Literary Movements: Romanticism, Theory, and American Fiction
Rationalism Versus Romanticism: Core Differences
The conflict between Rationalism and Romanticism can be summarized by these opposing concepts:
- Reason / Emotion
- Reality / Fantasy
- Mundane / Exotic
- Conservative / Revolutionary
The romantic journey often leads to the countryside. Romantics associated the country with independence, moral clarity, and purity. However, the Gothic Romantic E. A. Poe saw the country as a phantasmagoric place, while Irving viewed it as idyllic and a means of escape.
Defining Romanticism and Escapism
Romantic Escapism
Romanticism focused on simple natural beauty. Romantics often saw God in the contemplation of nature and sought exotic settings, sometimes drawn from the past. They believed in contemplating, or becoming one with, the natural world.
What is Romanticism?
The term designates a literary and philosophical theory that tends to see the individual at the center of all life and places the individual at the center of art.
Key Characteristics of the Romantic Movement
- Contemplating or becoming one with the natural world.
- Abandonment of the heroic couplet in favor of blank verse, the sonnet, and experimental verse forms.
- Dropping of conventional poetic diction in favor of fresher language and bolder figures.
- Idealization of rural life (e.g., Goldsmith).
- Enthusiasm for the uncivilized or “natural.”
- Interest in human rights and sympathy with animal life.
- Sentimental melancholy and emotional psychology (especially in fiction).
- Gothic Romance.
- Imitation of popular ballads and interest in mythology.
Dark Romanticism: Conflict and Subgenre
Dark Romanticism is a literary subgenre often conflicted with mainstream Romanticism. It suggests that individuals are prone to sin and self-destruction, rather than inherently possessing divinity and wisdom. Whereas Transcendentalists advocate social reform, works of Dark Romanticism frequently show individuals failing in their attempts to make changes for the better.
Literary Genres of Growth and Development
The Bildungsroman and Initiation Stories
An Initiation Story involves the concept of coming of age—waking up to experience, to life, or discovering a painful truth (like realizing your parents are setting out the Christmas presents).
In literary criticism, the Bildungsroman (a novel of formation, novel of education, or coming-of-age story) is a genre focusing on the psychological and moral growth of the protagonist from early youth to adulthood. Character change is extremely important. This process is chronological and covers the whole development; it doesn’t happen suddenly, which often causes pain because the protagonist is unprepared.
Understanding Homiletic Theory
Homiletic theory outlines the structure for interpreting and applying religious texts:
- Reading and Explication: Detailed analysis of a biblical text.
- Statement of Doctrine: Teaching what is extracted from the text.
- Reasons: Explaining why the doctrine must be fulfilled.
- Uses or Applications: How to apply this doctrine to one’s life.
This process contrasts Explication (stating the same idea in different words) versus Exploration (giving reasons).
Critical Approaches to Literary Analysis
- Intrinsic (Formalist): Takes into consideration only elements that appear within the text itself (e.g., tone, point of view, structure).
- Extrinsic: Approaches the text critically by considering external elements, which can be psychological, biographical, historical, or sociological (e.g., when, where, and under what circumstances the text was written, and who wrote it).
The Rise of American Literature and Mass Audience
The establishment of American Literature involved creating secure public value for the works received by the audience.
Popular Fiction by Women in the Mid-19th Century
The sudden advent in the 1850s of novels written by women led to sales of unprecedented dimensions. Authors like Mrs. Southworth, Caroline Lee Hentz, and Mary Jane Holmes became best-sellers.
They were successful because they spoke directly and comprehensively to the new world created for women and family life with the institution of new middle-class norms of domestic propriety. They helped organize the world of domestic leisure into a market authors could regularly trade on.
Two factors crystallized the reading audience and habits in mid-nineteenth century America:
- Women’s writing.
- A middle-class domestic audience.
The most widely read writers of the post-Civil War decades were these domestic writers. The domestic establishment of American literature implies an ongoing literary audience on a mass scale.
Evolution of Mass Literary Consumption
- 1840s: Appearance of the “penny-press” (mass journalism), a newspaper format that published fiction in place of news.
- 1850s: Fiction moved first into story papers, and then into the mass-produced cheap book (the Dime novel).