renewal of language – form and content (freedom of free verse: democracy!)
  
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  “a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars”: simple leaves of grass as poetic topic that reflects the cosmos
  
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  Individual and community (single leaf of grass à beauty and transcendence of individualism), but real democracy only in community à personal consciousness enlarged towards cosmic awareness
  

Which writers represent America's dark romanticism? What is the main difference compared to transcendental romanticism?

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  Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson
  
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  Reaction to Transcendentalism
  
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    emerged from transcendentalism, but departed from the ideas, America 19th century moving from ideal of agrarian republic towards technology, mobility (steam locomotives), territorial expansion, urbanization, social diversification
    
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  Pessimistic outlook on mankind, nature, God
  
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  Individual prone to sin and self-destruction
  
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  Anthropomorphized evil: devil, ghost, vampire
  
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  Nature reveals evil, decay, dark mystery
  
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  Anti-social tendency: man as failure
  
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  Relation to Gothic fiction (terror, supernatural, melodrama)
  

How does Hawthorne compare the novel and the romance? Which does he prefer?

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  Distinction novel / romance: clear preference of romance
  

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   Preoccupation with American history to question the cult of present
   
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   Bringing history to the present through imaginative transgression of the factual (fantastic)
   

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  Romance fulfills the spiritual necessities of America better than the novel (social reality, empirical data, historical facts) does.
  
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  History as allegory of the present, history not as make-believe, but as invisible continuity
  

In what ways is The Scarlet Letter a work of the American Dark Romanticism?

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  Hawthorne’s most famous romance: The Scarlet Letter 1850
  
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  set in 17th century Puritan Boston
  
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  polar opposites of sin acknowledged and guilt unconfessed  shown through characters of Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale
  
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    Hester is aware of her sin, wears her scarlet letter publicly as token of her sin and is aware of the sins of others
    
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  Whereas Hester finds salvation in the admittance of her guilt, Dimmesdale conceals his complicity in her shame. But he is not only doomed because of that, but also because Roger Chillingworth coldly probes his heart.
  
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  The novel can be read as a fictional historiography, an interpretation and revelation of the blind spots of early American Puritanism.
  
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  obvious allegorical elements:
  
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    letter “A” can at times be read as adultery, also as “America” or “apocalypse”: this would connect the individual fate with national history.
    
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    Or it can be read as “angel”: the opposite meaning of sinful adultery, depicting woman in positive light.
    
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    “A” is also the first letter of the alphabet and thus marking a new beginning in general, or as “A” in “art”, here the beginning of a new literature and culture in America. The novel here as romance remains ambiguous: no certainty as to positive or negative evaluation.
    

What is Arthur Dimmesdale's guilt? How does the character develop throughout the text?

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  Arthur hides his sinful behavior, i.e. having an illegitimate affair with Hester, a married woman who then gets pregnant.
  
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  Dimmesdale seems to be wasting away and suffers from mysterious heart trouble, seemingly caused by psychological distress.
  

Explain Poe's literary method.

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  Poe is the darkest of the dark romanticists
  
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  least American or most European of the writers of the American Renaissance
  
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  can be seen as the mirror-side of transcendentalism (“frog-pondism”): the evil, the nightmare, madness, dissolution of the self, death: those were his omnipresent themes.
  
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  Strongly influenced by European romantics and the gothic (Blake, Shelley, Byron, Keats, E.T.A. Hoffmann)
  
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    he in turn strongly influenced the French symbolists (Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud) later on  which in turn then returned to America and influenced many of the modernist in the early 20th century
    
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  Unlike his contemporaries, Poe was mainly concerned with beauty, not with morality
  
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  anticipated the “l’art pour l’art” (art for art’s sake) movement towards the end of the 19th century, esp. late Victorianism.
  
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  Besides his gothic stories, he is also the inventor of the genre of the detective story.
  
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  His creative method: Poe believed that long stories or poems lost their effectiveness, readers becoming too tired!
  
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    almost everything he wrote was intended to be read at one sitting
    
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  In his prose writing, Poe aimed at creating a single effect coming at the climax and conclusion of the tale – the “wow”-effect.
  
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  Erotics of death!
  
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  Aesthetic (form) AND psychology (emotion)
  
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  This effect: mainly beneath surface of normality à irrational à gothic, but not like in Brockden Brown as disturbance of rationality: but radical focus on the inner life of the individual, no escape from inner perspective, terror within à Gothic here radicalized into terror of the soul (unreliable narrators: madmen and liars)
  
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  No explication in the end: reality transformed into fantasy and this is where the reader (and the characters) remain
  

In what ways is "The Fall of the House of Usher" a work of the American Dark Romanticism?

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  The Fall of the House of Usher: obviously grotesque
  
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    return of the dead
    
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    haunted mansion collapsing
    
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    doubling of narration and characters (doubling narration: there is a narration within the narration: the poem “The Haunted Palace”)
    
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  There are allusions to incest, vampirism, perverse desires
  
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  There are also evocations of landscapes and settings that in the future will be stock features of what will be called the Southern Gothic (Faulkner, Truman Capote, Carson McCullers)
  
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  narrator expresses is the aesthetic experience of the sublime  e.g. in the description of the house
  
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  The sublime is one of the major aesthetic concepts especially virulent in romanticism.
  
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    inexperienced hero is faced with the luring sites of the beautiful and the sublime
    
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    From a distance, he will have a feeling of admiration and spiritual elevation, but getting closer, he will face chaos and destruction
    
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    tension between the rational and the irrational
    
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  fear of affects connected to the sublime  mentioned by Edmund Burke (in “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful”, 1757)
  
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    In the dark romanticism, this fear is symbolized by the opposition of the garden and the wilderness – order and chaos.
    
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  From nature à transfer to psyche
  

In what ways is "Bartleby the Scrivener" a work of the American Dark Romanticism?

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  humor and pathos
  
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  despair: iron necessities of pathetic life (copyist (“dead letters”, not “belles lettres”) = anti-artist)
  
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  Bartleby: isolation, autism
  
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  provoking passivity and maddening non-compliance (“I would prefer not to”) à death
  
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  teaching complacent employer to embrace commandment to love fellow man
  
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  unreliable narrator (employer)