The New England Renaissance 1830 1860 ROMANTICISM A

The New England Renaissance 1830 - 1860

ROMANTICISM A literary and artistic movement of the 18 th and 19 th centuries that placed value on emotion or imagination over reason, the individual over society, nature and wildness over human works, the country over the town, common people over aristocrats, and freedom over control or authority.

ROMANTICISM Focused on a “higher reasoning” which was the ability to grasp metaphysical truths in the physical world. Metaphysical: abstract concepts such as being, knowing, cause, identity, time, and space.

ROMANTIC WRITERS Edgar Allan Poe The Tell-tale Heart The Pit and the Pendulum The Raven The Fall of the House of Usher The Minister's Black Veil The Scarlet Letter Rappaccini’s Daughter Moby Dick Bartleby the Scrivener Charles Dickens Nathaniel Hawthorne Herman Melville A Tale of Two Cities A Christmas Carol Harriet Beecher Stowe Uncle Tom’s Cabin

EDGAR ALLAN POE Accomplishments Co-created the modern short story (along with Nathaniel Hawthorne) Invented detective fiction Wrote lyric poetry Pioneered the psychological horror story. Modern-day psychological horror stories: The Sixth Sense Silence of the Lambs

ROMANTICISM The most famous outcome of the Romantic Era was TRANSCENDENTALISM

TRANSCENDENTALISM Transcend: be or go beyond the range or limits of Transcendentalism was a belief in a realm of spiritual or transcendent truths beyond sense perception and material existence.

TRANSCENDENTALISM Transcendentalist Values Spiritual over material success Opposed materialism, or the desire for increased wealth (which had already become the core of American values) Dismissed tradition and social convention--any authority beyond that of the individual conscience. It is more important to be true to your own convictions than to those of society

TRANSCENDENTALIST WRITERS Ralph Waldo Emerson Self-Reliance Henry David Thoreau Walden

NEW ENGLAND RENAISSANCE POETRY A group of poets during this era became known as The Fireside or Schoolroom Poets because their work was quite popular among families reading in the evening around the fire and because their work came to be recited and memorized widely in American schoolrooms.

FIRESIDE/SCHOOLROOM POETS Henry Wadsworth Longfellow James Russell Lowell John Greenleaf Whittier Oliver Wendell Holms Their most popular poems were songlike, containing regular rhymes that made the poems easy to recite and remember. These poets offered mostly idealized, romantic, morally uplifting views of the nation and its past, in lyric and narrative verse.

EMILY DICKINSON Dickinson’s style was completely different from that of the Schoolroom Poets’ Dickinson’s poetry does not follow the regular rhythmic patterns of the Schoolroom poets; it is full of interrupted thoughts and sudden bursts of awareness, often jarring the reader through irony and paradox into a wholly different, more unsettling view of the world.