CHOOSE ONE: AMERICAN ROMANTICISM

Choose One: American Romanticism

American Romanticism

"Romanticism," as a period, derives from "romance," which from the Medieval time span (1200-1500) and on simply intended a article (e.g. all the chivalric, King Arthur legends) that was adventuristic and improbable.  "Romances" are differentiated from "novels," which focus the mundane and realistic.  The period between 1860 and 1900, for the U.S., is often called "The Age of Realism," because of the numerous authors (e.g., Theodore Dreiser & Stephen Crane) who present their books' subject matter in a very sensible manner (Melville's monomaniacal Ahab, chasing a monstrous, symbolic whale, would be out of location in a very sensible innovative, whereas Moby-Dick has many very sensible minutia about the whaling industry).

The "Romantic time span" mentions to literary and heritage movements in England, Europe, and America approximately from 1770 to 1860.  Romantic writers (and creative persons) glimpsed themselves as revolting against the "Age of Reason" (1700-1770) and its values.  They celebrated imagination/intuition versus reason/calculation, spontaneity versus command, subjectivity and metaphysical considering versus objective detail, revolutionary power versus custom, individualism versus communal conformity, democracy versus monarchy, and so on.  The action starts in Germany with the publication of Goethe's Sorrows of juvenile Werther (about a love-sick, alienated artist type, too perceptive to reside, who kills himself; after it was released a number of young men pledged suicide in imitation!) and the emergence of various Idealist philosophers (who believed mental methods are the finally reality, as opposed to Materialists).  The action then proceeds to England (Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, and Keats), until about 1830 (upon which the Victorian Age begins).  Romanticism does not appear in the U.S. until Irving and Emerson are writing; so, rather confusingly, the Romantic time span in the U.S. (1830-1860) overlaps with the time span in which U.S. culture may furthermore be said to be "Victorian" (1830-1880).  One outcome of the latter: a author such as Hawthorne is both loving and Victorian (he is simultaneously fascinated by and concerned about Hester's rebelliousness in The Scarlet Letter).  Other works of the period--such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's best-seller Uncle Tom's Cabin--are not "Romantic," but are rather much nearer to the very sensible fiction of Victorian Britain's George Eliot.

Very generally, we furthermore distinguish loving" from academic" values and types of sign, without referring to any specific time period.  Thus, you can come up with a list of atemporal oppositions:

ROMANTIC                                                          NON-ROMANTIC/CLASSICAL Emotional                                                           Reasonable and ...