...When asked to name works of the Romantic Movement, one may mention works such as Hawthorne’s, The Scarlet Letter, or Poe’s, “The Raven.” These works, while both romantic, are American. However, the Romantic Movement actually began in Europe, with books such as Goethe’s, The Sorrows of Young Werther, and others. The American Romantic movement was influenced from the European gothic style of writing; the American writer, Washington Irving acts as a bridge, displaying this style in his works, and essentially sparking the American Romantic movement. Of course, to start a movement so widespread, Irving needed inspiration; fortunately, his trip to Europe included scores of opportunities for such, and played an integral role Irving’s starting of the American Romantic Movement. Specifically, one such inspiration he picked up from Europe was the habit of keeping journals. Irving’s journals became one of his most prized possessions, and in them, he was constantly trying to improve on his writing. (Williams). Another source of inspiration for Irving was the European myths and legends that he learned of. In fact, “Irving's most important friendship in Granada, both now and during his second visit in 1829, was with this Spanish peasant, Mateo Ximénez, who acted as his guide and who told him many tales which later appeared in Irving book. (The Alhambra 1832)” (Williams) (22) “Irving wanders into the town of Sleepy Hollow, New York, and is told of the story of the Headless Horseman, also...
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...In this essay, the writer J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur is writing to people during the time period 1782. The purpose for writing this article was to promote Americans as Europeans who have gone into another country because they weren’t happy with their current standing in their own country. While, reading this essay, the author’s inspirational tone would have persuaded anybody in 1782 that America is just as good if not better than European countries. Although Crevecoeur’s wrote this essay in 1782, his diction, similes, and other rhetorical devices still have an impact on the world today. In the essay, the writer states that “in Europe they were as so many useless plants, wanting vegetative mold…” by using this quote the writer is talking about the people of America before they arrived like how they were just trying to survive in their homelands and they weren’t thriving because they were at the bottom of the social ladder and they need the right soil to grow and prosper. The essay also states that “the love of a kindred as poor as himself were the only cords that tied him” what the writer means by this is that they only thing that is holding these people to that country are their loved ones. Family was everything in that time period and some members either didn’t want to start over with a new life or they were...
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...individualistic idea of an American frontier filled with characters and heroes challenged the norms of everyday life in Europe. Captivated by the imaginative presentation of an idealistic America, Europeans were drawn to the writings Washington Irving. Even though his work was not considered art he was very influential in the development of the American short story. American short story started with the colonization of American and the early Puritanical type writings attempting to define a culture to itself. These writings mostly glorified God through direct and clear structure that reflected the austere lifestyle they lived during this time. With the Great Awakening came a more somber message of salvation delivered through evangelical...
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...Romanticism (literature), a movement in the literature of virtually every country of Europe, the United States, and Latin America that lasted from about 1750 to about 1870, characterized by reliance on the imagination and subjectivity of approach, freedom of thought and expression, and an idealization of nature. The term romantic first appeared in 18th-century English and originally meant “romancelike”—that is, resembling the fanciful character of medieval romances. II ORIGINS AND INSPIRATION By the late 18th century in France and Germany, literary taste began to turn from classical and neoclassical conventions (see Classic, Classical, and Classicism). Inspiration for the romantic approach initially came from two great shapers of thought, French philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau and German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. A The Romantic Spirit Rousseau established the cult of the individual and championed the freedom of the human spirit; his famous announcement was “I felt before I thought.” Goethe and his compatriots, philosopher and critic Johann Gottfried von Herder and historian Justus Möser, provided more formal precepts and collaborated on a group of essays entitled Von deutscher Art und Kunst (Of German Style and Art, 1773). In this work the authors extolled the romantic spirit as manifested in German folk songs, Gothic architecture, and the plays of English playwright William Shakespeare. Goethe sought to imitate Shakespeare's free and untrammeled style...
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...Blacks World Spotlight: on the International Stage in the 1920s During World War I the United States bought nearly 200,000 African-American soldiers to France. Majority of the African American soldiers were from the southern region of the United States of America. Many Blacks stayed after the war, generating a permanent Black population in France. The ending of the First World War also marked the beginning of the New Negro Movement or Harlem Renaissance in the United States. During this time African Americans emerged as talented, creative intellectuals leaving their footprint on 1920s America. While much focus of the New Negro Movement is centered in the United States, it indeed was an international affair. The purpose of this research is to examine how a number of African Americans launched their creative debut from the international stage of Paris, France. Additional focus will center on black artists turning to Africa as a source and facture in the art. Last but not least, the effort of Author Schomburg to collect and house international works about blacks will be addressed. Utterly intrigued by African Americans and thoroughly consumed with their talents, the French displayed a respect for Blacks unseen in the United States. While a great number of African-American soldiers remain in Paris, many journeyed back to the United States. Those soldiers certainly were not greeted by change. The United States remained the same racially tensed nation. If there was any change, it...
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...American Romanticism * Early Romanticism * Washington Irving * James Cooper * Transcendentalism * Ralph Emerson * Henry Thoreau * Others: eg. Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne… * Romanticism---a retrospect * Background of Romanticism in Europe? * The Industrial Revolution * The French Revolution * Ideological change * Definition & Features of Romanticism? * Romanticism(The Romantic Movement) * 5 key features * Romanticism was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century, recognized for expressions of exoticism, individualism, emotionalism, and the beauty of nature, rejecting the ordered rationality of the Enlightenment as mechanical, impersonal, and artificial. * Imagination; * Nature; * Individualism; * Glorification of the Commonplace; * The Lure of the Exotic * American Romanticism * Time: Romantic period---early 19th century to the outbreak of the Civil War * Forms: novels, short stories, and poems replaced sermons and manifestos as America’s principal literary forms * Background: * exterior: Romantic movement in Europe (inheritance) * interior: Westward movement and economic boom; * Literary themes: * Highly imaginative and subjective * Emotional intensity * Escapism * Common man as hero ...
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...dignity and worth of the individual. A basic assumption is that people are rational beings who possess within themselves the capacity for truth and goodness. The term humanism is most often used to describe a literary and cultural movement that spread through Western Europe in the 14th and 15th centuries. This Renaissance revival of Greek and Roman studies emphasized the value of the classics for their own sake, rather than for their relevance to Christianity. Humanism is an attitude of the mind that accompanied the progression of the Renaissance. This aspect of humanism, sometimes called the Revival of Antiquity, includes the study of the classics; editorial and philological work on ancient texts. In the beginning, the church controlled literature. Writers could only center their literature on God. Writers couldn’t write about flesh, each other and objects outside the church. People of this time were very uneducated because the church did not value education. They believed that God does the thinking for you. At some point, people started thinking and they wanted to know what literature was like before the church controlled it. What they found opened their eyes and opened the door to the Renaissance. They found that writers wrote about other things and not just God. This is how the Renaissance begin. The Renaissance movement...
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...the way through it and after it. It was the writers in the last war who wrote propaganda that finished themselves off that way. There is plenty of stuff that you believe absolutely that you can write which is useful enough without having to write propaganda….If we are fighting for what we believe in we might as well always keep on believing in what we have believed, and for me this is to write nothing that I do not think is the absolute truth.” -To Maxwell Perkins, Finca Vigia, Cuba, May 30, 1942 It would be nice to designate the Second World War with a factual title, such as The Good War, or The Best War Ever, but in retrospect neither of these titles would be an honest opinion to the military or the civilian victims of the war. Historians and journalists alike, being that one cannot be the other and therefore should never be confused but for the instance of the following should be entitled to the same mistakes, insinuate that the portrayal of the Second World War was an accurate one without the tremendous censorship and propaganda that transpired out of the First World War. Undoubtedly, to believe such an apparent statement of propaganda would be to dismiss the actions and the transformation of the techniques used by propaganda agencies between the two wars. Institutions, which included the U.S. Government, its military branches, and more important media outlets, were well aware of their failings in the eyes of the American public before the treaty of Versailles in 1918...
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...14 March 2012 ENH 242 The British American Conversion American writer William Carlos Williams widely recognized for a frugal use of lexicon stands apart as one of the most significant forces of twentieth-century poetry. A myriad of ingredients, including people, experiences, and circumstances, combined to influence Williams’ poetry and prose. Williams’ writing, along with that of many of the emerging American Modernist poets, is also considered to be a reaction to the verbose poetry and prose he had been exposed to growing up. “The ‘New Poetry,’ as it was called, was largely a revolt against the Romanticism of the previous decades” (Scott 18). In addition, Williams’ poetry was inspired by societal and cultural changes occurring during the early twentieth century. William Carlos Williams led the way into an Americanized style of poetry, diverging from the grandiloquent manner of European writers, to create a form of modernist poetry that remains as relevant today as it did when it was written. The essence of William Carlos Williams’ innovative style of writing derives from his remarkably plebian upbringing. Born in 1883 to an English father and Puerto Rican mother in Rutherford, New Jersey, Williams was exposed to art, literature, and the Bible by his family. His father and mother instilled in him a sense of idealism and moral perfectionism that terrified Williams. In 1904 Williams wrote “I never did and never will do a premeditated bad deed in my life,” (Williams Carlo...
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...American Realism The Civil War tore the country apart. Once America was reunited in 1865, there was a lot of healing that needed to take place to correct the wounds Americans had suffered at the hands of their kin. In these years there were still a lot of questions to answer and still a lot of truth to be found out about the nation itself. The questions of the place of African-Americans, white Americans, political Americans and every other kind of American out there was a source for constant frustration and violence. This is the background and the huge dust storm that American Realism rose out of. Prior to the Civil War, America was knee deep in the Romantic Movement which included writers such as Hawthorne, Thoreau, Melville, Poe and Whitman. Their writings focused on the puritan aspects of their ancestors or of the dark romance and psychological perspectives writers such as Poe and Melville used. However, after the war, this movement began to fade and Realism increased as the choice reading of the people. This was due to multiple events and changes in culture that led to Americans looking for something better to relate to. The first event was the end of the Civil War. The Civil War showed the violent intentions men had towards each other and also showed the vulnerability of men and the nation and how ungodly man actually was. However, Realism did not begin immediately after the Civil War but rather took off in the 1880’s. So what happened in the 1880’s then? The 1880’s...
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...Imagism and Symbolism: American Poets in Europe The key aspects discussed in this paper are American Imagists in Europe in the beginning and the middle of 20th century. However, everything has its roots and its beginnings. The same way imagism movement initially developed from symbolism, very popular literary movement of the end of 19th century, which influenced most of the imagist poets. Symbolism was an art movement originated in France, Belgium and Russia in the end of the 19th century, which remained prominent almost until the end of the World War II. This movement was a reaction to the predominating at that time standards and rules of realism. It appeared as a new manifestation of the romanticism and was concerned about preserving individualism in the modern world, absorbed by the mass culture.1 Usually being enclosed in free verse, symbolism was about expression of author’s personal emotions. It handled very composite feelings that appeared from the everyday life in the world and was rather about evoking than about describing. It used an object, person, colour or just a word in order to represent or describe something else. It was used when an author wanted to create some specific mood or any given emotion in his piece.2 Being tired of realism, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, introduced symbolism to the America. Nevertheless, Pound was looking for something else, for something new in his poetry and, along with some other British and American poets, created imagism...
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...Steven Jones 2/2/11 Impression Paper John Henrik Clarke was an educator, writer, and pioneer of Africana Studies. A student of history and world literature, he advocated to have the research and study of the African-American experience and history incorporated into our higher educational systems. In his essay “The Origin and Growth of Afro-American Literature”, Clarke presents us with a timeline of African American literature from the fourteenth century in Timbuktu to James Baldwin in the 1960’s. He describes that little known history of intellectual centers of education and culture in West Africa during the 1500’s when scholars such as Felix DuBois and Ahmed Baba were prominent during the height of the University of Sankore, and takes us through every major milestone in Afro-American literature after that. I appreciate how he shed light and emphasized that the ancestors of those who became slaves in the U.S. lived in a society where scholarship was present and appreciated. Clarke felt it necessary to emphasize and elaborate on this because of the contrary misconception that Africans at that time were uneducated and uncivilized compared to other society’s such as those in Europe. The section about petitioner Prince Hall gives us a glimpse into Afro-American history during the 1700’s. Hall’s questioning of the concept of freedom at the time lead to his great achievement of founding the first African Lodge in the U.S. in July 3, 1776. Hall’s use of...
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...Two Ways to Belong in America - The textwas written in New York Times, so this information is reliable, serious and reslistic. - The author of the txt is Bharati MUKHERJEE. She was born on july 27, 1940 is an Indian- born American writer who is currently a professor in department of english at the university of California. Her Ph.D in 1969 from the department of Comperative literatüre. She wrote numerous fiction and non- fiction. She considers herself as an American writer. She was born into a wealthy family which assisted her in dream of becoming a writer. She lived in India, Europe, USA, Canada. Migrating to these countries that are so different from her place of birth enabled her to write very powerful novels on immigrant experience. She lived many part of the World, sos he knows affects of living as a immigrant. - The title suggests about the text is that there is two ways to be an American citizenship. - The intended audience is immigrants who has similiar issues. - The thesis statement is that this is a tale of two sisters from calculate,Mira and Bharati, who have lived in the USA for some 35 years, but who find themselves on different sides in the current debate over the status of immigrants. - The author begins the essay by giving some informations about herself and her sister. The argument is examined by the author how they feel about being immigrants. - Key idea: I am her only blood relative on this continent. The price that the immigrant willingly pays, and that...
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...Language and Literacy American InterContinental University Abstract The vernacular is basically a common language used in a country. During the medieval times Latin and French were the popular literature used at that time. However, there was a limitation as to those who could learn Latin. Those who were able learn of this finer language during this time were those who were wealthy. Eventually the average citizen learned the vernacular language as well. Introduction The vernacular language began in different countries such as Europe and Italy. The vernacular was spread through these countries via writings by writes such as Dante Alighieri. Education was another way vernacular language was spread. The rise of literacy impacted these countries. Origins of the vernacular language Vernacular language is native language of the Romans. It is also known as the romance language, which seems logic since romance derived from the Old French term “romans”. (Sayre, 2012) Before the vernacular language, Latin language was the official language for many countries. However, once the vernacular became popular Latin became obsolete. You see Latin was commonly used by people of upper classes and members of the clergy. (CEC, 2013) People who were involved in the government also used Latin language. After the rise of the vernacular language, Latin was used less and soon became hard for people from other areas of the country to understand. Spread of the vernacular language The spread...
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...Perfects. Photography. 1839. Darwin. Publishes. 1859. Wright Brothers. Fly. 1903. (1) The Industrial Revolution Spreads. Setting the Scene. The second Industrial Revolution is marked by the spread of industry, the development of new technologies, and the rise of big business. By 1880s, steel replaces steam as symbol. New Industrial Powers. In first Industrial Revolution Britain stands alone as world industrial giant. Britain tries to protect its lead through laws against export of inventions (or inventors). By mid-1880s, others challenge Britain dominance. In Europe. Elsewhere. 1807. Belgium becomes first European nation outside Britain to industrialize. British mechanic (William Cockerill) opens factories to make spinning, weaving machines. 1871. Germany unifies into powerful nation. Becomes Europe’s leading industrial power. 1900. USA emerges as world’s leading industrial power. Some nations in southern and eastern Europe (sans resources) are slower to industrialize. Japan industrializes rapidly after 1868 to become leading industrial power in Asia. Technology and Industry. In first Industrial Revolution inventions (like steam engine) are work of gifted tinkerers. In second Industrial Revolution professional chemists and engineers create new products. Early inventors try to repair tools or improve existing machinery. Later inventors (after 1850) try to discover new products to manufacture. The marriage of science, technology, and industry spurs economic growth. Steel. 1709. Abraham...
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