I. Freneau as Leader of 18th Century Naturalism
1. Fresh interest in nature.
2. The belief that nature is a revelation of God. 3. Humanitarian sympathy for the humble and oppressed.
4. The faith that people are naturally good.
5. That they lived idyllic and benevolent lives in a primitive past before the advent of civilization. 6. The radical doctrine that the golden age will dawn again when social institutions are modified, since
they are responsible for existing evil.
II. Aspects of Freneau
1. Poet of American Independence: Freneau provides incentive and inspiration to the revolution by writing
such poems as \"The Rising Glory of America\" and \"Pictures of Columbus.\"
2. Journalist: Freneau was editor and contributor of The Freeman's Journal (Philadelphia) from 1781-1784. In his writings, he advocated the essence of what is known as Jeffersonian democracy - decentralization of
government, equality for the masses, etc.
3. Freneau's Religion: Freneau is described as a deist - a believer in nature and humanity but not a pantheist. In deism, religion becomes an attitude of intellectual belief, not a matter of emotional of spiritual ecstasy.
Freneau shows interest and sympathy for the humble and the oppressed.
4. Freneau as Father of American Poetry: His major themes are death, nature, transition, and the human in nature. All of these themes become important in 19th century writing. His famous poems are \"The Wild Honey-Suckle\" (1786), \"The Indian Burying Ground\" (1787), \"The Dying Indian: Tomo Chequi\" (1784), \"The Millennium\" (1797), \"On a Honey Bee\" (1809), \"To a Caty-Did\" (1815), \"On the Universality and Other Attributes of the God of Nature,\" \"On the Uniformity and Perfection of Nature,\" and \"On the Religion of Nature\" (the
last three written in 1815).
In the evening of 18 December 1832, at the age of almost 81, Philip Freneau walked home from a meeting of the circulating library in Philadelphia in a snowstorm; he fell, broke his hip, and froze to death. His body
was found the next day. His tombstone begins, simply: POET'S GRAVE.
http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/home.htm
Elements of Romanticism
1. Frontier: vast expanse, freedom, no geographic limitations. 2. Optimism: greater than in Europe because of the presence of frontier.
3. Experimentation: in science, in institutions.
4. Mingling of races: immigrants in large numbers arrive to the US.
5. Growth of industrialization: polarization of north and south; north becomes industrialized, south remains
agricultural. Romantic Subject Matter
1. The quest for beauty: non-didactic, \"pure beauty.\" 2. The use of the far-away and non-normal - antique and fanciful:
a. In historical perspective: antiquarianism; antiquing or artificially aging; interest in the past. b. Characterization and mood: grotesque, gothicism, sense of terror, fear; use of the odd and queer.
3. Escapism - from American problems.
4. Interest in external nature - for itself, for beauty: a. Nature as source for the knowledge of the primitive.
b. Nature as refuge.
c. Nature as revelation of God to the individual.
| Top | Romantic Attitudes
1. Appeals to imagination; use of the \"willing suspension of disbelief.\"
2. Stress on emotion rather than reason; optimism, geniality.
3. Subjectivity: in form and meaning.
Romantic Techniques
1. Remoteness of settings in time and space.
2. Improbable plots.
3. Inadequate or unlikely characterization.
4. Authorial subjectivity.
5. Socially \"harmful morality;\" a world of \"lies.\"
(Compare the above with Realistic Techniques in Chapter 5 of PAL.) 6. Organic principle in writing: form rises out of content, non-formal. 7. Experimentation in new forms: picking up and using obsolete patterns.
8. Cultivation of the individualized, subjective form of writing.
Philosophical Patterns
1. Nineteenth century marked by the influence of French revolution of 1789 and its concepts of liberty,
fraternity, equality:
a. Jacksonian democracy of the frontier. (Andrew Jackson on the Web) b. Intellectual and spiritual revolution - rise of Unitarianism.
c. Middle colonies - utopian experiments like New Harmony, Nashoba, Fourierism, and the Icarian community. 2. America basically middle-class and English - practicing laissez-faire (live and let live), modified because of geographical expansion and the need for subsidies for setting up industries, building of railroads, and
others.
3. Institution of slavery in the South - myth of the master and slave - William Gilmore Simms' modified references to Greek democracy (Pericles' Athens which was based on a slave proletariat, but provided order,
welfare and security for all) as a way of maintaing slavery. | Top | The Renaissance in or the Flowering of American Literature
The decade of 1850-59 is unique in the annals of literary production. For a variety of reasons American authors, both African and European, published remarkable works in such a concentration of time that this feat, it is safe to say, has not been duplicated in this or any other literary tradition. Given below are the details:
Works by European American Writers Year Author Title
1850 Ralph Waldo Emerson Representative Men 1850 Nathaniel Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter
1851 Herman Melville Moby-Dick 1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Tom's Cabin
1854 Henry David Thoreau Walden 1855 Walt Whitman Leaves of Grass
Works by African American Writers Year Author Title
1853 Frederick Douglass Heroic Slave
1853 William Wells Brown Clotel: Or, The President's Daughter
1857 Frank J. Webb The Garies and Their Friends 1859 Martin R. Delany Blake: Or, The Huts of America
1859 Harriet E. Wilson Our Nig: Or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black
| Top | Important ideas from: Warren, Robert Penn, Cleanth Brooks, and R.W.B. Lewis. \"A National Literature and Romantic Individualism.\" in Romanticism. eds. James Barbour and Thomas Quirk. NY: Garland, 1986, 3-24. 1. Social and political changes - Andrew Jackson's unsuccessful bid for presidency in 1824, when he won the plurality of votes but lost to John Quincy Adams when the election was decided in the House of Representatives. Jackson, a man of common beginnings, was the first candidate of the new states. In 1828 election, Jackson
convincingly defeated Adams bringing to an end the domination of the eastern establishment.
2. The beginning of industrial and technological developments - key markers were the introduction of steamboats,
spinning mills, Eli Whitney's cotton gin, the clipper ships, railroads, and telegraph.
3. \"The success of northern industry made slavery appear anomalous, and to the free labor of the North slavery
became ... repugnant.\"
4. The industrial revolution also raised the issue of the overworked laborers. Influenced by the French philosopher Charles Fourier, Albert Brisbane published The Social Destiny of Men (1840). In it Brisbane states: \" ... monotony, uniformity, intellectual inaction, and torpor reign: distrust, isolation, separation,
conflict and antagonisms are almost universal. ... Society is spiritually a desert.\"
5. Utopian experiments to counter the industrial revolution - Robert Owen's New Harmony in Indiana; George
and Sophia Ripley's Brook Farm; Bronson Alcott's Fruitlands; and many Fourierist colonies. 6. Other experiments: Amelia Bloomer's bloomers worn by women in some Fourierist colonies, mesmerism,
phrenology, hydropathy, giving up of tobacco or alcohol, the eating of Dr. Graham's bread.
7. The major reform movements: abolition of slavery, the rights of women, and the civil war. Reformism was, according to Whittier, \"moral steam-enginery\" and it was fed by two impulses - the idea of evolution even
before Darwin and the idea of the \"perfection of the social order.\"
8. Transcendentalism - the philosophical, literary, social, and theological movement - go to Chap. 4 in PAL.
Study Questions
1. Discuss the following statement with reference and relevance to specific literary works: the Puritans were typological, the eighteenth-century writers were logical, but the early-nineteenth-century writers were
analogical in their way of knowing and expressing what it means to be an American.
2. Discuss changes in the concept of the American self in the early nineteenth century. Locate your discussion
within specific works by Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne.
3. Cite several fundamental differences between early-nineteenth-century writers and their deist predecessors. Focus on the concept of self-invention and, in specific literary works, discuss the early-nineteenth-century
evolution of this concept.
4. Research and explain the theory of romantic organicism in Bryant and Poe, at the same time exploring
differences between these two poets.
5. Consider literary portraits of women engaged in heroic struggle or of escaping slaves portrayed as heroic fugitives. Compare and contrast portraits by Stowe, Fuller, Jacobs, and Douglass with Hester Prynne in The
Scarlet Letter or Thoreau's autobiographical narrator in Walden.
6. Read some of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's lectures, addresses, and letters (not anthologized). Then compare and contrast The Declaration of Sentiments (1848, see Appendix) with its model, The Declaration of Independence. Analyze the nineteenth-century document with respect to style, imagery, concepts of nature and authority,
and relative political effect.
7. Whether or not the earliest American realists wrote in a distinctive and innovative form, they make different choices of language and genre than their contemporaries. Choose to analyze a text by any of the following writers and explore elements of realism in the work: Longstreet, Stowe, Thorpe, Stoddard, and Davis.
Major Themes
1. Love - usually of a mourning man for his deceased beloved.
2. Pride - physical and intellectual.
3. Beauty - of a young woman either dying or dead.
4. Death - a source of horror.
Influence of Poe
1. Influenced writers of split personality.
2. Influenced literary criticism.
3. Influenced writers dealing with the disintegration of personality.
Poe's Four Types of Short Stories
1. Arabesque - strange; use of the supernatural; symbolic fantasies of the human condition; (Example - \"The
Fall of the House of Usher\").
2. Grotesque - heightening of one aspect of a character (Example - \"The Man Who Was Used Up\").
3. Ratiocinative - detective fiction (Example \"The Purloined Letter\").
4. Descriptive (Example - \"The Landscape Garden\").
Poe's Aesthetic Theory of Effect
1. \"Unity of effect or impression\" is of primary importance; the most effective story is one that can be
read at a single sitting.
2. The short story writer should deliberately subordinate everything in the story - characters, incidents,
style, and tone - to bringing out of a single, preconceived effect.
3. The prose tale may be made a vehicle for a great variety of these effects than even the short poem. Poe's main concern focused upon matters of design, proportion and composition; his use of effect meant the impact which a short work would make upon a reader. In reviewing Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales, he pointed out the writer's obligation and reward: \"If his very initial sentence tend not to be the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with
a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction.\"
Paradoxes in Poe
1. His life - basically insecure and highly emotional, but his writing is structured.
2. He reflects the paradoxical time - there was the apocalyptic sense of doom combined with the romantic
innocence of childhood.
3. Poe was a romantic writer, but he emphasized rationality.
4. He presents realistic details in gothic settings.
5. There is a paradox in Poe's critical thinking - he believed in individual creativity but advocated classical
norms - the ideal length of a poem, suggested Poe, is 100 lines.
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