The Romantic period in American fiction 1820 – 1860

Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, and the Transcendentalists represent the first great literary generation produced in the United States. In the case of the novelists, the Romantic vision tended to express itself in the form Hawthorne called the “Romance”, a heightened, emotional, and symbolic form of the novel. Romances were not love stories, but serious novels that used special techniques to communicate complex and subtle meaning. 

Instead of carefully defining realistic characters through a wealth of detail, as most English or continental novelists did, Hawthorne, Melville and Poe shaped heroic figures larger than life, burning with mythic significance. The typical protagonists of the American Romance are haunted, alienated individuals. Hawthorne’s Arthur Dimmesdale or Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, Melville’s Ahab in Moby-Dick, and the many isolated and obsessed characters of Poe’s tales are lonely protagonists pitted against unknowable, dark fates that, in some mysterious way, grow out of their deepest unconscious selves. The symbolic plots reveal hidden actions of the anguished spirit. 

Our reason for this fictional exploration into the hidden recesses of the soul is the absence of settled, traditional community life in America. English novelists – Jane Austin, Charles Dickens (the great favourite), Anthony Trollope,  George Eliot, William Thackery – lived in a complex, well-articulated, traditional society and shared with their readers attitudes that informed their realistic fiction. 

American novelists were faced with a history of strife and revolution, a geography of vast wilderness, and a fluid and relatively classless democratic society. American novels frequently reveal a revolutionary absence of tradition. Many English novels show a poor main character rising on the economic and social ladder, perhaps because of a good marriage or the discovery of a hidden aristocratic past. But this buried plot does not challenge the aristocratic social structure of England. On the contrary, it confirms it. The rise of the main character satisfies the wish fulfillment of the mainly middle-class readers. 

In contrast, the American novelist had to depend on his or her own devices. America was, in part, an undefined, constantly moving frontier populated by immigrants speaking foreign languages and follow strange and crude ways of life. Thus the main character in American literature might find himself alone among cannibal tribes, as in Melville’s Typee, or exploring a wilderness like James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking, or witnessing lonely visionsfrom the grave, like Poe’s solitary individuals, or meeting the devil walking in the forest, like Hawthorne’s Young Goodman Brown. Virtually all the great American protagonists have been “loners”. The democratic American individual had, as it were, to invent himself.

The serious American novelist had to invent new forms as well – hence the sprawling, idiosyncratic shape of Melville’s novel Moby-Dick and Poe’s dreamlike, wandering Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Few American novels achieve formal perfection, even today. Instead of borrowing tested literary methods, Americans tend to invent new creative techniques. In America, it is not enough to be a traditional and definable social unit, for the old and traditional gets left behind; the new, innovative force is the centre of attention. 

Reading list:

1)   Alcott, Louisa May, Little Women (1868)
2)   Alger, Horatio. Ragged Dick (1868)
3)   Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward: 2000 - 1887 (1888)
4)   Bierce, Ambrose. In the Midst of Life: Tales of Soldiers and Civilians (1891)
5)   Chesnutt, Charles. The Marrow of Tradition (1901)
6)   Chopin, Kate. The Awakening (1899)
7)   Cooper, James Fenimore. The Pioneers (1828)
8)   Crane, Stephen. The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
9)   Dickinson, Emily. Final Harvest (Back Bay Books)
10) Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)
11) Dreiser, Theodore. Sister Carrie (1900)
12) Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk (1903)
13) Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Selected Essays: "Nature" (1836), "The American Scholar" (1837), "War" (1838), "The Divinity School Address" (1838), "Self-Reliance" (1841), "Circles" (1841), "Experience" (1844), "The Poet" (1844),
14) Fern, Fanny. Ruth Hall (1854)
15) Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter (1850)
16) Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Selected Tales: "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" (1832), "Young Goodman Brown" (1835), "Endicott and the Red Cross" (1836), "The Maypole of Merry Mount" (1836), "The Minister's Black Veil" (1836), "Rappaccini's Daughter" (1844), "Ethan Brand" (1850)
17) Howells, William Dean. The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885)
18) Irving, Washington. The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1820)
19) Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861)
20) James, Henry. The American (1877)
21) Jewett, Sarah Orne. The Country of the Pointed Furs (1896)
22) Lincoln, Abraham. Selected Speeches: The "House Divided" Speech (1858); The Cooper Union Speech (1860); "First Inaugural" (1861); "Gettysburg Address" (1863); "Second Inaugural" (1865)
23) London, Jack. Call of the Wild (1903)
24) Melville, Herman. Moby-Dick (1851)
25) Melville, Herman. Selected Tales: "Bartleby the Scrivener" (1853), "Benito Cereno" (1855),
26) Norris, Frank. McTeague (1899)
27) Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart. The Gates Ajar (1868)
28) Poe, Edgar Allan. Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838)
29) Poe, Edgar Allan. Selected Tales: "The Man of the Crowd" (1840), "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1840), "The Gold-Bug" (1843), "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains" (1844), "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1843), "The Purloined Letter" (1844-1845)
30) Riis, Jacob. How the Other Half Lives (1890)
31) Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)
32) Thoreau, Henry David. Walden (1854)
33) Twain, Mark. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
34) Twain, Mark. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889)
35) Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery (1901)
36) Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth (1900)
37) Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass (1855) and the following poems from later editions: "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"; "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking"; "As I Ebb'd with the Ocean of Life"; "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"; "Passage to India"; "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed"