Romantic American literature The origin It started with the publication of Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book and ended with Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. ↘ Its social historical and cultural background The development of the American society nurtured “the literature of a great nation.” America was flourishing into a politically, economically and culturally independent country…> Major writers of this period There emerged a great host of men of letters(作家、学者) during this period, among whom the better-known are poets such as Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, Henry Wordsworth Longfellow ,Edgar Ellen Poe,and, especially, Walt Whitman,whose Leaves Of Grass established him as the most popular American poet of the 19th century …> from ic fables of Washington Irving to the Gothic tales of Edgar Allen Poe, from the frontier adventures of James Fenimore Cooper to the narrative quests of Herman Melville from the psycho1ogical romances of Nathaniel Hawthorne to the social realism of a Harding Davis. △ The impact of European Romanticism on American Romanticism ↘ (1) They put emphasis upon the imaginative and emotional qualities of literature, which included a liking for the picturesque, the exotic, the sensuous, the sensational, and the supernatural. (2) The Americans also placed an increasing emphasis on the free expression of emotions and disp1ayed an increasing atten
