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Towards literary emancipation (1800 - 1865) - Coggle Diagram
Towards literary emancipation (1800 - 1865)
Gothic and grotesque trends
Introducers: Charles Brocken Brown, Poe and Melville incorporated mysterious landscapes in their works.
Washington Irving (1783 - 1859) enabled the distinction between neoclassicism and romaticism. He partook in a group named "Knickerbockers" with Cooper and Bryant who strive to publish entertaining works and developing genuine American culture. He was intererested in German folktales, in the past and in picturesque.
Edgar Allan Poe (1809 - 1849) quarrelled with his adopting or foster family, the Allans, resigned to study and to enlist the army for wandering.
He eschewed optimism, advocated that poetry's aim was beauty. According to him, the "most poetical" subject is the death of a beautiful woman. Writing consists in creating effect. = father of detective fiction.
Romanticism
James Fenimore Cooper (1789 - 1851) is reknown for the "Leatherstocking series" which are historical romances exploring the frontier between wilderness and civilization.
William Cullen Bryant (1794 - 1878) was a supporter of liberal causes such as abolition of slavery, prison reform. Nature is a source of contemplation.
The Transcendentalists
Starting in England, it was bound to philosophy, religion with Emerson, Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller. Relation between man and God is a personal matter because humankind is divine. Communion with nature transcend its limits and reach higher truths.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 - 1882) was ordained as a minister. He belonged to a circle of intellectuals called The Transcendentalists. Through his essays, he exhorts Americans to follow their inner "light" thanks to contemplation of nature and to move from imitation to originality.
Henry David Thoreau was Emerson's disciple and experimented in living. Living in the forest helped him to discern what is essential and what stems from materialism.
Voice of dissident
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811 - 1896) the novel exposes the cruelty of the slavery and the ability to forgiveness from the victims.
Frederick Douglass (1818 - 1895) denounced the paradox of slavery's presence in a country which claimed "all men as equal".
Margaret Fuller (1810 - 1850) considered self-development to be applied to women. She made the analogy between the lack of freedom of women and the condition of slaves.
The American Renaissance
Expression coined by F.O Matthiessen in a book in which he put forths the structural common points between five writers (Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman) which were allegorical and imaginary.
Nathaniel Hawthorne is persuaded of the corruption of human nature. In his novels, the characters are sinners, who have taste the forbidden fruit and live recluse from humanity or is scapegoated due to infringement to mores. (The Scralet Letter in 1850)
Herman Melville (1819 - 1891) was bereaved at twelve, he became a seaman at nineteen. He believed that "evil was the chronic malady of the universe".
Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892) worked as a schoolteacher, a journalist, a government clerk, a wound-dresser.
The Household poets
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 - 1882) represents the genteel culture ans the antebellum of Boston. He wrote about romantic love, passions are determined by propriety.
John Greenleaf Whittier (1807 - 1892) felt concerned with America's common people.
James Russell Lowell (1819 - 1891) is reknown for active campagning against slavery, child labor, capital punishement and was an activist for woman suffrage. He reckons the language of uneducated people as spry.