What makes romantic literature american

Like the European Romantics, these American writers reacted against what they perceived to be the mechanistic and utilitarian tenor of Enlightenment thinking and the industrial, urbanized world governed by the ethics and ideals of bourgeois commercialism.

They sought to redeem the ideas of spirit, nature, and the richness of the human self within a specifically American context. It was Emerson who laid the foundations of American Romanticism. Utilizing the ideas of Wordsworth , Coleridge , and Thomas Carlyle , he developed organicist ideas of nature, language, and imagination, and called for American writers to depart from the strict genres and formal hierarchies of European literary tradition and to forge their own modes of expression.

Whitman saw the human personality as integrating and accommodating all kinds of development, scientific, artistic, religious, and economic. Margaret Fuller — also voiced fervent opposition to what she saw as a society soiled by material greed, crime, and the perpetuation of slavery.

She was distinctive in making gender an issue, and this text can be read as an effort to make Emersonian self-reliance an option for women. For Hawthorne, recognition of textual history and the history of American institutions is just an integral element of such a vision as is nature. Both Hawthorne and his friend and admirer Herman Melville reacted, like the other American Romantics, against the mechanism and commercialism at the core of American life.

Striving to attain the passion and originality to develop a national literature, they yet recognized that the modern fragmented world defied the attempts of romance and imagination to achieve a harmonious and comprehensive vision of life.

You must be logged in to post a comment. The Romantic period also saw an increase in female authors and readers. In his popular novel Last of the Mohicans, Cooper expressed romantic ideals about the relationship between men and nature. Later transcendentalist writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson still show elements of its influence and imagination, as does the romantic realism of Walt Whitman.

Emerson, a leading transcendentalist writer, was highly influenced by romanticism, especially after meeting leading figures in the European romantic movement in the s.

By the s, however, psychological and social realism were competing with Romanticism in the novel. James Fenimore Cooper, American novelist and political writer : In his popular novels, such as Last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper expressed romantic ideals about the relationship between men and nature.

During the middle of the nineteenth century, newspapers went from serving as mouthpieces of political parties to addressing broader public interests. Identify the distinctive trends in newspaper journalism that emerged over the course of the eighteenth century.

During the middle of the nineteenth century, newspapers changed from being mouthpieces of political parties to serving a broader public appeal. Many of the changes that came with this shift brought about new features of journalism that remain important today, such as the editorial page, personal interviews, business news, and foreign-news correspondents.

Many newspapers in the early part of the nineteenth century were published by political parties and served as political mouthpieces for the beliefs and candidates of those parties. Newspapers and their editors began to show greater personal and editorial influence as they realized the broader appeal of human-interest stories. November 16, edition of the New York Tribune : Some penny papers were closely associated with political parties; the New York Tribune backed the Whigs and later the Republicans.

The editorial voice of each newspaper grew more distinct and important, and the editorial page began to assume something of its modern form.

The editorial signed with a pseudonym gradually died, but unsigned editorial comment and leading articles did not become established features until after , when Nathan Hale made them characteristic of the newly established Boston Daily Advertiser. From then on, these features grew in importance until they became the most vital part of the greater papers.

Nearly every county and large town sponsored at least one weekly newspaper. Politics were of major interest, with the editor-owner typically deeply involved in local party organizations. However, the papers also contained local news, and presented literary columns and book excerpts that catered to an emerging middle class and literate audience.

A typical rural newspaper provided its readers with a substantial source of national and international news and political commentary, typically reprinted from metropolitan newspapers. In addition, the major metropolitan dailies often prepared weekly editions for circulation to the countryside. Systems of more rapid news-gathering and distribution quickly appeared. The telegraph, put to successful use during the Mexican-American War, led to numerous far-reaching results in journalism.

Its greatest effect was to decentralize the press by rendering the inland papers in such cities as Chicago, Louisville, Cincinnati, and New Orleans independent of those in Washington and New York.

The news field was immeasurably broadened; news style was improved, and the introduction of interviews, with their dialogue and direct quotations, imparted papers with an ease and freshness. There was a notable improvement in the reporting of business, markets, and finance. A foreign-news service was developed that reached the highest standard yet attained in American journalism in terms of intelligence and general excellence.

This idea of the newspaper for its own sake, the unprecedented aggressiveness in news-gathering, and the blatant methods by which the cheap papers were popularized, aroused the antagonism of the older papers, but created a competition that could not be ignored.

The growth of these newer papers meant the development of great staffs of workers that exceeded in numbers anything dreamed of in the preceding period.

Indeed, the years between and saw the beginnings of the scope, complexity, and excellence of our modern journalism. In the early s, newspapers had catered largely to the elite and took two forms: mercantile sheets that were intended for the business community and contained ship schedules, wholesale product prices, advertisements and some stale foreign news; and political newspapers that were controlled by political parties or their editors as a means of sharing their views with elite stakeholders.

Journalists reported the party line and editorialized in favor of party positions. Some editors believed in a public who would not buy a serious paper at any price; they believed the common person had a vast and indiscriminate curiosity better satisfied with gossip than discussion and with sensation rather than fact, and who could be reached through their appetites and passions.

Penny press newspapers became an important form of popular entertainment in the mid-nineteenth century, taking the form of cheap, tabloid-style papers. They depended much more on advertising than on high priced subscriptions, and they often aimed their articles at broad public interests instead of at perceived upper-class tastes.

Mass production of inexpensive newspapers became possible when technology shifted from handcrafted to steam-powered printing. The Romantic period also saw an increase in female authors and readers. In his popular novel Last of the Mohicans, Cooper expressed romantic ideals about the relationship between men and nature. Later transcendentalist writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson still show elements of its influence and imagination, as does the romantic realism of Walt Whitman.

Emerson, a leading transcendentalist writer, was highly influenced by romanticism, especially after meeting leading figures in the European romantic movement in the s. By the s, however, psychological and social realism were competing with Romanticism in the novel. Skip to content The European Romantic movement reached America during the early 19th century. Relation to Transcendentalism The Romantic movement gave rise to New England transcendentalism, which portrayed a less restrictive relationship between God and the universe.