1. Literary Movement

2.  1750-1800: Rationalism/ Age of Reason  1800-1860: Romanticism  1860-1900: Realism

3.  1803 Louisiana Purchase  1812-15 War of 1812, “Star-Spangled Banner” written  1820-21 Missouri Compromise  1830 Underground Railroad is organized  1838 Trail of Tears  1846 Potato famine in Ireland  1846-48 U.S. annexes Texas; war with Mexico  1848 First women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls  1849 California gold rush

4.  A reaction against Rationalism  Valued FEELING and INTUITION over reason  Imagination can discover truths that the mind cannot reach  Value imagination, individual feelings, and wild nature over reason, logic and sophistication  Reflection on natural world led to emotional and intellectual awakening

5.  5 Is of Romanticism  Intuition  Imagination  Innocence  Inspiration from nature  Individualism  Other characteristics:  Favored remote/exotic settings (the past, the countryside)  City perceived as a place of corruption  Emphasis on the natural and the supernatural worlds  Divinity found in nature

6.  Fireside Poets  Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes  Transcendentalists  Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau  Dark Romantics  Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe  Other poets  Walt Whitman, Emily Dickenson

7.  Poetry was valued as the greatest embodiment of the imagination.  Fireside Poets used traditional forms but introduced uniquely American subject matter.  Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson later broke free from traditional forms of poetry.  Transcendentalism  Everything is a reflection of the Divine Soul  Nature is a doorway to the spiritual world  Man should be true to himself rather than blindly submitting to external authority  Optimistic view of human nature  Dark Romanticism  Similar to Transcendentalism; the major difference is that Dark Romantics were pessimistic in their view of humanity

8.  Transcendentalism is an American literary, political, and philosophical movement of the early nineteenth century, centered around Ralph Waldo Emerson.  Stimulated by English and German Romanticism  They were critics of their contemporary society for its unthinking conformity, and urged that each individual find, in Emerson's words, “an original relation to the universe” (O, 3).  Emerson and Thoreau sought this relation in solitude amidst nature, and in their writing.

9.  The “American Renaissance” refers to an explosion in the production of American literature.  Literature produced during the American Renaissance falls under the larger umbrella of American Romanticism.  The movement includes works by the Transcendentalists, Dark Romantics, and poets Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.