Washington Irving(1783-1859) was the first American storyteller to be internationally recognized as a man of letters and the first great prose stylist of American romanticism, and his familiar style was destined to provide a model for the prevailing prose narrative of the future. His first book A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the End of the Dutch Dynasty (1809), written under the name of Diedrich Knickerbocker, was a great success and won him wide popularity. He is best known for his The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent (1819-1820), especially in which two short stories Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow have become American classics. Later he wrote works of history and biographies, such as The History of Life and Voyages of Christobra Columbus (1828), A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada and The Alhambra (1832). After that, he spent the rest of his life living a life of leisure and comfort, and writing The Life of Goldsmith (1840) and a five-volume Life of Washington (1855-1859). He died in 1859. James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) is respectfully remembered as a master of adventurous narrative and as the creator of an American hero-myth. According to a charming legend, Cooper’s first novel Precaution (1820) was a response to his wife’s challenge to improve on the current British society fiction, and the failure of this work turned him to historical novels. Later, The Spy, a tale of the Revolution he wrote, became a great success in America and Europe. In 1823, Cooper published The Pioneers (1823), which together with other 4 novels The Deerslayer (1841), The Last of the Mohicans (1826), The Pathfinder (1840) and The Prairie (1827) became his well-known Leather-stocking Tales. Cooper went on to write over thirty novels, including exciting adventures of the sea like The Pilot. Cooper created the American historical novel using authentic American subject. 2. New England Transcendentalism American Romanticism culminated around the 1840s in what has come to be known as “New England Transcendentalism” or “American Renaissance” (1836-1855). 2.1 Characteristics of New England Transcendentalism The Transcendentalist movement, embodied by essayists Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, was a reaction against 18th century Rationalism, and closely linked to the Romantic Movement. It is closely associated with Concord, Massachusetts, a town near Boston, where Emerson, Thoreau, and a group of other writers lived. In general, Transcendentalism was a liberal philosophy favoring nature over formal religious structure, individual insight over dogma, and humane instinct over social convention. American Transcendental Romantics pushed radical individualism to the extreme. American writers—then or later —often saw themselves as lonely explorers outside society and convention. The American hero—like Herman Melville’s Captain Ahab, or Mark Twain’s Huck Finn—typically faced risk, or even certain destruction, in the pursuit of metaphysical self-discovery. For the Romantic American writer, nothing was a given. Literary and social conventions, far from being helpful, were dangerous. There was tremendous pressure to discover an authentic literary form, content, and voice. 2.2 Representative writers and their works Ralph Waldo Emerson, the towering figure of his era, had a religious sense of mission. Although many accused him of subverting Christianity, he explained that, for him “to be a good minister, it was necessary to leave the church.” The address he delivered in 1838 at his alma mater, the Harvard Divinity School, made him unwelcome at Harvard for 30 years. In it, Emerson accused the church of emphasizing dogma while stifling the spirit. Emerson is remarkably consistent in his call for the birth of American individualism inspired by nature. Much of his spiritual insight comes from his readings in Hinduism, Confucianism, and Islamic Sufism. |
