American Romanticism

The Romantic Sensibility: Celebrating the Imagination

Romanticism is the name given to any schools of thought that value feeling and intuition over reason.
The repulsive and wretched working and living conditions in the cities showed the limits of reason.
The Romantics believed that the imagination could comprehend truths that could not be reached with reason alone.
These truths were often accompanied by powerful emotion, and were associated with natural, unspoiled beauty.
The Romantics valued poetry above all other works of the imagination.

Romantic Escapism

• Romantics wanted to rise above “dull realities” to find a realm of higher truth.
• There were two ways that the Romantics tried to understand higher truths.
• One was to explore the past, the exotic and the supernatural.
• The other was to contemplate the natural world.

Characteristics of American Romanticism

• Find the characteristics of American Romanticism on Page 144 of the textbook.
• Blue text box in right-hand corner
• You have three minutes to complete this.

Answers to Fill-in the Blank

Feelings and intuition over reason
Experience; imagination
Civilization; unspoiled nature
Youthful innocence; educated sophistication
Freedom; individual
Beauty; spiritual; moral
Past; progress
Exotic; supernatural; imagination
Poetry
Myth, legend, and folk

America vs. Europe

• Prior to the American Romantic period, nearly all American literature is based on European models.
• American authors had not yet found a unique and “American” perspective to write from.
• The American frontier was a unique experience – all of Europe had been settled for hundreds of years.
• Novels related to westward expansion and the development of the frontier provided the first break from European literature
• In addition, Europeans tended to view Americans as unsophisticated and uncivilized.