American Romanticism

1- AN AMERICAN RENAISSANCE?

This section has the presents works by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Harriet Beecher Stowe. In the early decades of the twentieh century, American literature was generally not taught in American universities, or else it was taught in subordinate relation to English literature. Among the important critical books that helped change this situation wass F.O Matthiessen´s "american Renaissance: art and expression in the age of emerson and whitman". Nevertheless, Matthiessen´s idea of an "American Renaissance" has come under considerable challenge: his renaissance excludes the contribution of women and minority writers, especially African American writers. Matthiessen chooses not to discuss slavery, immigration or other political and social contexts that also had a significant influence on the writing of the time.

2- AMERICAN LITERARY NATIONALISM AND THE 1820s

From the moment of the successful outcome of the American Revolution, literary nationalism had an important place in the mergent culture of the new nation. Convinced that a sign of a great nation was the existence of a great national literature patriotic writers of the early republic attempted to produce "American" works as quickly as possible. But, in fact, there was a sense during the 1790s and early 1800s that American nationality was provisional, vulnerable, fragile. The War of 1812, which emerged from trade disputes with England, can therefore be seen as a war that, al least in part, spoke to Americans´desires to put an end to such anxiety by in effect reenacting the American Revolution against England and winning a victory once and for all. In its own time, this war was labeled "The Second War with England". When English troops stormed the District of Columbia in 1814 and burned the Capitol and the White House, Americans´grim sense of vulnerability was underscored. BUt all that changed when Andrew Jackson´s troops defeated the English army at New Orleans in 1815, shortly after a peace treaty had officially ended the second major war between the two nations. From New Orleans emerged a national mythology of the republican hero who incarnated the strengths and virtues of th U.S nation. The immediate beneficiary of that mythology, Adrew Jackson, would achieve further acclaim among his white compatriots fro fighting the Indians in the Floridas. When he was eventually elected president in 1828, he was regarded as the incarnation of the democratic spirit of the age. Jacksonian democratic energies and ideals would have enormous impact on the writing thta would emerge in the United States over the next several decades, both in its celebration of the capacities of ordinary people and its hostility to unearned social distinction and inherited wealth.

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