Professional Documents
Culture Documents
American Romanticism Article
American Romanticism Article
American Romanticism Article
Duffy, Christopher. The Military Experience in the Age of Reason. Martin, Joseph Plumb. Private Yankee Doodle: Being a Narrative of
New York: Atheneum, 1987. Some of the Adventures, Dangers, and Sufferings of a Revolutionary
Higginbotham, Don. The War of American Independence: Military Soldier. Boston: Little, Brown, 1962.
Attitudes, Policies, and Practice, 1763–1789. New York: Royster, Charles. A Revolutionary People at War: the Continental
Macmillan, 1971. Army and American Character, 1775–1783. Chapel Hill:
Lee, Henry. Memoirs of the War in the Southern Department of the University of North Carolina Press, 1979.
United States. New York: University Publishing, 1870. Shy, John. A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military
Mackesy, Piers. The War for America, 1775–1783. Cambridge, Struggle for American Independence. New York: Oxford University
Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1964. Press, 1976.
mantic materials. Romanticism persists as an appropriate idiom Chai, Leon. The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance.
for confronting the implications of modernity, providing a Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987.
means for interrogating and interpreting a world characterized Gura, Philip and Joel Myerson. eds., Critical Essays on American
by increasingly rapid change and dislocation. Transcendentalism. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982.
Jones, Howard Mumford. Revolution and Romanticism. Cambridge,
IAN D. COPESTAKE Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1974.
Bibliography Morse, David. American Romanticism. 2 vols. London: Macmillan,
1987.
Buell, Lawrence. Literary Transcendentalism: Style and Vision in the Parrington, V. L. Main Currents in American Though. Vol. 2, The
American Renaissance. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, Romantic Revolution in America. New York: Harcourt, Brace,
1973. 1959.
with the energy of “the Nature revival” in American literature. dance with Howells’ distinction, but critics such as Jonathan
The strains of naturalism in Norris’s major novels McTeague Levin have argued that the resistance to “definitive formulations”
(1899), The Octopus (1901), and The Pit (1903) address the in Romantic thought is often expressed as “stylistic restlessness”
“realistic” issues of poverty and the effects of technology and and “unsettled possibility” that cannot be reduced to list of ge-
business on the material conditions of life, but in each novel he neric characteristics. As such, the legacy of Romanticism forms
delves “down deep into the red, living heart of things” rather a complex series of influences, revealing the tensions between
than depicting only “clothes and tissues and wrappings of flesh.” nativist and international impulses while reinforcing the essential
For Norris, the true writer takes realism away from the coziness hybridity of American literary production.
of the middle class drawing room into the street, where it fuses MARTIN HALLIWELL
with a dynamic Romantic spirit that is heedless of moral limits Bibliography
and literary propriety.
The modernist critics T. S. Eliot, in “ ‘Romantic’ and ‘Clas- Chase, Richard. The American Novel and Its Tradition. New York:
Doubleday, 1957.
sic’ ” (1934), and Philip Rahv, in “Redskin and Paleface” (1939), Eliot, T. S. Selected Prose. Edited by Frank Kermode. London:
reinforced this notion of two competing traditions in American Faber, 1970.
writing. For Eliot, the effusiveness of Romantic thought was Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Emerson: Essays and Lectures, New York:
inferior to the balance and poise of classical poetry, whereas Library of America, 1983.
Rahv compares “redskins” such as Whitman and Mark Twain Halliwell, Martin. Romantic Science and the Experience of Self.
and their celebration of nature and open spaces with the “pale- London: Ashgate, 1999.
Howells, William Dean. W. D. Howells as Critic. Edited by E. H.
face” writers Henry James and T. S. Eliot, who are more cerebral
Cady. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973.
and often drawn to European literary traditions. While Rahv’s Levin, Jonathan. The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism and
distinction holds for certain writers, his bipartite scheme lacks American Literary Modernism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University
nuance, and does not take into account modernists such as Ezra Press, 1999.
Pound and Henry Miller, whose work reviles Romanticism Norris, Frank. The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris. Edited by
(Pound expresses his dislike of Whitman in “A Pact” [1916] Donald Pizer. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964.
and Miller parodies Romantic expression at the beginning of Rahv, Philip. Literature and the Sixth Sense. London: Faber, 1970.
Ruland, Richard and Malcolm Bradbury, From Puritanism to
Tropic of Cancer [1934]) but also displays sympathies with its Postmodernism. London: Viking, 1991.
spirit of nonconformism (Pound’s poem ends by agreeing there Weinstein, Norman. Nobody’s Home: Speech, Self and Place in
should be “commerce between” Whitman and himself). Divi- American Fiction from Hawthorne to DeLillo. New York: Oxford
sions in recent American writing can still be discerned in accor- University Press, 1993.
Hans Christian Andersen was the first truly professional Danish and at the age of fourteen obtained his mother’s reluctant per-
writer in the sense that he earned a living from his writing and mission to travel to Copenhagen to seek his fortune, without
never had another occupation. Although his fame today rests any contacts there and equipped only with a letter of recommen-
on his fairy tales, his works cover every literary genre and many dation to the leading ballerina at the Royal Theater.
of them received great popular acclaim in his own time, both From childhood on the theater was always Andersen’s grand,
in Denmark and abroad. if largely unrequited, passion, and his early visits to the Odense
There are few writers whose life and works are more inextrica- Theater left an indelible mark. In his first difficult years in Co-
bly entangled than those of Hans Christian Andersen. He grew penhagen, he managed to get minor parts at the Royal Theater
up in great poverty in Odense, then the second largest city in and to have lessons in singing and ballet, but to no avail. Rejec-
Denmark, and was only eleven when his father Hans Andersen, tion as a performer only fueled his desire to become a playwright,
a cobbler, died. His mother had to take odd jobs, and ended
but early derivative attempts were very crude and revealed an
up an alcoholic. Some of his closest relatives had experienced
imprisonment and madness, and the existence of an elder, illegit- appalling lack of elementary education. Nevertheless, although
imate, half sister haunted him for much of his life. It is significant the Royal Theater rejected them, it was at this point that some
that the theme of a young man who has to overcome poverty influential people there saw a few glimpses of potential in Ander-
before his innate talents are recognised—often with the help of sen and offered him a free secondary education. Jonas Collin,
benefactors—runs through Andersen’s works. A loner, he always the Royal Theater’s director, oversaw this scheme, and in him
felt an outsider in the bourgeois and upper-class society to which and his family Andersen found the surrogate father and the
he desperately tried to adapt. One of his own self-images was bourgeois home that he yearned for, and subsequently referred
that of a “swamp plant” reaching for the light. From early child- to as the “home of homes.” The actual school years were the
hood he did, however, believe strongly in his own artistic talents, most miserable of his life and haunted him long afterward, but