The Romantic Period

From the end of the 18th century to the outbreak of the Civil War. Started with Washington Irving's The Sketch Book and ended with Whitman's Leaves of Grass, also called 'the American Renaissance' .Free expression of emotion, escapes from society, and return to nature New England Transcendentalism 新英格兰超验主义—Walt Whitman, whose "Leaves of Grass" established him as the most popular American poet of the 19th century.

Washington Irving

—one of the first American writers to earn an international reputation, an early Romantic writer, and Father of the American short stories, "the American Goldsmith"

Is regarded as a writer who "perfected the best classic style that American literature ever produced."

First novel A History of New York 纽约外史won him wide popularity
The Sketch Book 见闻札记 won international fame.

→contains German folk tales Rip Van Winkle, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow

READING: excerpt from "Rip Van Winkle"瑞普·凡·温可尔

It is not only well-known for Rip's 20-year sleep but also considered a model of perfect English in American literature and in the English language as well.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

— the spokesman of New England Transcendentalism（超验主义）movement

"The American Scholar"论美国学者, "Self - Reliance"论自助, "The Over-Soul"，"The Poet"a reflection upon the aesthetic problems in terms of the present state of literature in America.

Experience: a discussion about the conflict between idealism and ordinary life. American Puritanism, European Romanticism, intuitive knowledge, over-soul, individual, nature

Henry David Thoreau梭罗-"Walden"瓦尔登湖

READING: excerpt from Nature

"Nature" 论自然is regarded as the Bible of New England Transcendentalism，Emerson's first little book, which discuss the love of nature, the uses of nature… "a transparent eyeball".

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Interior(内部) of the heart, "there is evil in every human heart, which may remain latent, perhaps, through the whole life, but circumstances may rouse it to activity", so in almost every book, Hawthorne discuss sin and evil.

The Scarlet Letter the scarlet letter A stands for "adultery","able" and "angel". The ambiguity（不明确的） is one of the salient(显著的) characteristics of Hawthorne's art.

READING: Young Goodman Brown 小伙子布朗

"Young Goodman Brown" Goodman Brown, a Puritan(清教徒), who accepts both society in general and his fellow men as individuals worth his regard, confronted with the vision of human evil in one terrible night, and becomes thereafter distrustful and doubtful.

Walt Whitman

Openness, freedom, individualism

I - me, my nation (society), Free verse（自由体诗）, Envelope structure（信件结构）, Catalogue (Listing)

A new ideal, a new world, a new life-style

"Leaves of Grass" 草叶集written in the founding documents of both the Revolutionary War in the United States and the Civil War.

READING:

1."There Was a Child Went Forth"一个孩子的成长how a child is greatly influenced by his growing environments, be identified with the childhood of a young, growing America.

2."Cavalry Crossing a Ford" 涉水的骑兵a scene of the American Civil War, all the movements described in this picture are frozen.

3."Song of Myself"自己之歌 Whitman is a man bubbling with energy and laden(装满) with ideas, spontaneous(自发的) expression of his original ideas

Herman Melville

— a master of allegory and symbolism, like Hawthorne

Mardi玛地，Redburn雷得本，White Jacket白外衣，Pierre皮埃尔，Billy Budd比利·伯德

READING: excerpt from Moby-Dick

Moby-Dick白鲸 is one of the world’s greatest masterpieces, the first American prose epic, It turns out to be a symbolic voyage of the mind in quest of the truth and knowledge of the universe, a spiritual exploration into man’s deep reality and psychology.

Ishmael both as a character and a narrator；the captain, Ahab is a monomaniac(狂热者) whose single purpose is to capture the fierce, cunning(狡猾的) white whale, Moby Dick, which had torn away his leg.