American Romanticism Click for a PDF …（美国浪漫主义点击一个PDFu2026）.pdfVIP

1 American Romanticism Prof. Bruce Harvey Click for a PDF INTRODUCTORY OVERVIEW Romanticism, as a term, derives from romance, which from the Medieval Period (1200- 1500) and on simply meant a story (e.g. all the chivalric, King Arthur legends) that was adventuristic and improbable. Romances are distinguished from novels, which emphasize the mundane and realistic. The period between 1860 and 1900, for the U.S., is often called The Age of Realism, because of the many authors (e.g., Theodore Dreiser Stephen Crane) who present their novels subject matter in a realistic manner (Melvilles monomaniacal Ahab, chasing a monstrous, symbolic whale, would be out of place in a realistic novel, although Moby-Dick has many realistic details about the whaling industry). The Romantic Period refers to literary and cultural movements in England, Europe, and America roughly from 1770 to 1860. Romantic writers (and artists) saw themselves as revolting against the Age of Reason or “Enlightenment” period (1700-1770) and its values. They celebrated imagination/intuition versus reason/calculation, spontaneity versus control, subjectivity and metaphysical musing versus objective fact, revolutionary energy versus tradition, individualism versus social conformity, democracy versus monarchy, and so on. The movement begins in Germany with the publication of Goethes Sorrows of Young Werther (about a love-sick, alienated artist type, too sensitive to live, who kills himself; after it was published a number of young men committed suicide in imitation!) and the emergence of various Idealist philosophers (Immanuel Kant, for example) who believed mental processes are the ultimately reality, as opposed to Empiricists which see the mind shaped by what it perceives. The movement then goes to England (Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, and Keats), until abou