In this unit we're discussing Mary Shelly's Frankenstein and Jane Austen's Emma as reactions, in part, to certain aspects of Romanticism. I've been amused to recognize some real similarities between what, on the surface, seem such wildly different kinds of books. Both Shelly and Austen seem deeply skeptical of the Romantic prioritization of subjective fancy and imagination; both feature brilliant, egoistic individuals who mess up pretty profoundly in their relations with other people, and who each create various types of monsters...
Transcendentalism
In America, thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau translated some of the chief tenets of European Romanticism into a distinctly American idiom. In many ways it was an easy fit; Romantic veneration of nature found vivid expression in painters of the Hudson River Valley School. And Protestant, individualist Americans would be inherently sympathetic to the Romantic emphasis on "inner vision" as well as the purification of self in nature.
Some Essays by Emerson to consider:
"Self Reliance"
"The Over-Soul"
"The Poet"
And by Thoreau, Walden, of course.
In America, thinkers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau translated some of the chief tenets of European Romanticism into a distinctly American idiom. In many ways it was an easy fit; Romantic veneration of nature found vivid expression in painters of the Hudson River Valley School. And Protestant, individualist Americans would be inherently sympathetic to the Romantic emphasis on "inner vision" as well as the purification of self in nature.
Some Essays by Emerson to consider:
"Self Reliance"
"The Over-Soul"
"The Poet"
And by Thoreau, Walden, of course.
Hawthorne and Poe
Alongside the transcendentalists (sometimes directly alongside -- Hawthorne was a member of Emerson's circle and participated in the Utopian community at Brooke farm) was another group of thinkers who both celebrated the imaginative excess of Romanticism and were deeply skeptical of it. Hawthorne and Poe are included here, though we could easily add Herman Melville to the course with a reading of Moby Dick.
Below is an anthology of short stories from Hawthorne and Poe that embody that odd tension, celebrating and critiquing Romantic enthusiasms...
Alongside the transcendentalists (sometimes directly alongside -- Hawthorne was a member of Emerson's circle and participated in the Utopian community at Brooke farm) was another group of thinkers who both celebrated the imaginative excess of Romanticism and were deeply skeptical of it. Hawthorne and Poe are included here, though we could easily add Herman Melville to the course with a reading of Moby Dick.
Below is an anthology of short stories from Hawthorne and Poe that embody that odd tension, celebrating and critiquing Romantic enthusiasms...