Romanticism 

Genres and Style of Romanticism  Character sketches  Slave narratives  Poetry  Short stories

Effects and Aspects of Romanticism  Value feeling and intuition over reasoning  Journey away from corruption of civilization and limits of rational thought toward the integrity of nature and freedom of the imagination

Historical Context  Expansion of magazines, newspapers, and book publishing  Slavery debates  Industrial revolution brings ideas that the old ways of doing things are now irrelevant

Authors and Titles  Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle”  Dunbar’s “We Wear the Masks”  Emily Dickinson  Walt Whitman

American Renaissance/Transcendentalism  1840 – 1860  Note the overlap in time period with Romanticism. Some consider the transcendentalists to be the dark romantics or gothics

Genres and Style of Am. Renaissance/Transcendentalism  Poetry  Novels  Anti-transcendentalists  Holds readers’ attention through dread of a series of terrible possibilities  Feature landscapes of dark forests, extreme vegetation, concealed ruins with horrific rooms, depressed characters

Effects and Aspects of Transcendentalists  True reality is spiritual  Comes from the 18 th century philosopher of Immanuel Kant  Idealists  Self reliance and individualism  Emerson and Thoreau

Effects and Aspects of Anti-Transcendentalism  Used symbolism to great effect  Sin, pain, and evil exist  Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville

Historical Context  Portrayal of alluring antagonists whose evil characteristics appeal to one’s sense of awe  Stories of the persecuted young girl forced apart from her true love  People seeking beauty in life and in nature, a belief in true love and contentment

Authors and Titles  Poems, aphorisms, and essays of Thoreau and Emerson  Edgar Allen Poe  Nathaniel Hawthorne*

Realism and Regionalism  1855 – 1900  Civil War period and post Civil War

Styles and Genres  Novels and short stories  Objective narrator  Does not tell reader how to interpret the story  Voices from around the country  Local color stories

Effects and Affects  Social realism seeks to change a social problem  Aesthetic realism: art that insists on detailing the world as one sees it

Historical Context  Civil War brings demand for a truer type of literature that does not idealize people or places

Authors and Titles  Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (some say it is the first American novel)  Ambrose Bierce  Stephen Crane  The Narrative Life of Frederick Douglass  Jack London