A Brief Summary of the History of American Literature（二）

1.1 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.

1.2 Representative writers and their works

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

2. New England Transcendentalism

American Romanticism culminated around the 1840s in what has come to be known as “New England Transcendentalism” or “American Renaissance” (1836-1855).

2.1 Characteristics of New England Transcendentalism

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. It is closely associated with Concord, Massachusetts, a town near Boston, where Emerson, Thoreau, and a group of other writers lived.

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. The American hero—like Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab, or Mark Twain’s Huck Finn—typically faced risk, or even certain destruction, in the pursuit of metaphysical self-discovery. 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.

2.2 Representative writers and their works

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the towering figure of his era, had a religious sense of mission. Although many accused him of subverting Christianity, he explained that, for him “to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the church.” The address he delivered in 1838 at his alma mater, the Harvard Divinity School, made him unwelcome at Harvard for 30 years. In it, Emerson accused the church of emphasizing dogma while stifling the spirit. Emerson is remarkably consistent in his call for the birth of American individualism inspired by nature. Much of his spiritual insight comes from his readings in Hinduism, Confucianism, and Islamic Sufism.

Henry David Thoreau was from a poor family, like Emerson, he worked his way through Harvard. Thoreau’s masterpiece, Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), is the result of two years, two months, and two days (from 1845 to 1847) he spent living in a cabin he built at Walden Pond, near Concord. This long poetic essay challenges the reader to examine his or her life and live it authentically. Thoreau’s essay “Civil Disobedience,” with its theory of passive resistance based on the moral necessity for the just individual to disobey unjust laws, was an inspiration for Mahatma Gandhi’s Indian independence movement and Martin Luther King’s struggle for black Americans’ civil rights in the 20th century.