美国文学the_American_Romanticism_1.pptVIP

American Literature The American Romanticism (I) I. What is Romanticism Simply speaking, Romanticism is a literary movement which flourished as a cultural force throughout the 19th C and it can be divided into the early period and the late period. Also it remains powerful in contemporary literature and art. Romanticism, a term that is associated with imagination and boundlessness, is contrasted with classicism, which is commonly associated with reason and restriction. A romantic attitude may be detected in literature of any period, but as an historical movement it arose in the 18th and 19th centuries, in reaction to more rational literary, philosophic, artistic, religious, and economic standards.... The most clearly defined romantic literary movement in the U. S. was Transcendentalism. The representatives of the early period includes Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, and those of the late period contain Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe. A. Washington Irving (1783-1859 ) His fame “Father of American Imaginative literature” “Father of the American short story” His Works A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty by Diedrich Knickerbocker The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent “Rip Van Winkle” “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” c) Bracebridge Hall 1822 d) Oliver Goldsmith 1840 e) Life of George Washington 1855-1859 The short story as a genre in American literature probably began with Irving’s The Sketch Book, A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS, SKETCHES, AND TALES. It also marked the beginning of American Romanticism. B. James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) His Major Works In his life Cooper wrote over thirty novels which can be divided into frontier novels, detective novels and reference novels. He considered The Pathfinder 探路人(1840) and The Deerslayer杀鹿者 (1841) his best works. The unifying thread of the five novels