美国文学浪漫主义英文版

American Romanticism

Romantic Period is one of the most important periods in the history of American

literature. When Americans were constructing their country, they also began to realize

their differences from their European counterparts. They began to hope to see an

entirely different literature model which expressed American cultures. Great writers of

that period captured on their pages the enthusiasm and the optimism of that dream.

Romanticism refers to an artistic and intellectual movement originating in

Europe in the late 18th century and characterized by a heightened interest in nature,

emphasis on the individual’s experience of emotion and imagination, departure from

the attitudes and forms of classicism, and rebellion against established social rules and

conventions. The romantic period of American literature stretches from the end of the

18th century to the outbreak of the Civil War. 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, and 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.

1. The unique 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，(1) the American national experience of "pioneering into

the west" proved to be a rich source of material for American 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. (2) 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. (3) 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. (5) 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.

2. Representative writers and their works

Washington Irving(1783-1859) was the first American storyteller to be

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internationally recognized as a man of letters and the first great prose stylist of

American romanticism, and his familiar style was destined to provide a model for the

prevailing prose narrative of the future. His first book A History of New York from the

Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty (1809), written under the

name of Diedrich Knickerbocker, was a great success and won him wide popularity.

He is best known for his The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent (1819-1820),

especially in which two short stories Rip

Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

have become American classics. Later he wrote works of history and biographies,

such as The History of Life and Voyages of Christobra Columbus (1828), A Chronicle

of the Conquest of Granada and The Alhambra (1832). After that, he spent the rest of

his life living a life of leisure and comfort, and writing. The Life of Goldsmith (1840)

and a five-volume Life of Washington (1855-1859). He died in 1859.

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) is respectfully remembered as a master of

adventurous narrative and as the creator of an American hero-myth. According to a

charming legend, Cooper’s first novel Precaution (1820) was a response to his wife’s

challenge to improve on the current British society fiction, and the failure of this work

turned him to historical novels. Later, The Spy, a tale of the Revolution he wrote,

became a great success in America and Europe. In 1823, Cooper published The

Pioneers (1823), which together with other 4 novels The

Deer slayer (1841), The Last

of the Mohicans (1826), The Pathfinder (1840) and The Prairie (1827) became his

well-known Leather-stocking Tales. Cooper went on to write over thirty novels,

including exciting adventures of the sea like The Pilot. Cooper created the American

historical novel using authentic American subject.

In general, American Romanticism was a kind of imitation as well as innovation

because it appeared under the Western Europe Romanticism and finally it created a

unique style of fiction and poetry. American Romanticism embraced the individual

and rebelled against the confinement of neoclassicism and religious tradition.

American Romanticism created a new literary genre that continued to influence

American writers.

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