Theme: romanticism in american literature romanticism and transindentalism in American literature. Plan

EDGAR ALLAN POE
(1809-1849)

Edgar Poe was an American romanticist. But, unlike many English romantic writers he had no special interest in the feudal times. As the history of America had not known a feudal period, it was natural that Poe and other American writers took slight interest in the Middle Ages. On the other hand, neither had Poe that revolutionary spirit of protest, which made the poetry of Shelley and Byron. But, as some romantic authors in England and other countries, Poe was fond of the mysterious, the horrible and the supernatural. His life was most unhappy, his health weak, and his mind often took an unhealthy pleasure in playing with the awful and the mystic.

The contemporary reader is interested in Poe not so much when he tells of horrible and impossible things, as when he mingles scientific facts with fantastical impossibilities or displays accurate reasoning and his knowledge of human psychology. Thus in “The Adventures of one Hans Pfall” he tells us about the adventures of a man, who made a wonderful balloon and flew to the moon. In other stories he solves the mystery of a crime by careful observation of psychology and analysis of the details of the case. This makes him one of the principle founders of the modern detective story.

But Poe was also well-known as a poet. He had a peculiar manner of writing. He considered that the poem should be short, should have the force of “monotone” and should serve to one purpose which he himself called “totality effect”.

HERMAN MELVILLE
(1819-1891)

Herman Melville, like Nathaniel Hawthorne, was a descendant of an old wealthy family that fell abruptly into poverty upon the death of the father. Despite his patrician upbringing, proud family traditions, and hard work, Melville found himself in poverty with no college education. At 19 he went to sea. His interest in sailors’ lives grew naturally out of his own experiences, and most of his early novels grew out of his voyages. In these we see the young Melville’s wide, democratic experience and hatred of tyranny and injustice. His first book, Typee, was based on his time spent among the supposedly cannibalistic but hospitable tribe of the Taipis in the Marquesas Islands of the South Pacific. The book praises the islanders and their natural, harmonious life, and criticizes the Christian missionaries, who Melville found less genuinely civilized than the people they came to convert.

Moby-Dick; or The White Whale, Melville’s master-piece, is the epic story of the whaling ship Pequod and its “ungodly, god-like man.” Captain Ahab, whose obsessive quest for the white whale Moby-Dick leads the ship and its men to destruction. This work, a realistic adventure novel, contains a series of meditations on the human condition. Whaling, throughout the book, is a grand metaphor for the pursuit of knowledge. Realistic catalogues and descriptions of whales and the whaling industry punctuate the book, but these carry symbolic connotations. Although Melville’s novel is philosophical, it is also tragic. Despite the heroism, Ahab is doomed and perhaps damned in the end. Nature, however beautiful, remains alien and potentially deadly. In Moby-Dick, Melville challenges Emerson’s optimistic idea that humans can understand nature. Moby-Dick, the great white whale, is an inscrutable, cosmic existence that dominates the novel, just as he obsesses Ahab.

The novel is modern in its tendency to be self-referential, or reflexive. In other words, the novel often is about itself. Moby-Dick has been called a “natural epic” – a magnificent dramatization of the human spirit set in primitive nature – because of its hunter myth, its initiation theme, its Edenic island symbolism, its positive treatment of pre-technological peoples, and its quest for rebirth. In setting humanity alone in nature, it is eminently American.