1. American Romanticism 1800-1860

2. Historical Context Industrial Revolution 1760-1840
1803 Louisiana Purchase
Enlightenment
1848 Gold rush
Mid 1800’s – Suffrage Movement
Right around the corner - Civil War

3. Romanticism Reaction to Revolutionary Period
Reaction to the Industrial Revolution
Imagination over Reason
Intuition over Fact
Focus on Emotions

4. Dark / Gothic Romantics
Romanticism
Transcendentalists
Love of nature
Idealization of rural life
Love of beauty and nature
Sympathy and sentimentality
Dark / Gothic Romantics
Nature is alien or even frightening
Loss of place in the urban, modern world
Enthusiasm for the wild or grotesque in nature
Emotional psychology

5. Dark / Gothic Romantic American Literature

6. Dark / Gothic Romantic Literature
Supernatural events
Damsels in distress
Creepy / disturbed characters

7. Dark / Gothic Romantic Literature
Creepy settings
Omens and dreams
Highly charged emotional states

8. Dark / Gothic Romantic Literature
deep awareness of the human capacity for evil
probing of the mind, conscience, and heart

9. The Dark / Gothic Romantics
Three giants from this period are Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe. Hawthorne and Poe are what have been called “brooding” romantics or “anti-transcendentalists” while Irving’s works are interspersed with dark humor.

10. Father of American Literature
Washington Irving
Father of American Literature
“The Devil and Tom Walker” “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” “Rip Van Winkle”
1789 – 1851

11. Nathaniel Hawthorne Sin, Guilt, Pride, Selfishness The Scarlet Letter
“Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment”
“Rappaccini’s Daughter”
“The Minister’s Black Veil”
“The Birthmark”
“Young Goodman Brown”

12. Edgar Allan Poe Created the modern short story & the detective story
“Masque of the Red Death”
“The Fall of the House of Usher”
“The Raven”
“The Cask of Amontillado”
“The Tell-Tale Heart”
“The Murders in the Rue Morgue”