The Pre-romantic area,

Rise of a National
Literature, and
Birth of the American Short
Story

1714-1865
 A. 1714 – 1830
The Literature of
reason – the Pre-
Romantics
 1714 -1818 The Enlightenment
…
Seven Colleges (Harvard,
William and Mary, Yale,
the University of
Pennsylvania, Princeton,
Columbia and Brown)
founded by the 1760s.
The ideas of the French Enlightenment
philosophes strongly influenced the
American revolutionaries. French
intellectuals met in salons like this one to
The Enlightenment in
Europe stretches from exchange ideas and define their ideals such
as liberty, equality, and justice.
the mid-decades of the
seventeenth century
through the eighteenth
century and is
characterized by
dramatic revolutions in
science, philosophy,
society and politics.

In the US it spans from 1714 to

1818 and corresponds to a period
of intellectual ferment, an age of
rationality and order. It lead to
the gradual decline of the
preceding Calvinist (Puritan)
beliefs and opened the way to
the American Revolution.
1714 – 1818 Science and Inquiry

New social ideals The Capitol

• Reason and ethics.
• Fascination for balance and
restrain.
• Neoclassicism, which admired order,
simplicity, clarity, and reason,
embodies the combination of the
above ideals, set in a mood of quiet
grandeur. It used classical (Greek
and Roman) exempla as guides.
 1714 – 1818 NATURE

Most of the intellectual architects

of the new republic were deists.
They believed that God was good
and could be found in the
contemplation of nature.
Toleration, harmony, and conformity
to the laws of nature were some of
the principles of the new age that
came to replace the harsh (Puritan)
doctrines of predestination and the
concept of a wrathful God punishing
sinners in hell.
 1714 – 1818 Human Perfectibility

In The Age of Reason, a best seller

published in three parts (in 1794, 1795,
and 1807) Thomas Paine expresses an
optimistic belief that man was good
and capable of infinite improvement.
The concept of human perfectibility
will prove to be essential to
Romanticism that will be developed in
the following decades as a reaction to
the “age of reason”.
Still, the Federal age did not favour the
description of emotions and inner
conflicts: by 1800 most books read in
America were popular, sentimental and
Gothic works imported from England.
 B. 1714 – 1830
The Literature of reason and the Pre-Romantics
 1714 – 1830 Literary works

• Political books, pamphlets, essays and autobiographies reflecting …

the political and social concerns of the period.
• Thomas Paine, Common Sense (1776).
• Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason (1793-1795).
• Thomas Jefferson. Declaration of Independence (1776).
• Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785).
• Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography (1771-1790).

• Various works, however, herald the romantic age with their

optimism (belief in the perfectibility of man) and idealization of
America as well as with their reverence for nature, their
sentimentalism and humanitarianism.
• St John de Crevecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer, (1782).
• Philip Freneau, “The Power of Fancy” (1770), “The House of Night: A Vision”
(1779).
 The Age of the Common Man

George Caleb Bingham, The County

Belief in Equality Election, (1851–1852, St. Louis Art
Museum)
• Andrew Jackson's term as president (1829-1837)
began a new era in American politics. For the
first time in the United States history, a man
born in humble circumstances was now
President (cf. the “myth” of the American
Dream).
• The frontier moving west, the expansion of the
continent according to what was still considered
the will of God (“Manifest Destiny”) could only
strengthen this rising belief in equality.
• The need to assert it may have been all the
stronger as it was felt to be threatened.
C. THE RISE OF A NATIONAL LITERATURE
1830-1865 or The American Renaissance
 THE LEADING FIGURES

From the Revolution to Civil War

Washington IRVING (1783-1859)
James F. COOPER (1789-1851)
William C. BRYANT (1794-1878)
Edgar Allan POE (1809-1849)
Ralph Waldo EMERSON (1803-1882)
Henry David THOREAU (1817-1862)
Nathaniel HAWTHORNE (1804-1864)
Herman MELVILLE (1819-1891)
Walt WHITMAN (1819-1892)
Henry Wadsworth LONGFELLOW (1807-
1882)
Romanticism as a reaction against rationalism
Romanticism, a definition
• A literary, artistic, and philosophical
movement originating in the 18th century,
characterized chiefly by a reaction against
neoclassicism and an emphasis on the
imagination and emotions. It is marked by
sensitiveness and underscored by a belief in
the perfectibility of the human being. It
presents the use of autobiographical
material, an exaltation of the primitive and
the common man, an appreciation of
external nature (“Mother Nature”), an
interest in the remote, a predilection for
melancholy, and the use of older verse
forms in poetry and archaisms in prose.
The Romantics
• The Romantics believed in Pantheism, the
idea that God existed in everything in nature
and in human beings as well.
• According to some scholars, romanticism
heralded ecology. “…much Romantic writing
emerges from a desperate sense of alienation
from the natural world and expresses an
anxious endeavor to re-establish a vital,
sustainable relationship between mankind
and the fragile planet on which [we] dwell"
(Jim McKusick, “Romanticism and Ecology,”
The Wordsworth Circle, 28.3, 1997, 123).
 Romanticism: The Knickerbockers

A definition… Diedrich Knickerbocker

• A group of writers active in and around New York City during the first half of the 19th
century. Taking its name from Washington Irving’s Knickerbocker’s History of New York
(1809), the group, whose affiliation was more a regional than an aesthetic matter,
sought to promote a genuinely American national culture and establish New York City as
its literary centre. The chief common point shared by these writers was their desire to
entertain the reader and their interest in nature, which is to be related to the
popularity of the Hudson River School in painting (cf. next slide). The most important
members of the group were Irving, his friend the novelist J.K. Paulding, James
Fenimore Cooper, and William Cullen Bryant. Other writers associated with the group
were the abolitionist and woman-suffrage crusader Lydia M. Child, editor and politician
G.C. Verplanck, Clement Moore, scholar and author of “’Twas the Night Before
Christmas” (1823), and the poet and travel writer Bayard Taylor. The Knickerbocker
Magazine (1833–65), a literary monthly edited by Lewis G. and Willis G. Clark, though
not an official organ of the group, published members’ work.
Thomas Cole (1801–1848), 1836, The Oxbow, View from
Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a
Thunderstorm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
 Transcendentalism

• American transcendentalism is intimately associated with European

transcendental thought and its sources in German idealism. The
influence of the sacred books of the East, the traditions of Plato
and Neo-Platonism find also their way in Transcendentalism as well
as the line of British philosophy that ran through John Locke,
Bishop Berkeley and David Hume. All these influences serve to
confirm and enrich the importance of the individual, the superiority
of intuition to intellect, and the presence of a spiritual power in
both nature and the individual human being.
 The Transcendentalists

• Rejecting Calvinism and the materialism of society,

Emerson and Thoreau asserted their beliefs in deism,
in individualism and self-reliance, and in the need for
a national literature. These ideas, most clearly
expressed in Emerson’s Nature (1836) and in Thoreau’s
Walden (1854).
• Emerson’s emphasis on what he called “the new
importance given to the single person” typically
illustrates the principles of American democracy and,
as Martin Scofield has it, favoured the cultivation of
the short story.
 Transcendentalism directly influenced three
groups of writers
The writers of the The Schoolroom or
American Renaissance Walt Whitman Household Poets
Nathaniel Hawthorne The prophet and seer, Longfellow, Lowell, and
(1804 –1864), the believer of Whittier, so called
Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – democracy, in the because of the
October 7, 1849) vitality of man and in tremendous popularity
the necessary of their works which
Herman Melville (1819- emergence of American were read at home and
1891) poetry. (Leaves of Grass, in schools.
Their symbolic and 1855)
imaginative works,
although pessimistic,
deal with the individual
caught between his own
values and those of
 Power of the Individual, extreme experiences, fear,
horror and natural landscapes… from Europe to America

• Although in the nineteenth century, American writers were

influenced by the European Romantic movement, they added their
own nationalistic twist. The most famous European Romantics
included William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and
William Blake. The characteristics of the movement, which began
in Germany at the beginning of the eighteenth century, included
an interest in the power of the individual; an obsession with
extreme experiences, including fear, love, and horror; an interest
in nature and natural landscapes; and an emphasis on the
importance of everyday events.
The 19th century American
Romantic Hero

• Some writers in America who drew

from the Romantic tradition were
James Fenimore Cooper, Washington
Irving, and the transcendentalists
Henry David Thoreau and Ralph
Waldo Emerson.
• American Romantics in the early
nineteenth century tended to
celebrate the American landscape and
emphasize the idea of the sublime,
which glorified their beautiful home
country. They also created the concept
of an American Romantic hero, who
often lived alone in the wilderness,
close to the land, such as Cooper’s
Leatherstocking or Thoreau himself at
Walden Pond, in Concord,
Massachusetts.

Cette photo par Auteur inconnu est soumise à la licence CC BY

D. The Literary and Social Context of the
Early American Short Story
Romanticism and the American Short Story
 The Literary and Social Context of the Early
American Short Story I
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) a Unitarian Clergyman in Boston in
1829–32; began a long career as Lecturer in 1833; settled in Concord in
1834; Editor of The Dial in 1842–44. “Each age , it is found, must
write its own books; or rather,
each generation for the next
succeeding. The books of an
older period will not fit this.”
• "The American Scholar" onlin
e

Emerson: “The American

Scholar” (1837)
Emerson’s Nature

• “Our age is retrospective. It writes biographies,

history and criticism. It builds the sepulchers of the
fathers. The foregoing generations beheld God and
nature face to face, through their eyes. Why
shouldn’t we also enjoy an original relation to the
universe?”
• “An original relation to the universe”, one founded
on self-reliance and self-respect is the key to the
thought and work of Emerson. It also inspired a
number of other writers who s aw the liberation of
the self as an American imperative.
Romanticism: The Literary and Social Context
of the Early American Short Story II

• Emerson refers to the need of man to adapt the

representation of reality, the present and the
past, to the requirements of each age, “to make
it new.”
• “This desire to make it new is no small part of
the emphasis on the short story in American
literature from the 1820s.”
 Romanticism: The Literary and Social Context
of the Early American Short Story III

“I have preferred adopting a mode of

sketches and short tales rather than long
work, because I chose to take a line of writing
peculiar to myself; rather than fall into the
manner of school of any other writer; and
there is a constant activity of thought and a
nicety of execution required in writings of the
kind, more than the world appears to
imagine…”
Washington Irving, The sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. Ed. Susan Manning (Oxford,
Oxford World’s Classics, 1996); Quoted from a letter in the editor’s introduction, p. xxvii.
 Romanticism: The Literary and Social Context
of the Early American Short Story IV

Books VS Magazines Edgar Allan Poe

• Conditions of writing and • A writer like Edgar Allan Poe, with the
publication encouraged the ambition to create an independent American
publication of short pieces. tradition, turned to magazine publication as
International copyright laws the best means of creating both a literature
allowed publishers to pirate British and a reading public. For Poe, “the Magazine
work and print it cheaply, putting project was an ideological end, not a means; the
American novels at a disadvantage. magazine’s success per se would constitute a
The magazine, rather than the revolution or the culmination of one.”
book, came to be the appropriate • Andrew Levy, The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story, CUP,
expression of American culture. 1993, pp. 32-33.
 Romanticism: The Literary and Social Context
of the Early American Short Story V

The Short Story VS the Novel Edgar Allan Poe

• “I perceive that the whole energetic, busy spirit

of the age tended wholly to the Magazine
literature – to the curt, the terse the well-timed,
and the readily diffused, in preference to the
old forms of the verbose, the ponderous and the
inaccessible.”
• Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. J.W. Ostrom. New York, Gordian Press, 1980, vol. I, p. 168.
 Romanticism: The Literary and Social Context
of the Early American Short Story VI
A French Historian’s Insight
Alexis de Tocqueville
De Tocqueville (1805–1859) considers the question of what kind
of literature can be expected of a new democracy in conditions
where
• “classes are intermingled and confused and knowledge as
well as power is infinitely divided up and … scattered
around. Most of those who read will go into business or
politics or adopt some profession which leaves but short,
stolen hours for the pleasures of the mind… With but short
time to spend on books they want it all to be profitable.
Romanticism: The Literary and Social Context
of the Early American Short Story VII
…
Alexis de Tocqueville

…They like books which

are easily got and
quickly read, requiring
no learned research to
understand them…;
above all they like things
unexpected and new…
What they want is vivid,
lively emotions, sudden
Democracy in America II
revelations, brilliant
(London, Collins 1968),
truths, or errors able to
pp. 608-609.
rouse them up and
plunge them, almost by
violence, into the middle
of the subject… Short
works will be commoner
than long books, wit
than erudition,
imagination than
depth.”
 Romanticism: The “democracy” of the
short form

• De Tocqueville predicts with uncanny accuracy the qualities of a

popular, commercial literature and seems to look forward to film,
television and the new media. His accompanying analysis that
“formal qualities will be neglected” in literature does not do
justice, as we shall see, to Poe’s zealous theorizing about form in
his review of Hawthorne (1842) or “The Philosophy of Composition”
(1846), but nevertheless the above passage seems precisely to
predict the short stories of Poe himself.
 Romanticism: The “democracy” of the short
form
… …

• Looking forward to the • Apart from its association with magazine

development of the American publication and its appeal to busy readers,
short Story across the the form has been held to have
nineteenth century, and characteristics which associate particularly
beyond one might consider with ‘the man in the street’ (cf. Andrew
further this idea of the Jackson and ‘the age of Common Man’).
democracy of the form. Partly because of its length and the time
taken to read it, it has been seen as the
precursor of the one-hour television play or
series episode or the two-hour film.
 Romanticism: The “democracy” of the short
form

The Irish short story writer

Frank O’Connor (1903–
1966) in his fine study of
the short story The Lonely
Voice, has seen the short
story as the ideal form for
treating the life of the
isolated individual, the
‘Little Man’ and the
submerged ‘population
group’.