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1.
The Age of
American Romanticism
The
period
1820s-1865
in
American
Literature
is
commonly
identified
as
the
Romantic
Period in America
. After the
establishment of the Federal Government of
1789, American entered a new age. Its
population was considerably added to by the
influx of immigration. The American
pioneers pushed the frontier further west beyond
the Mississippi. Before 1860, the
United States began to change into an industrial
and
urban society. The rapid growth of
population, the westward expansion and the spread
of industrialism produced something of
an economic boom and a tremendous sense of
optimism and hope among the
people.
The writers of this period
produced works
of originality and
excellence that helped shape the ideas, ideals,
and literary aims
of many American
writers.
Writers of the American
Romantic Period include Ralph
Waldo
Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Edgar Allan Poe,
Herman Melville, Nathaniel
Hawthorne,
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
Emily Dickinson,
and Walt Whitman.
Romantic
Period
is
one
of
the
most
important
periods
in
the
history
of
American
literature.
It
was
an
age
of
westward
expansion,
of
the
increasing
gravity
of
the
slavery
question,
of
an
intensification
of
the
spirit
of
embattled
sectionalism
in
the
South,
a
nd of a powerful impulse to reform in
the North. In literature it was America’s
first great creative period, a full
flowering of the romantic impulse on American
soil.
The characteristics
of American Romanticism
Although
greatly
influenced
by
their
English
counterparts,
the
American
romantic writers
revealed unique characteristics of their own in
their works and they
grew
on
the
native
lands.
For
examp1e
，
the
American
national
experience
of
writers to draw
upon.
They celebrated America's
landscape with its virgin forests,
meadows, groves, endless prairies,
streams, and vast oceans. The wilderness came to
function almost as a dramatic character
that symbolized moral 1aw.
The desire
for an
escape from society and a return
to nature became a permanent
convention
of
American
literature.
Such
a
desire
is
particularly
evident
in
Cooper’s
Leather
Stocking
Tales,
in
Thoreau's
Walden
and
，
later,
in
Mark
Twain’s
Adventures
of
Huckleberry
Finn.
With the growth of American
national consciousness, American
character
types
speaking
local
dialects
appeared
in
poetry
and
fiction
with
increasing
frequency.
(4)Then
the
American
Puritanism
as
a
cultural
heritage
exerted great
influences over American moral values and American
Romanticism.
One of the manifestations
is the fact that American romantic writers tended
more to
moralize
than
their
English
and
European
counterparts.
Besides,
a
preoccupation
with
the
Calvinistic
view
of
origina1
sin
and
the
mystery
of
evil
marked
the
works
of Hawthorne, Melville and a host of lesser
writers.
Later
，
American
literature
came
to
Transcendentalism
Period
which
emphasized
individualism,
self-
reliance,
and
rejection
of
tradition
authority.
It
was
actually
greatly
influenced
by
romanticism.
American
Romanticism
culminated
around
the
1840s
in
what
has
come
to
be
known
as
“New
England
Transcendentalism”
or
“American
Renaissance”
(1836
-1855).
The
Transcendentalist
movement,
embodied
by
essayists
Ralph
Waldo
Emerson
and
Henry David Thoreau, was a reaction
against 18th century Rationalism, and closely
linked to the Romantic Movement.
In
general,
Transcendentalism
was
a
liberal
philosophy
favoring
nature
over
formal
religious
structure,
individual
insight
over
dogma,
and
humane
instinct
over
social
convention.
American
Transcendental
Romantics
pushed
radical individualism to the extreme.
American
writers
—
then or later
—
often saw
themselves as lonely explorers outside
society and convention.
There was a
trust in
the individual, democracy,
possibility of continued change for the better, a
need to see
beyond
what
is
before
our
eyes,
and
to
see
a
deeper
significance,
a
transcendent
reality.
Nature
conceived
of
not
as
a
machine
but
as
an
organism,
symbol
and
analogue
of
the
mind.
For
the
Romantic
American
writer,
nothing
was
a
given.
Literary and social
conventions, far from being helpful,
were dangerous. There was
tremendous
pressure to discover an authentic literary form,
content, and voice.
The romantic period
of American literature stretches from the end of
the
18th century to the outbreak of the
Civil War.
The Civil War brought the
Romantic
Period to an end. The age of
Realism came into existence.
2.
The age of Realism
If you study American literature,
you
’
d better learn more
about Realism.
The period
ranging from 1865 to 1914 has been referred to as
the Age of Realism in
the history of
Unite States, which is actually a movement or
tendency that dominated
the spirit of
American literature, especially American fiction
from the 1850s onwards.
In art and
literature, Realism refers to an attempt to
describe human behavior
and
surroundings or to
represent figures exactly as they act or appear in
life.
Realism
entered
American literature after the Civil War, when the
American society provided
rich
soil
for
the
rise
and
development
of
Realism.
William
Dean
Howells
defined
realism as
“
nothing more and nothing
less than the truthful treatment of
material
”
.
Realists searched for the social and
human nature more directly. In part, Realism was
a reaction against the Romantic
emphasis on the strange, idealistic, and long-ago
and
far-away.
It
has
been
chiefly
concerned
with
the
commonplaces
of
everyday
life
among the middle and lower classes
where character is a product of social factors and
environment is the integral element in
the dramatic complications.
Literature Features in
Realism Period
The
major
form
of
literature
produced
in
this
era
was
realistic
fiction.
Unlike
romantic
fiction,
realistic
fiction
aims
to
represent
life
as
it
really
is
and
make
the
reader
believe that the characters actually might exist
and the situations might actually
happen.
In
order
to
have
this
effect
on
the
reader,
realistic
fiction
focuses
on
the
ordinary
and commonplace. The major writers of the
Realistic Period include William
Dean
Howells, Mark Twain, Henry James, Bret Harte, and
Kate Chopin.
The American authors
lumped together as “realists” seem to have some
features
in common: “verisimilitude of
detail derived from observation,” the effort
to approach
the norm of
experience
—
a reliance on the
representative in plot, setting, and character,
and
to
offer
an
objective
rather
than
an
idealized
view
of
human
nature
and
experience.
They
insisted
on
accurate
documentation,
sociological
insight,
and
avoidance of poetic
diction and idealization. Local colorism as a
trend first made its