Introduction 2 How did Romanticism appear 5

3. The authors belonged to London Romanticism

The group of poets who gathered first in Bristol in 1795 and later in the Lake District introduced new accounts of the relationship of the mind to nature, new definitions of imagination, and new lyric and narrative forms. Their theories of creativity emphasized the individual imagination, but their practice of writing tells another story, one of collaborative writing. This practice originated in imagining a social community that Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey called pant isocracy, or government by all. Coleridge and Southey met in June 1794, planned to emigrate to Pennsylvania with a few friends to set up an ideal community based on abandoning private property, and together composed poetry and delivered public lectures to raise money for their emigration. Pant isocracy proved utterly impractical, and Southey withdrew from the plan in the summer of 1795. Their plans for a community of writers with shared property changed to a practice of collaborative writing, dialogic creativity, and joint publication⁹.
The European Romantic movement reached America in the early 19th century. American Romanticism was just as multifaceted and individualistic as it was in Europe. Like the Europeans, the American Romantics demonstrated a high level of moral enthusiasm, commitment to individualism and the unfolding of the self, an emphasis on intuitive perception, and the assumption that the natural world was inherently good, while human society was filled with corruption. Romanticism became popular in American politics, philosophy and art. The movement appealed to the revolutionary spirit of America as well as to those longing to break free of the strict religious traditions of early settlement. The Romantics rejected rationalism and religious intellect. It appealed to those in opposition of Calvinism, which includes the belief that the destiny of each individual is preordained.
Romantic Gothic literature made an early appearance with Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820) and Rip Van Winkle (1819); there are picturesque "local color" elements in Washington Irving's essays and especially his travel books. From 1823 the prolific and popular novelist James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) began publishing his historical romances of frontier and Indian life, to create a unique form of American literature. Cooper is best remembered for his numerous sea-stories and the historical novels known as the Leatherstocking Tales, with their emphasis on heroic simplicity and their fervent landscape descriptions of an already-exotic mythicized frontier peopled by "noble savages", exemplified by Uncas, from The Last of the Mohicans (1826) show the influence of Rousseau's (1712–78) philosophy. Edgar Allan Poe's tales of the macabre that first appeared in the early 1830s, and his balladic poetry was more influential in France than at home¹⁰.
By the mid-19th century, the pre-eminence of literature from the British Isles began to be challenged by writers from the former American colonies. This included one of the creators of the new genre of the short story, and inventor of the detective story Edgar Allan Poe (1809–49). A major influence on American writers at this time was Romanticism.
The Romantic movement gave rise to New England Transcendentalism, which portrayed a less restrictive relationship between God and Universe. The publication of Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1836 essay Nature is usually considered the watershed moment at which transcendentalism became a major cultural movement. The new philosophy presented the individual with a more personal relationship with God. Transcendentalism and Romanticism appealed to Americans in a similar fashion, for both privileged feeling over reason, individual freedom of expression over the restraints of tradition and custom. It often involved a rapturous response to nature. It encouraged the rejection of harsh, rigid Calvinism, and promised a new blossoming of American culture.
The romantic American novel developed fully with Nathaniel Hawthorne's (1804–1864) The Scarlet Letter (1850), a stark drama of a woman cast out of her community for committing adultery. Hawthorne's fiction had a profound impact on his friend Herman Melville (1819–1891). In Moby-Dick (1851), an adventurous whaling voyage becomes the vehicle for examining such themes as obsession, the nature of evil, and human struggle against the elements. By the 1880s, however, psychological and social realism were competing with Romanticism in the novel.
1. Edmund Burke(1729-1797);
2. William Godwin(1756-1836);
3. John Thelwell (1764-1834);
4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834);
5. Lord Byron (1788-1824);
6. William Cowper (17931-1800);
7. William Blake (1757-1827);
8. Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823);
9. Robert Southey (1774-1843);
10. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822);
11. Thomas Paine (1737-1809);
12. Mary Robinson(1758-1800);
13. Mary Anne Lamb (1764-1847);
14. Charles Lamb (1775-1834);
15. John Clare (1793-1864);
16. Anna Barbauld (1743-1825);
17. Robert Burns (1759-1796);
18. Maria Edgeworth (1767-1849);
19. William Hazlitt (1778-1830);
20. Felicia Hemans (1793-1835);
21. Hannah More (1745-1833);
22. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797);
23. William Wordsworth (1770-1850);
24. Leigh Hunt (1784-1859);
25. John Keats (1795-1821);
26. Charlotte Smith (1749-1806);
27. Joanna Baillie (1762-1851);
28. Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855);
29. Lady Caroline Lamb (1785-1828);
30. Mary Shelley (1797-1851);
31. Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1827);
32. Helen Maria Williams (1762-1827);
33. Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832);
34. Thomas DeQuincey (1785-1859);