浪漫主义美国文学

Part III The Literature of Romanticism I．Historical Introduction from early 19th century through the outbreak of the Civil War 1. native factors

It is a period following American Independence. In this period, democracy and political equality became the ideals of the new nation. America was in an economic boom. There is a tremendous sense of optimism and hope among the people. The spirit of the time is, in some measure, responsible for the outburst of romantic feeling. ? 2. foreign influence ? Romanticism emerged in England from 1798 to 1832. It added impetus to the growth of Romanticism in America. In England the general features of the works of the romantics is a dissatisfaction with the bourgeois society. British Romanticism inspired the American imagination. Thus American Romanticism was in a way derivative.

II．American Romanticism: American Renaissance

? Romanticism (appeared in England in the last years of the 18th century and spread to continental Europe and then) came to America early in the 19th century. It was pluralistic; its manifestations were as varied, as individualistic, and as conflicting as the cultures and the intellects from which it sprang. Yet romantics frequently shared certain general characteristics: moral enthusiasm, faith in the value of individualism and intuitive perception, and a presumption that the natural world was a source of goodness and man's societies a source of corruption. ? It exalted the individual, which suited the nation's revolutionary heritage and its frontier egalitarianism. It revolted against traditional art forms, which gratified those cramped by the strict limits of neoclassic literature, painting, and architecture. It rejected rationalism, which gladdened those who were opposed to cool, intellectual religious wrapped with the remnants of Calvinism. ? Romantic writers placed increasing value on the free expression of emotion and display increasing attention to the spiritual 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 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 ghosts. A preoccupation with the demonic and the mystery of evil marked by the works of Poe, Hawthorne, Melville, and a host of lesser writers. ? Early American romanticism was best represented by New England poets William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878) and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) in poetry, and James FenimoreCooper (1789-1851) and Washington Irving (1783-1859) in fiction. ? The later/peak period is represented by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) and Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862).

III．Washington Irving

1. Rip Van Winkle ? The story, written while Irving was staying with his sister Sarah and her husband Henry van Wart in Birmingham, England, is set in the years before and after the American Revolutionary War. A villager of Dutch descent escapes his nagging wife by wandering up Kaaterskill Clove near his home town of Palenville, New York in the Catskill Mountains. After various adventures (in one version of the tale, he encounters the spirits of Henry Hudson and his crew playing ninepins at the top of Kaaterskill Falls), he settles down under a shady tree and falls asleep. He wakes up 20 years later and returns to his village. He finds out that his wife is dead and his close friends have died in a war or gone somewhere else. He immediately gets into trouble when he hails himself a loyal subject of George III, not knowing that in the meantime the American Revolution has taken place and he is not supposed to be a loyal subject of any Hanoverian any longer. ? The story has become a part of cultural mythology: even for those who have never read the original story, "Rip Van Winkle" means either a person who sleeps for a long period of time, or one who is inexplicably (perhaps even blissfully) unaware of current events. ? Rip Van Winkle has been seen as a symbol of several aspects of America. Rip, like America, is immature, self-centered, careless, anti-intellectual, imaginative, and jolly as the overgrown child. The town itself symbolizes America – forever and rapidly changing. Washington Irving has Rip sleep through his own country’s history, through what we might call the birth pangs of America, and return to the “busy, bustling, disputatious” self-consciously adult United States of America. His conflicts and dreams are those of the nation – the conflict of innocence and experience, work and leisure, the old and the new, the head and the heart.