American Romanticism/American Renaissance

Heroes come in all shapes and sizes. Captain Ahab is no exception. Forget for a second Ahab's villainous qualities and look instead to the classical tradition. Shakespeare's Macbeth was not a very nice guy. Neither was Milton's Satan. Still, we find qualities within these antagonists that conform to ancient ideas of the epic and tragedy. Let us, then, look at Ahab in this same light. Ahab may be a monomaniac, but we still adore him despite all of his faults. Therefore, this essay explores the heroic qualities of Ahab which have made him into the American lit icon he is today.

In the wellspring of classic nineteenth-century American literature, a spectacular theme unites our greatest authors. They, in various ways, challenge the naïve optimism of the “American Adam” and American liberalism. They are deeply conservative in their skepticism toward human and civilizational progress and perfection.

Abstrak Artikel ini mendiskusikan mengenai wacana tentang Romantisisme pada waktu Inggris menjajah America dalam cerita Washington Irving yang berjudul "Rip Van Winkle". Karakter utama yang mempunyai konflik dengan istrinya yang dimana karakter utama memilih mengisi waktunya untuk membantu tetangga dan menghibur anak-anak didesa daripada mengurusi urusan keluarganya. Fenomena tersebut dikaitkan dengan Romantisisme di Amerika yang dianalisis melalui karakter utama menggunakan teori representasi dari Stuart Hall untuk merepresentasikan Romantisisme di Amerika. Melalui teori representasi fenomena ini direlasikan dengan kejadian yang terjadi pada abad sembilan belas dimana Amerika berjuang untuk memerdekakan negaranya dan sejarah perjalanan Washington Irving yang berhubungan dengan kontribusinya pada Romantisisme Amerika pada abad itu. Kata Kunci : Romantisisme, Karakter utama, Konflik, Representasi, Abad sembilan belas. Abstract This article discusses the discourse on Romanticism when Britain colonized America on Washington Irving story entitled "Rip Van Winkle". The main character who has a conflict with his wife in which the main character chooses to spend his time to help the neighbors and entertain the children in the village rather than taking care of family affairs. This phenomenon is associated with Romanticism in America which is analyzed through the main character by using the

В монографии проза Эдгара Аллана По рассматривается с точки зрения актуальной в современной гуманитарной науке проблемы тела в культуре. Автор поставил перед собой задачу перечитать По вопреки сложившимся о нем мифам и стереотипам, по возможности восстанавливая имманентный историко-культурный контекст и исследуя тревожащую материальность его текстов. В фокусе исследования - фигура наблюдателя и специфические техники наблюдения; повествование как форма вербального насилия и как травматический опыт; особые миметические отношения, в которые вступают тело и тело, тело и текст. Сквозь призму телесного сделана попытка переосмыслить характерные черты поэтики По, выявить внутреннюю логику и динамику его письма, определить психологический рисунок, образное и композиционное своеобразие его рассказов.
Книга адресована как специалистам (прежде всего филологам и историкам культуры), так и всем, кто интересуется творчеством Эдгара По.

In the dark world that is set by Nathaniel Hawthorne in “Young Goodman Brown,” there is a tiny spark of hope that makes the reader believe in a way out of all the freakiness that Youngman Brown goes through in the woods of a good Christian’s nightmare, at least until the story nears the end. The good-hearted and loving wife of Goodman, Faith with her pink ribbons, stands for what may be regarded as the main issue of the town’s people.

"What Susan taught me through her words in Rural Hours is that intimacy is wasted if just felt interpersonally. She helped me realize that nature and the physical landscape can teach humans valuable truths about living in a community—if only we allow ourselves to get close to nature, to get dirty. As I walked down that path in Cooperstown, “away from the village in quiet fields by the river,” (73) I, too, felt that intimacy with nature that Susan validated consistently with her experiences in Rural Hours. Perhaps the most valuable realization I came to in this journey however, would be at the moment when I felt distinctly at home in nature. I began to feel that my presence in the environment was not that of a foreigner, and in that moment, I knew that I had become aware of a community network based in the environment and of which I was forever a part. In order to help others come to these same epiphanies, I will be examining closely how Susan in Rural Hours uses the action of walking through nature as one which allows her to expose the community ethic inherent in the physical environment. Susan’s community ethic in Rural Hours is built on foundation in traditional gender roles, firm Christian values, and true phenomenological awareness of nature. But close readings of Susan’s observations of nature, as well as of supplementary readings that provide depth of understanding to Susan’s role as a female nature writer in the mid-nineteenth century, expose this community ethic in Rural Hours as central in formulating a healthy relationship between humans and nature. Furthermore, this community ethic comes to shape and validate Susan’s emphasis on conservation in Rural Hours, which is reflected in her legacy at Cooperstown, NY. Ultimately, I propose that Susan’s close observations of nature and the sense of community that thrives there, as they are demonstrated in Rural Hours, have played a huge role in the formulation of the conservation ethic that still energizes Cooperstown, NY today."

The American Romanticists of the mid-19th century may not have held a monopoly on being the first literary authors to opine about nature’s vast beauty, overwhelming immensity and humbling simplicity, but they were a generation of writers that had the ability, thanks to the enlightened and provable facts and ideals of science and philosophy, to understand that man was “a part of nature, and of the proper relationship between him and the rest of created things” (Krutch 14).

Nature, in all of its resplendent boundless innate beauty, wonder and immensity, from sea to shining sea, provided Concord’s most famous literary giants, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, with the inspiration and impetus to let their imaginations flourish with wild and creative abandon and to capture, on paper for the first time, the personal sentiments that made man recognize its eternal bond with the natural world and at long last give American’s their own literary genre that spoke to their affinity for the land and a nation they were proud to call home.

The Romantic Era of the mid-19th century introduced America to its first distinct form of national literature that brought worldwide recognition to its prominent authors and their works. Yet for hundreds of years prior the continent produced various literary styles that emanated from native tribes and European explorers to revolutionary heroes and leaders, culminating in a vast treasure trove of history that stood as a precursor to what lay ahead.

The natives of North America, absent of their own written vocabularies, passed down their histories, tales, myths and legends to their younger generations by word of mouth. Later, European settlers, after sailing across the vast Atlantic Ocean and reaching the shores of the
North American continent, would write their own accounts of their findings and eventually decipher and translate the native’s stories into the myriad languages of the western and non-western world.

Late 18th century American literature would be full of patriotic fervor from the writings of Thomas Paine, who would help rally General George Washington’s troops and bring new energy and hope to the American cause of independence and freedom. By the early 19th century,
and after a second conflict with England, the nascent American nation was ready to sink its teeth into a newly-found national literature that would introduce the Romantic Era while its prominent authors would write about heroic hard-fought battles for democracy, the vast frontiers, and imaginative spine-tingling tales.

It would be nature, though, in all of its resplendent boundless natural beauty, wonder and immensity, from sea to shining sea, that would provide the inspiration and impetus for two literary giants of this era, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, to let their imaginations flourish with wild creative abandon and to capture, on paper for the first time, the personal sentiments that made man recognize its eternal bond with the natural world and at long last give American’s their own literary genre that spoke to their affinity for the land and a nation they were proud to call home.

Le circostanze in cui furono trovate le Master Letters non sono chiare: si sa per certo che Mabel Todd ne era a conoscenza nei primi anni '90 dell'800, e ne incluse degli stralci nell'edizione delle lettere di Emily Dickinson che pubblicò nel 1894. In quell'edizione non c'è alcun riferimento a un "Master", e l'identità del destinatario è nascosta con l'espressione "To ____ ____" e con la data, fittizia, del 1885. Probabilmente, Mabel voleva evitare riferimenti precisi per evitare il disvelamento dell'identità del destinatario, che avrebbe potuto causare problemi alla sua famiglia.

From the century of independence to the contemporary, Montaigne acted as an influential voice in the ongoing transatlantic conversation that shaped the American identity. This special issue offers a series of transhistorical and interdisciplinary studies that draw the dense network of contexts, uses and meanings assumed by Montaigne’s figure and work in America, along different fields (literature, philosophy, political theory, and gender studies).

"Ruth Hall" by Fanny Fern is different from other novels written by and addressed to women: its plot, protagonist, and style prove that Fern’s book is an unconventional female Bildungsroman. To prove this statement, this paper will compare Fern’s novel to the two most famous bestsellers of the period: "The Wide, Wide World" by Susan Warner and "The Lamplighter" by Maria Cummins.

Beginning in the early 19th century following the revolutionary victory over the British Empire to once and for all establish a free nation for all Americans to live, govern and dream, literary imaginations flowed freely like the dreams of their newly-minted American citizens. Then, as new lands west of the Mississippi River were opened to settlers hoping to reach the shores of the Pacific Ocean and the promised land of California, the motivational cry of Manifest Destiny awakened the senses and allowed the American Romanticism movement to flourish.

This new literary movement sought to encapsulate the nation's bountiful natural beauty and grandeur; the citizen's hard-fought right to freedom through democracy that led to the power of individualism; the trials and tribulations that all were personally experienced would be conveyed through heart-wrenching emotion; and the liberty to dream and facilitate a new life in a wondrous land would permeate through the imaginations of these literary geniuses.

In this course, our authors-have all contributed in their own unique way in the styles of Nature, Individualism, Emotion, and Imagination (Democracy and Freedom). We will discuss how our five authors embraced the myriad facets that encompass the American Romantic literary genre and how their unforgettable prose still resounds today.

The richest period in American literary history, the American Renaissance (1830-1865) produced Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson. These authors were strongly influenced by foreign literature, from the ancients to the Romantics. This transnational influence mingled with the styles and idioms of an emerging popular culture that was distinctively American, divided between conventional, sentimental-domestic writings and sensational or grotesquely humorous ones. Integrating themes and images from this variegated popular culture, the major authors also projected in their works the paradoxes of a nation that promoted both individualism and union, that touted freedom but tolerated chattel slavery, that preached equality but witnessed widening class divisions and the oppression of women, blacks, and Native Americans. These oppressed groups produced a literary corpus of their own that was once neglected but that has assumed a significant place in the American canon.

Emily Dickinson, often viewed as a quintessentially private poet who was supposedly distanced from her times,  actually borrowed heavily from her contemporary popular culture: from women's literature, from sermons and reform writings, from sensational newspapers and fiction, and many other writings.  Without these sources, her poems would have been far duller and more conventional than they are.

For Stevens, the Romantic period extends from the late eighteenth century through the late nineteenth century, and it includes both English and American writers. The chief Romantic influences on Stevens' poetry include Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Emerson, Whitman, and Tennyson. (There are lesser echoes of Blake and Coleridge. Byron seems to have had little impact.) Stevens was born in 1879, and both Whitman and Tennyson died in 1892. For Stevens, then, Romanticism was not a remote historical episode. It overlapped with his own life, and it formed the immediate historical background to his life's work as a poet. Moreover, in Stevens' conception, Romanticism is not just a single historical period. It is a recurrent mode of the poetic imagination, and for Stevens that mode constitutes the wellspring of all poetic vitality.

For Emerson and those nature writers who followed his lead, it is the belief in nature's permanence and consistency which allows them to pursue the project of deriving 'spiritual facts' from 'natural facts,' making nature the normative ground on which to raise their critiques of modern society.

Through their imaginative writing styles, Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman incessantly endeavored to resolve the lingering question, what is an American? As individuals from around the world journeyed to the promising shores of America’s East Coast, seeking social and religious freedom, America’s cultural variety swelled and rehabilitated existing conceptions of a truly “American” man. Although he or his ancestors may have once taken pride in a European heritage, this new American left behind the traditions and customs of the past and awakened to new ideas, new principles, and could entertain new thoughts, form his own opinions, and experience the world through his own nature.

As this new way of thinking spread throughout the nation, writers reflected upon conceptions of freedom, individualism, democracy, boundless frontiers, and golden opportunities—experimenting with how America’s multi-cultural nation should define and understand itself in collective terms.

In response to the claim that our sense of will is illusory, some philosophers have called for a better understanding of the phenomenology of agency. Although I am broadly sympathetic with the tenor of this response, I question whether the positive-theoretic blueprint it promotes truly heralds a tenable undertaking. Marshaling a Schopenhauerian insight, I examine the possibility that agency might not be amenable to phenomenological description. Framing this thesis in terms of Charles S. Peirce’s semiotic framework, I suggest a way to integrate the idea of streaming experiences with that of bodily strivings, which, owing to their primitive structure, can never be represented.

Grounded theory is used to identify the main patterns across hundreds of statements by teachers to students about Hawthorne's short story "Young Goodman Brown." This essay appeared in the Spring 2011 (4:3) issue of Teaching American Literature: A Journal of Theory and Practice at http://www.cpcc.edu/taltp.

Many American Renaissance transcendentalists imagine men as self-contained but permeable orbs, which are both organs of sight and individual planets in their own orbits.  This conception is the result of an American pantheism that imaginatively merges and fragments human and divine bodies into parts, which are themselves, like Emerson's eye, also at times considered wholes. For the purposes of this essay, I define American pantheism as the deification of nature--the All of nature and in effect nature's eye--and the representation of natural law and its Romantic taxonomy of bodies as divine.  For the pantheist, the classification of nature, its archetypal models of human and plant development, provides the model of divine order: all substances become part of a great chain of being with the eye at the top.  I argue that a language of visual self-representation determines the nature of male identity in the American Renaissance.  This specific language is conspicuous in the writings of mid-century American pantheists, and in Emerson's and Melville's ubiquitous use of the tropes of eyes and orbs to locate the self.  In this chapter, I present a narrative of what happens to the eye, the orb, in the pantheist rhetoric of Emerson and Melville.  Their version of the American self is manifested as a globular entity, and what happens to that self happens to the eye.  The American's union with nature turns out to generate the fragmentation of the self as orb of seeing and being.
      Emerson's transformation to transparent eyeball in the essay "Nature," which was originally titled "Pan," is the central visual, linguistic, scientific, and representational motif of his transcendentalism.  Through this merger--a quintessential form of pantheistic reverie, a giddy transcendence of the self--Emerson is able to become nature, its archetypal form, nature seeing itself through the instrument of man. As an eye whose I disappears and becomes nothing, Emerson merges with the universe, and so becomes diffusely All, and sees all. Emerson attempts such a merger of part with whole, variety with unity, throughout his works, a merger which he considers the essence of transcendentalism, the transcendence of the male self and body.  In Emerson's wake, Melville undermines this optimism, one philosophically as well as etymologically based on Emerson's view of the eye; Melville and many of his characters initially experience Emerson's sublime orbit, but ultimately spin away from it fragmented and disillusioned.  Melville then recapitulates but finally parodies Emerson's configuration of the orbed and orbiting self, reincorporating his thematics with bitter irony.  Eyes are foremost the locus of human representation, so it is not surprising that altering the language of visuality changes not just one aspect of the self, but all the contingent parameters of that self.  While the Melvillean characters I discuss initially experiment with pantheism, they undergo some version of the visual dismemberment Pierre experiences in its most dramatic form.

This essay considers the notion of private selfhood as articulated in Emerson’s and Hawthorne’s writing about beauty. Though _Nature’s_ infamous “transparent Eye-ball” is frequently cited as evidence of his secular intellectual bent, the 1836 treatise borrows heavily from Jonathan Edwards’s aesthetics. Seen in this light, the early Emerson displays far more reliance on his Congregationalist Christian influences than is typically supposed, promoting a vision of the soul that resembles more than refigures colonial New England’s predominant configuration of homogenous interiority. Hawthorne’s writing about the beautiful, on the other hand, offers art as a vehicle for transcending humankind’s inherent isolation. While art rarely attains the status of true beauty, it does so when bringing particulars of the artist’s innermost self into meaningful contact with his community. Thus Hawthorne’s selfhood resonates with modern discourses of individualism more so than does Emerson’s.

The nineteenth-century invention of the category of the "spiritual"as opposed to being religious was deeply entangled within American Romanticism's larger project of reenchanting nature. While this relocation of spiritual authority out of the church and into the woods and wilderness echoes some of the larger dynamics of secularization that have long been a problematic for theories of Romanticism (see Abrams 1971), it also birthed a form of nature religiosity that still colors, for better and for worse, much contemporary American environmental thought. One of American Romanticism's most consequential legacies in the present, this chapter argues, is in an ongoing American predilection for sanctified landscape. This predilection is buttressed by models of conversion and self-transformation that have deep roots in Emersonian Transcendentalism and its larger dilations within postbellum culture. If this is where the sublimity of the New World has sometimes met the "woo-woo" of the New Age, this green spirituality and its attendant aesthetic forms has nevertheless inculcated viable forms of environmental politics, from legal frameworks for preservation and conservation to more radical forms of civil disobedience and environmental activism.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story "The Ambitious Guest" has been regarded by various readers as a tale of natural sublimity and a defeat of humankind under crushing forces of Nature. However, Hawthorne's captivating writing leaves space for multiple interpretations, and bearing in mind that Hawthorne belongs to Dark Romanticism this short story can be regarded as a defeat of individual heart against collective mind. In this story, Hawthorne, a great symbolist of his time, carefully developed the plot and the characters in order to portray how individual striving for progress and betterment can destroy a harmonious family that is in peace with natural order. Hawthorne uses a complete stranger and turns him into a force for destruction, as the character deeply disturbs the philosophy of each family member and changes the close-knit structure of the family into a scattered group of unsatisfied individuals who yearn for change, which results in a natural catastrophe. "The Ambitious Guest" represents Hawthorne's warning against individualism and yearning for progress, and it praises the institution of family as a building block upon which humankind is built.

Quintessentially transnational and transdisciplinary in its origins, Romanticism, Isaiah Berlin notes, is a recent movement to transform Western consciousness most radically, a transformation that, we would like to show, has continued to reverberate not merely in the West but in the East after the heyday of the movement, roughly from the 1800s to 1850s, from Frühromantik to the American Renaissance. In the second half of the nineteenth century, many figures carried the torch of Romanticism and helped to keep the fire burning to date. Three figures, we suggest, stand out and have exerted the greatest influence, respectively, in sustaining the social, aesthetic, and philosophical forces of Romanticism: John Ruskin, Charles Baudelaire, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Il volume ripercorre alcune tappe significative del dibattito intorno all'architettura che ha interessato Venezia nel corso del Novecento: dal ruolo svolto dai maestri in laguna (attraverso l'analisi di alcuni casi esemplari quali i progetti non realizzati di Frank Lloyd Wright e Louis Kahn, passando per gli interventi presso La Biennale), alla problematica questione che vede Venezia imporsi nel mondo quale "modello" (dall'Ottocento, alla lezione di piazza San Marco nell'opera di Eliel ed Eero Saarinen, fino alle più recenti riflessioni di Paulo Mendes da Rocha), per concludere con una riflessione intorno al ruolo privilegiato, nell'ambito della costruzione e rinnovamento della città, svolto nel corso del Novecento dall'Ater di Venezia (cha ha visto coinvolti progettisti di tutto rilievo come Giancarlo De Carlo) di cui si sono appena celebrati i cento anni dalla fondazione. Chiude il volume una sezione di disegni della mostra Iacp-Ater, Tra laguna e terraferma. La nascita della Grande Venezia 1914-1936, in larga parte inediti e che documentano la vitalità nascosta dell'architettura moderna anche a Venezia, in linea con quella vocazione già individuata da Manfredo Tafuri, vale a dire «il modo in cui Venezia tenta di resistere dentro la sua origine. Di tale resistenza Venezia diventerà simbolo quando in essa la continuità comincerà ad essere tradita dalla ripetizione e dal feticismo impotente».

Our concept of the literary canon in English has undergone several major upheavals, expanding over time to accommodate genres, authors, and themes that have gained cachet in the field. This paper argues that the time has come for science fiction to take its place in the canon, particulary in anthologies used in survey courses.