American Romanticism

(1820 -1860)
 American Romanticism
• “The growth of cultural nationalism aroused American artists to write
patriotic songs, to paint vast panoramas of American scenes, and to
design monumental buildings that would register the grandeur of the
American people and their land.”

• ”Literature ceased to be primarily didactic, a servant of politics and

religion.” (…)

• ”Novels, short-stories and poems replaced sermons and manifestoes as

America`s principal literary forms.
 American Romanticism
• ”Imaginative literature became intense, personal and symbolic as more
writers came to perceive themselves not as mere literary craftsmen
following the ordered rules of neoclassic literature but as prophets and
seers. Moved by calls for a national literature that would glorify the land,
that would “breathe the spirit of our republican institutions”, writer`s
celebrated American meadows, groves, and streams, its endless prairies,
dense forests, and vast oceans.”

• ”The desire for an escape from society and a return to nature became a
permanent convention of American literature, in Cooper`s Leatherstocking
Tales, in Thoreau`s Walden and later in Mark Twain`s Huckleberry Finn and
in the twentieth century writing of Ernest Hemingway and William
Falkner.”
 American Romanticism

• ”Romantic writers placed increasing values on the free expression of

emotion and displayed increasing attention to the psych states of their
characters. Heroes and heroines exhibited extremes of sensitivity and
excitement.”

• ”The novel of terror became the profitable literary staple that it remains
today. Writers of gothic terror novels sought to arouse in their readers a
turbulent sense of the remote, the supernatural and the terrifying by
describing castles and landscapes illuminated by moonlight and haunted by
specters. A preoccupation with the demonic and the mystery of evil
marked the works of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and the host of lesser
writers.”
 American Romanticism

• ”Nationalism stimulated a great literary interest in America`s

language and its common people. In 1828, Noah Webster published
An American Dictionary of the English Language. American character
types speaking local dialects appeared in poetry and fiction with
increasing frequency. Literature began to celebrate American farmers,
the poor, the unlettered, children, and noble savages (red and white)
untainted by society.”
• Source: The Concise Anthology of North American Literature