Discuss the background and qualities of Romanticism as reflected in 19th Century American novel.

Romanticism as reflected in 19th Century American novel. The term Romanticism does not stem directly from the concept of love, but rather from the French word romaunt (a romantic story told in verse). Romanticism focused on emotions and the inner life of the writer, and often used autobiographical material to inform the work or even provide a template for it, unlike traditional literature at the time.

Romanticism celebrated the primitive and elevated "regular people" as being deserving of celebration, which was an innovation at the time. Romanticism also fixated on nature as a primordial force and encouraged the concept of isolation as necessary for spiritual and artistic development.

Romanticism proper was preceded by several related developments from the mid-18th century on that can be termed Pre-Romanticism. Among such trends was a new appreciation of the medieval romance, from which the Romantic Movement derives its name. The romance was a tale or ballad of chivalric adventure whose emphasis on individual heroism and on the exotic and the mysterious was in clear contrast to the elegant formality and artificiality of prevailing Classical forms of literature, such as the French Neoclassical tragedy or the English heroic couplet in poetry. This new interest in relatively unsophisticated but overtly emotional literary expressions of the past was to be a dominant note in Romanticism.

Romanticism in English literature began in the 1790s with the publication of the Lyrical Ballads of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordsworth’s “Preface” to the second edition (1800) of Lyrical Ballads, in which he described poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” became the manifesto of the English Romantic movement in poetry. William Blake was the third principal poet of the movement’s early phase in England.

The first phase of the Romantic movement in Germany was marked by innovations in both content and literary style and by a preoccupation with the mystical, the subconscious, and the supernatural.

A wealth of talents, including Friedrich Hölderlin, the early Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jean Paul, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, August Wilhelm and Friedrich von Schlegel, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, and Friedrich Schelling, belong to this first phase. In Revolutionary France, François-Auguste-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand, and Madame de Staël were the chief initiators of Romanticism, by virtue of their influential historical and theoretical writings.

The 19th Century was an incredibly rich time in American history. In the wake of the American Revolution and the War of 1812, the United States was still at the early stages of forming its own identity and a culture of its own. This time period, historically remembered as the Romantic Era, greatly affected American thought, and could be credited as the period that gave birth to what it means “to be an American.”

Discuss the background and qualities of Romanticism as reflected in 19th Century American novel.

Romanticism (the more common name for the period of The Romantic Era) was an arts and literature movement that began in Europe and eventually made its way to the United States, where it took on a life of its own.

Initially, Romanticism sparked as a reaction to Industrialism and the restrictive neoclassical ideas of the preceding era of Enlightenment. It rejected ideas of modernity, rationalism, and religious rigidity and instead focused on individual emotion, the exploration of the self, and the importance and beauty of the natural world. It was a period where feeling preceded reason and self-expression was valued over traditional restraint. In the grand scope of American literature, American Romanticism was the first real literary movement to ever occur within in the United States.

In fact, the Romantic Era in the United States was largely known as the “American Renaissance” because it was around this time that American writers and artists began searching for a distinctly “American” voice, separate from that of their British and European counterparts. Just a few short decades after the American Revolution and in the wake of the War of 1812, the country found itself in a place of newly acquired freedom and at the precipice of unending possibility with regards to their identity as a nation. This state of liminality led to a bursting of creativity and artistic development spanning from the early to mid 1800s.

Inspired by British romantic writers who focused on aesthetics of nature, emotion, and the self, American artists took to writing about America through these Romantic lenses. William Cullen Bryant, for example, was inspired to write poetry depicting New England outdoors as influenced by the Romantic appreciation for nature. Henry David Thoreau, a key figure in American literature was also influenced by these works, and became a leading member of the distinctly American movement of Transcendentalism.

While some of these writers were influenced by European Romantics and philosophers, nearly all of them were inspired by a nationalistic concern to develop an indigenous cultural tradition and a distinctly American literature. Indeed, they helped to define – at a far deeper and more intelligent level than the crude definitions offered by politicians since then until the present day – the very concept of American national identity. Like the European Romantics, these American writers reacted against what they perceived to be the mechanistic and utilitarian tenor of Enlightenment thinking and the industrial, urbanized world governed by the ethics and ideals of bourgeois commercialism. They sought to redeem the ideas of spirit, nature, and the richness of the human self within a specifically American context.

 

Imagination

The first of these characteristics is imagination. This falls in line with the Industrial Revolution, which was a great time of progress. In many cases, when there is progress, there is also great optimism. People start to imagine what could happen next, and progress continues. On the flip-side of that, with that much progress, a lot of people began migrating to big cities that were becoming overpopulated. The cities became dirty and disease-ridden, so it's no surprise that many people wanted to escape that. Therefore, the American Romantic writers embraced that notion through escapism.

Escapism is where the mind allows you to escape harsh conditions by taking you to a place that is purely beautiful. Characters in Romantic literature are often journeying away from the city and into the countryside to a place that's not totally realistic, a place that has improbable and even supernatural qualities.

The authors develop these places with imagery to make the reader experience the locale as if it were real. Washington Irving, who's known as the father of American literature, wrote a story called 'Rip Van Winkle,' which is about a man who wanders out into the woods to escape some chores his wife is asking him to do.

Romanticism as reflected in 19th Century American novel. After falling asleep for twenty years in the woods, he not only escapes his chores but his wife as well because she's dead. This fanciful escape is typical during this time, but it's something we still see in movies today. Think about the movie Avatar. Jake Sully is able to escape by assuming a new identity in a beautiful new world. Even the audience, as they watch, is able to escape reality as they experience the fantastical world of Pandora. So, we see escapism continues today.

 

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