1. AMERICAN ROMANTICISM Enter Imagination

2. A PERIOD OF GREAT CULTURAL CHANGE  Romanticism focused on emotions and the individual  Writers in this time period (roughly 1830-1870) emphasized… Intuition Imagination Human potential for social progress and spiritual growth  Romanticism spawned in reaction to Classicism Classicism = Belief that reason dominates nature

3. ROMANTICNON- ROMANTIC/CLASSICAL Emotional Reasonable and Practical Individualistic Public Responsibility Revolutionary Conservative Loves Solitude & Nature Loves Public, Urban Life Fantasy/Introspection External Reality The Particular The Universal Satisfaction of Desire Repressed Desire Organic Mechanical

4. Well-known Romanticists  Nathaniel Hawthorne  Walt Whitman  Herman Melville  Washington Irving  Emily Dickinson  James Fenimore Cooper  Harriet Beecher Stowe  Edgar Allan Poe

5. CHARACTERISTICS OF ROMANTICISM IN LITERATURE  Nature: Beauty, strangeness, and the mystery of nature Washington Irving’s use of the forest as a place of savagery, mystery and evil in “The Devil and Tom Walker”  The Past: Rise in nationalism = Interest in American past Nathaniel Hawthorne’s depiction of the Puritan age in The Scarlet Letter  Inner World of Human Nature: Emotion, intuition, individual, and exploration of the private inner being Edgar Allan Poe’s characterization of Roderick Usher’s mental illness in “Fall of the House of Usher”

6. Washington Irving (1783-1859)  Considered the first internationally best-selling American novelist Advocated for writing as a profession Argued for stronger laws to protect writers from copyright infringement  Considered the first American author to place his stories firmly in the United States Promoter of Nationalism Outspoken against slavery  Best known works: “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle”