1. Early Romantic period: Irving, Cooper and Bryant
American literature
Early Romantic period:
Irving, Cooper and Bryant

2. General introduction
Time: from the end of the 18th century through the outbreak of the Civil War.
Ideals: Democracy and political equality became the ideals of the new nation.
Economic boom: industrialism
Immigration optimism and hope among people
Westward expansion
American Romanticism was both imitative and independent.
Imitative: English and European Romanticists
Independent: Emerson and Whitman
Themes:
Imitative: home, family, nature, children and idealized love
Independent: major problems of American life, like the westward expansion and democracy and equality.

3. Washington Irving (1783--1859)
“Father of American literature”
“Father of the American short story”
The first American writher of imaginative literature to gain international fame.
The short story as a genre in American literature began with Irving’s The Sketch Book.
The Sketch Book also marked the beginning of American Romanticism.

4. Irving’s Works
A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty by Diedrich Knickerbocker 《纽约外史》
The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent 《见闻札记》
“Rip Van Winkle”
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” 《睡谷的传说》
Bracebridge Hall 《布雷斯布里奇庄园》
Oliver Goldsmith 《哥尔德斯密斯》
Life of George Washington 《华盛顿传》

5. James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851)
Works.
Leatherstocking Tales
The Pioneers 《开拓者》………………………
The Last of the Mohicans 《最后的莫希干人》…. 2
The Prairie 《草原》…………………………… 5
The Pathfinder 《探路者》……………………
The Deerslayer 《杀鹿者》……………………
Precaution 《戒备》
The Spy 《间谍》
The Pilot 《领航人》

6. Leatherstocking Tales
Leatherstocking Tales is a series of five novels about the frontier of American settlers.
The Pioneers was probably the first true romance of the frontier in American literature.
Natty Bumppo represents the ideal American, living a virtuous and free life in God’s world. To him and to Cooper, the wildness is good, pure, perfect, where there is freedom not tainted and fettered by any forms of human institutions.
Natty Bumppo is a veritable embodiment of human virtues like innocence, simplicity, honesty and generosity, a man born with an immaculate sense of good and evil and right and wrong.
Cooper helped to introduce the “western tradition” into American literature.

7. William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)
the first American lyric poet of distinction
Works
Poems 《诗选》
The Fountain 《泉》
The White-Footed Deer 《白蹄鹿》
A Forest Hymn 《森林赋》
The Flood of Years 《似水流年》
“To a Waterfowl” 《致水鸟》
“Thanatopsis” 《死亡随想》
“The Yellow Violet” 《黄色堇香花》

8. Evaluation
Bryant’s writing demonstrats the imitative mode through which New Englanders of an intellectual bent sought to establish an acceptable American literary voice.
He can also be linked to the Transcendentalists--though with great caution, since much more is going on.
Again, he should be shown in connection with his English models. It's useful to point out the self-conscious regularity of these poems both in connection with their particularly derivative subject matter and in contrast with the form and subjects of those contemporary poems and songs (well represented in this anthology) that were not informed by the dominant English literary culture.