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transcendentalism rejected both 18th-century rationalism and established religion, which for the transcendentalists meant the Puritan tradition in particular, Instead, the transcendentalists celebrated the power of the human imagination to commune with the universe and transcend the limitations of the material world. The transcendentalists found their chief source of inspiration in nature. Emerson‘s essay Nature (1836) was the first major document of the transcendental school and stated the ideas that were to remain central to it. His other key transcendentalist works include The American Scholar (1837), a volume in which he addressed the intellectual‘s duty to culture, and Self-Reliance (1841), an essay in which he asserted the importance of being true to one‘s own nature.
4. Symbolism: Symbolism is a movement in literature and the visual arts that originated in France in the poetry of Charles Baudelaire in the late 19th century. In literature, symbolism was an aesthetic movement that encouraged writers to express their ideas, feelings, and values by means of symbols or suggestions rather than by direct statements. Hawthorne and Melville are masters of symbolism in American in the 19th century.
5. Free verse: Free verse is the rhymed or unrhymed poetry composed without attention to conventional rules of meter. Free verse was first written and labeled by a group of French poets of the late 19th century. Their purpose was to deliver poetry from the restrictions of formal metrical patterns and to recreate instead the free rhythms of natural speech. Pointing to the American poet Walt Whitman as their precursor, they wrote lines of varying length and cadence, usually not rhymed. Free verse has been characteristic of the work of many modern American poets, including Ezra Pound, and Carl Sandburg.
6. Puritanism: The word Puritanism is originally used to refer to the theology advocated by a party within the Church of England. The term Puritanism is also used in a broader sense to refer to attitudes and values considered characteristic of the Puritans. It has been employed to denote a rigid moralism, or the condemnation of innocent pleasure, or religious narrowness adhered by the early New England Puritans. The American Puritanism as a cultural heritage exerted great influence over American moral values. And this Puritan influence over American Romanticism was conspicuously noticeable. In addition, a preoccupation with the Calvinistic view of original sin and the mystery of evil marked the works by such famous writers as Hawthorne and Melville. IV. Identification. 1. Washington Irving
2. The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
3. A short story is a brief prose fiction, usually one that can be read in a single sitting. It generally contains the six major elements of fiction: characterization, setting, theme, plot, plot of view, and style. 4. James Fenimore Cooper 5. The Last of the Mohicans 6. Hawkeye 7. Thanatopsis
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8. view of death 9. iambic pentameter
10. Nature speaks to him who in the love of nature holds communion with nature‘s visible forms. Nature responds to two human moods. One is gayness, the other is gloominess, or sadness. 11. Edgar Allan Poe 12. The Raven
13. L1-alliteration L4-onomatopoeia L7-internal rhyme L10-assonance 14. Edgar Allan Poe 15. Psyche
16. Psyche is the goddess of the soul in Greek mythology. 17. Nature
18. Ralph Waldo Emerson
19. Then, the man can not believe and adore the God, can not preserve the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown. 20. Transcendentalism 21. Nature
22. He regards nature as the purest, and the most sanctifying moral influence on man, and advocated a direct intuition of a spiritual and immanent God in nature. In this connection, Emerson‘s emotional experiences are exemplary in more ways than one.
Now this is a moment of ―conversation‖ when one feels completely merged with the outside world, when one has completely sunk into nature and become one with it, and when the soul has gone beyond the physical limits of the body to share the omniscience of the Oversoul. In a word, the soul has completely transcended the limits of individuality and become part of the Oversoul. Emerson sees sprit pervading everywhere, not only in the soul of man, but behind nature, throughout nature. 23. Walden
24. Henry David Thoreau 25. (Open.)
26. Self-Reliance
27. Ralph Waldo Emerson
28. He believed above all the individualism, independence of mind, and self-reliance. 29. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 30. A Psalm of Life
31. His optimism which has characterized much of his poetry, also endeared many critics to him. He seemed to have persevered despite tragedy. In his poem, ―The Psalm of Life‖, he writes: Life is real! Life is earnest! And the grave is not its goal.
This is the cry of the heart, ―rallying from depression‖, ready to affirm life, to regroup from losses, to push on despite momentary defeat. 32. The Scarlet Letter
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33. Nathaniel Hawthorne 34. (open) 35. Moby Dick
36. Herman Melville
37. The captain of the whaling ship 38. The name of the whaling ship
39. The rebellious struggle of Captain Ahab against the overwhelming, mysterious vastness of the universe and its awesome sometimes merciless forces. V. Questions and Answers.
1. Age of Enlightenment is a term used to describe the trends in thought and letters in Europe and the American colonies during the 18th century prior to the French Revolution. The phrase was frequently employed by writers of the period itself, convinced that they were emerging from centuries of darkness and ignorance into a new age enlightened by reason, science, and a respect for humanity.
2. In the American colonies Enlightenment thought was expressed chiefly through political discourse. American thinkers asserted a growing belief in the supremacy of reason over church doctrine; they also played major roles in the American Revolution.
Paine‘s Common Sense called for the colonies to become independent and establish a republican government of their own. Franklin published Poor Richard’s Almanack (1732), with its homespun, practical wisdom exerted a pervasive influence upon the American character. For the most part, his literary reputation rests on his unfinished Autobiography, which is considered by many the epitome of his life and character. Jefferson, third president of US and author of the Declaration of Independence, made the declaration an announcement to the rest of the world that the colonies were independent from Great Britain; it also provide a rational for this action.
3. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow was the best known of the Fireside Poets, and it was with him that American poetry began its emergence from the shadow of its British parentage. His poetic narrative helped create a national historical myth, transforming colorful aspects of the American past into memorable romance. They include Evangeline (1847), which concerns lovers who are separated during the French and Indian War (1754~1763) and The Sea of Hiawatha (1855), which derives its theme from native American folklore. No American poet before or since was as widely celebrated during his or her lifetime as Longfellow. He became the first and only American poet to be honored with a bust in the revered Poets‘ Corner of Westminster Abbey in London, England.
4. The Romantic Period in the history of American literature stretches from the end of the 18th century to the outbreak of the Civil War. It starts with the publication of Washington Irving‘s The Sketch Book and ended with Whitman‘s Leaves of Grass. Being a period of the great flowering of American literature, it is also called ―the American Renaissance‖
5. The development of the American society nurtured ―the literature of a great nation.‖ The young Republic, devoid of a heavy burden of the inherited past and history,
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was flourishing into a politically, emotionally and culturally independent country. Historically, it was the time of westward expansion. Emotionally, the whole nation was experiencing an industrial transformation, which affected the rural as well as the urban life. Politically, democracy and equality became the ideal of new nation. With the founding of the American Independent Government, the nation‘ literary milieu was ready for the movement of romantic feeling that was brought about in the half of the 19th century.
6. Romanticism was spread for American in the early 19th century. Its manifestations were varied, yet romantics frequently shared certain general characteristics: moral enthusiasm, faith in the value of individualism and intuitive perception, and a presumption that natural world was a source of goodness and man‘s societies a source of corruption. Romanticism influenced the major forms of American prose: transcendentalist writings, historical fiction, and sentimental fiction.
7. American Romanticism and the European Romanticism share much in common: in reaction to the enlightenment and its emphasis on reason, Romanticism stressed emotion, the imagination, and subjectivity of approach. European literary masters, especially the English counterparts exerted a stimulating impact on the writers of the New World. Born of one common cultural heritage, American Romanticism is surely to some extent, derivative after their English predecessors. Although the European influences were strong, the great works that demonstrate what American romantic writings were typically America. They revealed unique characteristics of their own in their works and they grew on the native land. The content of the American Romantic period is an original and diverse body of work. American writes developed some new forms of fiction or poetry. They also placed an increasing emphasis on the free expression of emotions and displayed an increasing attention to the psychic states of their characters. The strong tendency to exalt the individual and common man was another focus of the movement.
8. Washington Irving (1783-1859) is the first American author to achieve international renown. Rip Van Wrinkle is a short story embraced in Irving‘s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent (1819). Irving was the great prose stylist of American romanticism. His familiar prose narrative juxtaposes the Old World and the new one, adding his own antiquarian interest with artistic perspective. Irving put his focus on American subject, American landscape, and he treated his subject with imagination.
9. Ralph Waldo Emerson transcendentalism is actually a philosophical school that absorbed some ideological concerns of American Puritanism and European Romanticism, with its focus on the intuitive knowledge of human beings to grasp the absolute in the universe and the divinity of man. Emerson rejected the formal religion of the churches; instead, he based his religion on an intuitive belief in an ultimate unity, which hr called the ―Over-soul.‖ The Over-soul, according to him, is an all-pervading power from which all things come from and of which all are a part. Emerson is affirmative about man‘s intuitive knowledge, with which a man can trust himself to be a self-reliant man. In Emerson‘s viewpoint, nature is emblematic of the spiritual world, alive with God‘ overwhelming presence; hence, it exercises a
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