The terms “Romanticism” and “Romantic” should not be confused with the popular meaning, as pertaining to love. “Romanticism” derives from the genre of the medieval romance, a heroic narrative emphasizing the importance of chivalry and valor in battle. Many Romantic authors, artists, and composers were fascinated by the Middle Ages and its legends of fair maidens, valiant knights, and evil villains. This fixation was part of Romanticism’s reaction against the materialism and ordinariness of modern life, particularly the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment.

Otherwise, Romanticism is defined by the following characteristics:

• Promotion of individualism and celebration of eccentric individuals who refuse to conform to social norms or accede to traditional authority figures
• Celebration of nature’s beauty and its ability to enhance human spirituality
• Interest in imagination (as opposed to reason, logic, and empirical observation)
• Interest in emotions, especially emotional extremes
• Celebration of the rural life and the “common folk” living in rural areas
• Celebration of Native Americans and other non-European groups as “noble savages”
• Support for revolution, especially the French Revolution

In addition to these features, Romanticism is characterized by its emphasis on the sublime and picturesque. These terms were used by the aesthetic theoretician Edmund Burke, whose essay A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) set the terms for later Romantic authors and artists. Burke defined the sublime as a quality that invokes awe and even terror in the human mind. The sublime refers to objects that are immense in scale, and often these objects are not entirely visible. Examples from the natural world include oceans, mountains, glaciers, and storms—all of which are huge, overwhelming, menacing, and fascinating.

On the other hand, the beautiful—often termed the picturesque—includes small, smooth, delicate objects that are easy and pleasant to observe such as flowers, calm winding streams, and small, harmless creatures. Romantic works set in medieval locations that emphasize the sublime often overlap with Gothicism and its fascination with the supernatural.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The Romantic movement may be traced to Germany in the mid-eighteenth century, where its tenets were expressed especially in the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) celebrated the unrestrained emotional expressions of its protagonist. Literary Romanticism soon spread to England and was embraced by writers such as William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The Scottish author Sir Walter Scott was among the foremost Romantic novelists. Romantic texts that incorporate Gothic elements include Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and John William Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819).

One of the first American writers to adopt Romanticism was the poet Philip Freneau, author of “The Power of Fancy” (1770) and “The Wild Honey-Suckle” (1786). However, Romanticism did not take serious hold in American literature until the early nineteenth century.

It is not surprising that Romanticism had a profound impact on American literature throughout much of the nineteenth century. The landscape in many parts of the United States and its surrounding frontiers was often beautiful and awe-inspiring, and those regions lying to the west of the frontier stirred the imaginations of many Americans. The presence of Native Americans prompted Romantics to view them as noble savages, a motif borrowed from the French Romantic author Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Although American authors did not look to the Middle Ages as much as their European counterparts did, they often set their works in America’s colonial past. Furthermore, the fact that the nation began in a revolution appealed to many Romantic nationalists. Finally, the American support for individual freedom and expression overlapped extensively with Romanticism, which shared some of the features of Transcendentalism, such as individualism and glorification of Nature. The two movements are not identical, though.

Several major American authors from this period were deeply influenced by Romanticism. Some fictional examples of American Romanticism include the tales of Washington Irving (the most famous of which are “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”) and the historical romances of Catharine Maria Sedgwick (for example, Hope Leslie, 1827), James Fenimore Cooper (The Pioneers, 1823; The Last of the Mohicans, 1826; The Prairie, 1827; The Pathfinder, 1840; and The Deerslayer, 1841), and Nathaniel Hawthorne (for example, The Scarlet Letter, 1850).

Romanticism’s glorification of Nature permeated many of these works. For instance, Irving’s tales abound with lush descriptions of the beauty of the Hudson River valley in New York, while Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie paints vivid pictures of the gorgeous scenery of colonial New England. The noble-savage motif is also evident in Hope Leslie as well as Cooper’s novels.

Herman Melville’s descriptions of the noble savages of Tahiti in Typee (1846) and his use of the concept of the sublime in describing the ocean and the white whale in Moby-Dick (1851) also reveal his debt to Romanticism. Both Hawthorne and Melville share Romanticism’s emphasis on individualism in The Scarlet Letter and Moby-Dick, respectively, as do the essays of Transcendentalists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and the poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson.

The poetry and fiction of Edgar Allan Poe is also characteristic of Romanticism in its emphasis on emotion and imagination, and the medieval settings of some of his Gothic tales are also characteristic of the movement. Most American poets of this time, including Emerson, Whitman, and the so-called “Fireside Poets” of New England—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, John Greenleaf Whittier, William Cullen Bryant, James Russell Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes—also relied on Romantic conventions.

Romanticism in America

Topics for Discussion and Research

1. Choose a text by Cooper, Sedgwick, or Irving and examine how it depicts America’s colonial past. Which elements of America’s past do these authors seem to long for? Conversely, which aspects do they depict negatively? See William Kelly’s book, Plotting America’s Past: Fenimore Cooper and the Leatherstocking Tales (1983), Amanda Emerson’s essay, “History, Memory, and the Echoes of Equivalence in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie” (2007), and Howard Horowitz’s article, “‘Rip Van Winkle’ and Legendary National Memory” (2004).

2. Many Romantic American authors, such as Cooper, Longfellow, Sedgwick, and William Gilmore Simms, often depicted American Indians as noble savages. Which positive and negative characteristics do these writers ascribe to this group? In what ways do these authors use these depictions to comment on their own society and culture? An Early and Strong Sympathy (edited by John Caldwell Guilds and Charles Hudson, 2003) includes writings by Simms about American Indians. See Richard Shaner’s article, “Simms and the Noble Savage” (1976), and Susanne Opfermann’s essay, “Lydia Maria Child, James Fenimore Cooper, and Catharine Maria Sedgwick: A Dialogue on Race, Culture, and Gender” (1999). Gaile McGregor’s The Noble Savage in the New World Garden (1988) also includes a chapter on Cooper’s depictions of American Indians.

3. In what ways do American Romantic authors adapt Romanticism to American culture and geography? Which elements of English Romanticism are they borrowing, and in which ways do they depart from English Romanticism? One might compare Poe’s Gothic fiction to Shelley’s Frankenstein, or compare Wordsworth’s poetry to poems by Emerson or the Fireside Poets in their glorification of nature. One starting point for researching this topic is Lance Newman’s electronic book, Sullen Fires Across the Atlantic: Essays in Transatlantic Romanticism (2006; http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/sullenfires/intro/intro.html).

4. How has American Romantic literature influenced later American literature? Consider how Romantic themes such as individualism, imagination, emotional expression, rebellion, and natural beauty are used by twentieth-century authors. For example, explore the similarities between Walt Whitman and Allen Ginsberg, or examine Henry David Thoreau’s impact on Gary Snyder or Robinson Jeffers. See John Osborne’s essay, “The Beats” in A Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry (2001), or Patrick Murphy’s article, “Robinson Jeffers, Gary Snyder, and the Problem of Civilization” in Robinson Jeffers and a Galaxy of Writers (1995).

5. What are the parallels between American Romantic literature and American Romantic art? For instance, compare the celebration of natural beauty in works by Cooper, Irving, Sedgwick, or Thoreau to the landscape paintings of Thomas Cole. To learn more about the paintings of Cole and the Hudson River School, consult Barbara Babcock Milhouse’s American Wilderness: The Story of the Hudson River School of Painting (2007).

Romanticism in England

Resources

William L. Andrews, ed., Literary Romanticism in America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981).
Includes seven essays focusing on the Romantic elements in the works of Emerson and Hawthorne, early African American fiction, and the concept of the “self-made man” in American autobiography.

Edward Halsey Foster, The Civilized Wilderness: Backgrounds to American Romantic Literature, 1817–1860 (New York: Free Press, 1975).
A helpful introduction to American Romantic literature.

Michael T. Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985).
Examines the works of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville and connects their attitudes toward the commodification of literature to the shift from an agrarian to a market economy in antebellum America.

Jennifer A. Hurley, American Romanticism (San Diego, Cal.: Greenhaven Press, 2000).
A collection of articles that places Romanticism within social, political, literary, and philosophical contexts.

Gaile McGregor, The Noble Savage in the New World Garden: Notes Toward a Syntactics of Place (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988).
Includes a long section on the noble savage in American culture and literature.

Categories: Literature

Tags: American frontier in literature, American Romanticism, Edgar Allan Poe, Edmund Burke, Emily Dickinson, emotional expression in literature, Enlightenment reaction, Fireside Poets, Gothic Literature, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Hope Leslie, Hudson River valley in literature, imagination vs reason, individualism in Romanticism, Industrial Revolution and Romanticism, James Fenimore Cooper, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Mary Shelley, medieval romance, Moby Dick, Nathaniel Hawthorne, nature in literature, noble savage, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Romantic authors, Romantic literature, Romanticism, Romanticism and Its Influence on American Literature, sublime and picturesque, The Last of the Mohicans, The Scarlet Letter, the sublime in Romanticism, Transcendentalism, Walt Whitman, Washington Irving