Unit Question: How do values, attitudes and choices impact one’s life and others in the community? How do values, attitudes and choices impact one’s life and others in the community? Learning Target: I can define Romanticism and identify 5 traits of romantic literature. I can define Romanticism and identify 5 traits of romantic literature.

1800s ► In the 1800s, the United States expands westward. Americans face a vast and unbroken wilderness. ► An American mythology is created in fact (Lewis and Clark’s records of their expedition) and fiction (stories and poems set in forests, towns, and outposts).

American Romanticism ► An artistic movement that dominated Europe and America in the early 1800s. ► Romantic authors moved away from realism, incorporating elements of the supernatural in their storytelling. ► (In medieval times, romances were simply improbable stories---)

Romanticism: Characteristics ► The exploration of the private self is as important as the exploration of the land ► Imagination over reason ► Feeling over fact ► The fantastic/supernatural ► Good receives justice ► Nature---can reward or punish ► May contain love as a central element, but often with an element of anguish

Washington Irving ► ► Wrote “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle.” ► American settings, often New England ► Believed crime, cruelty, guilt, and self- destruction were fundamental parts of human nature.

► Americans started out with nothing at all. The empty and endless stretches of wilderness were peopled with natives that the colonists couldn't and wouldn't understand. The first Americans wanted a tabula rasa and eventually they got one. Once the forest was really empty, it had to be filled up again. And that's what the devil is for. The imagination, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Satan is an efficient space-filler. It is not, I think, wholly coincidental that so many of those early authors who began to shape an American literature had gothic and romantic tendencies. Hawthorne never saw a tree that the devil wasn't lurking behind... Poe was, well, Poe. We were beginning to create our own myths and legends and for that we needed the dark matter of the imagination. ► Of course, before Poe, Melville and Hawthorne there was Washington Irving. Irving understood the dark places, the empty forests. He understood that where there are no legends they must be created. He knew that such creations take shape in the realm of shadow. He peopled our early hills, rivers, and forests with characters like Rip Van Winkle and Santa Claus, who straddle the divide between nature and its other...There is a divided soul in the stories of Washington Irving, who marked the transition from the Old World sensibility to the later American literature of Melville, Hawthorne, and Poe (who once called Irving “overrated”). We find a genuine yearning for the myths and legends of the old country, mixed with a sense that as Americans we cannot really have these stories and maybe don't even really want them.

“The Devil and Tom Walker” ► Variation of the Faust legend---tale of a man who sells his soul to the devil for earthly reward ► Setting=colonial times (100 years earlier) ► Use of nature and colonial idea that the forest was Satan’s realm ► Elements of the fantastic ► Omniscient narrator (knows all)