AMERICAN ROMANTICISM: REVIEW



AMERICAN ROMANTICISM: REVIEW

WORKS READ:

Puritan Tradition

Anne Bradstreet poems

Jonathan Edwards sermon

Hawthorne: "Young Goodman Brown" and The Scarlet Letter

Bryant: "To a Waterfowl" and "Thanatopsis"

Poe: "Sonnet - to Science"

Whitman: "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer"

Irving: "Rip Van Winkle"

Poe: "The Fall of the House of Usher"

ROMANTIC THEMES in AMERICAN LITERATURE:

|Man and nature: |Nature as spirit, as good for man |

| |Nature as ideal, as a metaphor for the Self |

| |Nature as powerful in relation to man |

| |Nature as an escape from society and means towards independence, but as an ambiguous place where |

| |man is free to err as well as to become better |

| |Nature as a way of obtaining insight, emotional and intellectual awakening |

| |Nature as "the neutral territory where the Actual and the Imaginative may meet," thus an |

| |appropriate and congenial setting for romantic stories |

|Man as an individual: |Concern for the full development of the individual |

| |Interest in examining the nature of man |

| |Trust in intuition as a unique faculty of man; imagination and feeling as valid ways of |

| |understanding the world |

| |Non-conformity (Listen to yourself, not the crowd.) |

| |Interest in how far the individual can go in becoming fully realized |

|Escape: |An interest in the past and the exotic, as different from the American present |

| |Journey from the mundane in order to achieve self-realization |

| |Imagination as a means of escaping a dull, unfulfilling reality |

|Civilization: |Place of moral ambiguity |

| |Sometimes even a place of corruption and death |

Questions to ask: How does each writer in each work deal with each theme? What is his attitude toward these various subjects and themes?

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