1. Chapter Three American Romanticism * Irving * Cooper
I. American Romanticism
1. Intellectual Background
The Romantic period stretches from the end of the 18th century through the outbreak of the Civil War. ( )
Politically: Democracy and political equality became the ideal of the nation; and the two-party political system was in the making.
Economically: The spread of industrialism, the sudden influx of immigrants, and the pioneers pushing the frontier further west lead to an economic boom.
Literarily: The new nation cried for newer literary expressions; magazines appeared in big numbers such as The American Quarterly Review, The Southern Review, The Atlantic Monthly, and Harper’s Magazine, facilitating literary expansion in this new country.

2. Chapter Three American Romanticism * Irving * Cooper
2. Foreign Influence (Derivative and Imitative)
The Romantic movement, which had flourished earlier in the century both in England and Europe, proved to be a decisive influence without which the upsurge of American romanticism would hardly have been possible.
The British romantic writers such as William Wordsworth, Taylor Coleridge, Byron, Robert Burns, Shelley and Sir Walter Scott exerted a great influence upon their American brothers.
The British Romantic literary pieces such as Lyrical Ballads (1798) by Wordsworth and Coleridge and Walter Scott’s border tales were esp. prevalent in America. (Scott’s Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, The Lady of the Lake, Waverley and The Heart of Midlothian)

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3. Native Factors (Different and Distinctive)
Although the foreign influences were strong, American Romanticism exhibited from the very outset distinct features of its English and European counterpart. American romanticism was in essence the expression of “a real new experience” and “a new sensibility”: new place; new faces; new sight, smells, and sounds; new cultural factor (American Indians).
American Puritanism as a cultural heritage rendered American moral values basically puritan. Public atmosphere of the nation predominantly conditioned social life, cultural taste, and literary expression. One of its palpable manifestations is the fact that American Romantic writers tended more to moralize and use symbols than their English and European brothers.
As a logical result of the foreign and native factors at work, American Romanticism was both imitative and distinctive, both derivative and independent.

4. Chapter Three American Romanticism * Irving * Cooper
II. Washington Irving ( )
1. Literary Status
Father of American literature
The first professional American writer
The first American Romantic writer
The first American short story writer
The first American imaginative writer
to be recognized by the Europeans
2. Life
Born into a wealthy New York merchant family
Read widely from very early age – studied law
Cared for his family business in England
Went bankrupt – wrote to support himself

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3. His Works:
A History of New York (1809)
The Sketch Book ( )
The History of the Life and Voyages of
Christopher Columbus (1828)
The Alhambra (1832)
Life of Goldsmith, Life of Washington
The short story as a genre in American literature probably began with Irving’s The Sketch Book, a collection of essays, sketches, and tales, of which the most famous and frequently anthologized are “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”.
4. Division of his writings:
Irving’s career can be roughly divided into two important phases, the English period which span from his first book up to 1832 the American period stretching over the remaining years of his life.

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5. Writing Style
Irving’s style can only be described as beautiful though imitative.
A. Irving avoids moralizing as much as possible: he wrote to amuse and entertain.
B. He was good at enveloping his stories in a rich atmosphere, which is often more than compensation for the slimness of plot.
C. His characters are vivid and true so that they tend to linger in the mind of the reader.
D. He was such a humorous writer that it is difficult not to smile and occasionally even chuckle.
E. His language was finished and musical.

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6. His Masterpieces
“Rip Van Winkle” got suggestions from a German source. Irving changed the setting of the original and added conflicts of his own to make it American. It is a fantasy tale about a man who somehow stepped outside the main stream of life.
Rip Van Winkle is a simple, good-natured, and hen-pecked man. He does everything except take care of his own farm and family. He helps everyone except his wife and his own folks. So he is welcome everywhere except at home. “He is one of those happy mortals, who take the world easy, eat white bread or brown, whichever can be got with least thought or trouble, and would rather starve on a penny than work for a pound.”

8. Plot Summery of “Rip Van Winkle”
The story of Rip Van Winkle is set in the years before and after the American Revolutionary War. Rip Van Winkle, a villager of Dutch descent, lives in a nice village at the foot of New York's Catskill Mountains. An amiable man whose home and farm suffer from his lazy neglect, he is loved by all but his wife. One autumn day he escapes his nagging wife by wandering up the mountains. After encountering strangely dressed men, rumored to be the ghosts of Henry Hudson’s crew, who are playing nine-pin, and after drinking some of their liquor, he settles down under a shady tree and falls asleep. He wakes up twenty years later and returns to his village. He finds out that his wife is dead and his close friends have died in a war or gone somewhere else. He immediately gets into trouble when he hails himself a loyal subject of King George III, not knowing that in the meantime the American Revolution has taken place. An old local recognizes him, however, and Rip's now grown daughter eventually puts him up. As Rip resumes his habit of idleness in the village, and his tale is solemnly believed by the old Dutch settlers, certain hen-pecked husbands especially wish they shared Rip's luck.

10. Plot Summery of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” narrates the memorable event of an apparently headless horseman throwing his head at his rival in love, and the memorable character of Ichabod.
The story is set circa 1790 in the Dutch settlement of Tarry Town，New York，in a secluded glen called Sleepy Hollow. It tells the story of Ichabod Crane, a lean, lanky, and extremely superstitious schoolmaster from Connecticut who competes with Abraham "Brom Bones" Van Brunt, the town rowdy, for the hand of 18-year-old Katrina Van Tassel, the daughter and sole child of a wealthy farmer. As Crane leaves a party he attended at the Van Tassel home on an autumn night, he is pursued by the Headless Horseman，who is supposedly the ghost of a Hessian trooper who had his head shot off by a stray cannonball during "some nameless battle" of the American Revolution War, and who "rides forth to the scene of battle in nightly quest of his head". Ichabod mysteriously disappears from town, leaving Katrina to marry Brom Bones, who was "to look exceedingly knowing whenever the story of Ichabod was related".

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III. James Fenimore Cooper ( )
1. Literary Status:
The first American Frontier novel
The first American Sea novel
The first American Spy Novel
The first American Historical Novel
His Leatherstocking Tales as the American National Epic
2. Life:
Locally famous family – Yale University at 14 – five years at sea – comfortable life – began to write accidentally – failed in his first novel Precaution – his second novel The Spy (Harvey Birch) – firmly established with his The Leatherstocking Tales

13. III. James Fenimore Cooper
James Fenimore Cooper ( ) 3. His major works:
Precaution (1820)
The Spy (1821)
“The Leatherstocking Tales” includes
The Pioneers (1823)
The Last of the Mohicans (1826)
The Prairie (1827)
The Pathfinder (1840)
The Deerslayer (1841)

14. III. James Fenimore Cooper
4. His Masterpieces:
A. The Leatherstocking Tales is a series of novels by American writer James Fenimore Cooper, each featuring the main hero Natty Bumppo, known by European settlers as "Leatherstocking," 'The Pathfinder", and "the trapper" and by the Native Americans as "Deerslayer," "La Longue Carabine" and "Hawkeye".
B. Natty Bumppo first appears to be a real frontieersman in his crube cabin, a man of flesh and blood in the virgin forests of North America. But as he moves out of The Pioneers into the world of The Last of the Mohicans, The Prairie, The Pathfinder, and The Deerslayer, he does so gathering more and more of a halo of a legendary and mythic nature around him. He becomes a type, a representation of a nation struggling to be born, progressing from old age to rebirth and youth.
C. The five Cooper tales constitute a mythic reproduction of the whole process: the old and dying Leatherstocking in The Pioneers and The Prairie relives anther phase of middle-age maturity in The Last of the Mohicans and The Pathfinder and enjoys another lease of youth in The Deerslayer.
D. Bumppo’s growth and progress embodies none other than the American quest for an ideal community; through this character Cooper tried to create a national myth of his own.

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5. Writing Features:
A. Plot construction: Cooper was good at inventing plots. His plots are sometimes quite incredible, but his stories are immensely intriguing.
B. Landscape description: His landscape descriptions are majestic and suggestive of sir Walter Scott, the legendary spirit of whose border tales might have been a source of inspiration for him.
C. A rich imagination: He had never been to the frontier and among the Indians and yet could write five huge epic books about them with his rich imagination. Free from injustice, he treated the American Indians as noble savages.
D. Clumsy style: his style is dreadful; his characterization seems wooden and lacking in probability.

16. III. James Fenimore Cooper
6. His Contribution
a. Cooper hit upon the native subject of frontier and wilderness.
b. He contributed to American literature different subgenres of novels: spy novel, sea novel, frontier novel, and historical romance.
c. He created the first legendary frontier hero Natty Bumppo as the typical Pioneering figure.
d. He introduced the West and the frontier as a usable past into American literature, thus ushering in the Western tradition into American world of letters.