LITR 4232 American Renaissance 2010 Student Midterm Samples #1. Long essay describing and focusing learning, challenges, issues concerning American Renaissance or American Romantic literature. (6-8 paragraphs)

Amber Criswell

1. The Romanticism of American Renaissance Literature

          The importance of literature when it comes to understanding history, culture, and yourself is paramount. History is shaped by great minds, many who were authors. Culture can both be defined by the era of writers who lived and produced during a certain time period. Self-discovery can begin by reading an insightful passage in a book. It is simple to understand how essential literature is to the individual and the understanding of styles, time periods, and genres is crucial. Literature from the American Renaissance is especially important because it is still relevant today; it is not as outdated as the Medieval period of literature, and it is not still developing like the Post-Modern movement. It is the perfect time to discover and appreciate the American Renaissance period of literature because the academic world has the resources necessary to truly begin to comprehend and collect the most significant authors and pieces from the period.

          A very large portion of American Renaissance literature is dedicated to the idea of Romanticism. Romanticism concerns many different types of sub-genres, such as gothic, sublime, lyrics poetry, transcendentalism, and includes many themes, such as individualism, nostalgia, escapism, utopian thought, sentiment, and love. Romanticism can be considered diametrically opposing to realism. The very word root word of Romanticism is “romantic” which implies the nature of the movement. Romanticism is a captivating force that focuses on the transcendent. It is focused on the beyond, and implicit to it’s meaning, can never be achieved. If reality is what is directly in front of you, romanticism is what is in your heart.

          The very nature of romanticism is based in matters of the heart, thus romantic literature is rich in symbolism, metaphors, and correspondence. These types of literary devices work perfectly at getting the eschewed, non-realistic point of romanticism across to the reader. The three devices share one thing in common; they implicitly imply something that is greater than their literal meaning. Symbols are used to represent something else that communicates to a deeper sense of knowledge. Metaphors shape the unknown into something that is understandable. Correspondence explains the greater, more implicit cause and effect of two objects. Romanticism uses these three literary devices with perfection, because by definition, romanticism tries to capture the unknown and force it into the known world.

          Certain authors, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Ralph Waldo Emerson, define the era of American Renaissance literature, other the two are quite different artists, but that is the beauty of Romanticism. Poe exists deep within the gothic; he delves deep into the dark, psychologically disturbing aspects of humanity. His prose and poems are dripping with the use of color, death, lavish descriptions, and hauntings that exist in the physical and mental realms of his characters. He sets the standard for what is considered gothic; from creating the pale, intelligent, dark gothic woman in Ligeia to setting the scene for a personal hell in his poem, The City in the Sea. While other authors from the literature period, such as Irving and Hawthorne, used stylistic gothic elements, neither based their entire work in it, such as Poe.

          Ralph Waldo Emerson, on the other hand, surrounded himself in transcendentalism and used a sublime stylistic approach. While Poe pushed the importance of dark, Emerson uses beauty and nature to express romanticism. His artful and philosophical work, Nature, explores the sublimity that surrounds us all as humans. He expresses the almost tragically beauty of nature as something that unites each and every person, and that we must exercise thought to understand the complexities that surround us. The ideal of a transcendental world that exists around us is a very Romantic notion, and is explored heavily by Emerson. Nature is more a philosophical essay than it is a piece of literature, but its elements are profoundly influenced by Romantic notions.

          It is easy to understand the appeal of romanticism found in American Renaissance literature. While the theme of escapism is often found throughout the literature from that time period, romantic novels and poems offer an escape from a harsher reality. It is appealing to imagine that there is a transcendental universe that is waiting to be discovered, as postulated by Emerson in Nature. It is alluring to believe that the power of love could conquer even the absolute end of death, such as Poe describes in Ligeia. Poets such as Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson describe a romantic world that exists within their works, one that is greater than itself. It is a natural tendency of people to want to believe in something that is greater than themselves; that there is a bigger picture; that something exists beyond the horizon of reality, and that is were romanticism and American Renaissance literature is its most important and relevant.