1. Nationalism and Sectionalism in Literature
Objective 2.02

2. Noah Webster America should record its own form of English.
Became obvious as nationalism grew.
American Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1828.

3. Noah Webster

4. Literary Renaissance Occurred in the early to mid 1800s.
Americans beginning to form national and regional identity – wanted to write about it.

5. 2 Major Groups Transcendentalists
urged people to over-come the limits of their minds and embrace beauty.
New Nationalists
wrote of American identity and culture

6. Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson – Nature (1836)
Henry David Thoreau – must fight the pressure to conform to society
Think of them as hippies of the 1800s.

7. Emerson
Thoreau

8. New Nationalists/ Knickerbocker School
Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter
Ideas of Puritans
Edgar Allen Poe
Terror and Mystery

9. New Nationalists cont. James Fennimore Cooper – Last of the Mohicans
Wrote of Native Americans
Washington Irving – “Legend of Sleepy Hollow”

10. Alex de Tocqueville Not American but wanted to write about it.
Wrote Democracy in America – told of his journeys through America
Explained how the social conditions impacted both the individual and gov’t

11. Art and Architecture
Hudson River School—group of artists beginning in the 1820s known for landscape paintings, led by Thomas Cole
George Caleb Bingham—art of ordinary Americans
Neoclassical Architecture made an impression in America w/ its Greek style.

13. Thomas Cole, View from Mount Holyoke, 1836

14. George Caleb Bingham, Raftsmen Playing Cards, 1847