Romantic Movement

Romantic Movement. The initial phase of the American romantic movement is largely identical with New England transcendentalism. From that standpoint, its origin could be dated to the publication of Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature in 1836. Like transcendentalism itself, however, the antecedents of the American romantic movement are complex. It owes its inspiration to German biblical criticism and comparative mythology; to the rise of American Unitarianism; and, perhaps most of all, to the cultural revolution brought about by European romanticism (ca. 1770–1830). Among many European romantic authors, a few— Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shelley, Mme. de Staël, Balzac, and Goethe—stand out for their influence on the American scene. Prominent European scientists— Pierre Simon Laplace, Georges Cuvier, Etienne Geoffroy Saint‐Hillaire, and Humphry Davy—played a role as well.

In the early phase of the American romantic movement, the significant presences were those of the transcendentalist circle: Emerson, Theodore Parker, Margaret Fuller, Amos Bronson Alcott, and Henry David Thoreau. Their concerns included pantheism, the relation of subjectivity to objectivity (or, more broadly, of self or consciousness to the external world), symbolism in nature and literature, the secularization of religion, and, most importantly, self‐development.

The later phase of the romantic movement in the United States is in some respects even more complex because of the additional complications created by the American assimilation of Victorian culture. As a result, social concerns such as antislavery and women's rights acquired greater importance. But both of these clearly derived from the romantic notion of self‐development. Its Victorian expression, the Bildungsroman, or novel of education, informs even slave narratives such as those of Frederick Douglass, especially My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). Combined with self‐development was the affirmation of a religion of the affections (traceable to later romantics like Keats and Shelley but also to Dickens and other Victorian novelists) and, simultaneously, a growing awareness of the problems of intersubjectivity, as in the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne and the female slave narratives of Harriet Jacobs (1813–1897) and others. Much of the work produced in the 1850s reflects a tendency toward retrenchment. The sentimental fiction of Maria Cummins, Fanny Fern, Louisa May Alcott, and others reveals a strong emphasis on emotional self‐discipline. The works of Herman Melville (especially Pierre, 1852) offer an even more radical questioning of many concepts and values professed by the American romantic movement in its initial phase. What one sees throughout the decade is a collective effort to respond to a perceived cultural/social crisis that would soon culminate in the Civil War.

Echoes of the American romantic movement appear after the Civil War in Melville, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, who explore the immanent value of experiences, eternal recurrence, and new forms of spirituality. The enduring legacy of American romanticism may be seen as well in the pragmatism of William James, John Dewey, and Josiah Royce.
See also Antebellum Era; Cole, Thomas; Literature: Early National and Antebellum Eras; Painting: To 1945; Philosophy; Poetry; Unitarianism and Universalism; Women's Rights Movements.

Bibliography

Michael T. Gilmore , American Romanticism and the Marketplace, 1985.
Leon Chai , The Romantic Foundations of the American Renaissance, 1987.
Barbara Novak , Nature and Culture: American Landscape Painting, 1825–1875, 1993.

Leon Chai