American Romanticism - Renaissance

1
American Romanticism - Renaissance

• that a true man belongs to no other time or
  place, but is at the center of things. Where he
  is, there is nature. He measures you, and all
  men, and all events.

2
Ideologies of the Romantics

• Values feeling and intuition over reason
• Places faith in inner experience and the power of
  imagination
• Shuns the artificiality
• of civilization and seeks unspoiled nature

3
Characteristic Authors

• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Henry David Thoreau
• Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Herman Melville
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Emily Dickinson
• Walt Whitman

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Ralph Waldo Emerson

• Self-Reliance
• Nature
• Each and All
• For non-conformity, the world whips you with its
  displeasure.
• To be great is to be misunderstood.
• Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of
  your principles.

5
Henry David Thoreau

• Walden
• Resistance to Civil Government
• Walden
• The purpose of Walden is to force his readers to
  evaluate the way they have been living and
  thinking.
• Employs fables and allegories

6

• Re-evaluate every institution from Christianity
  to slavery
• Walden is a book on how to live wisely
• Parable of all experience
• His journals became a literary form

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Famous Quotes by Thoreau

• That government is best which governs not at
  all.
• if the law causes you to be an agent of
  injustice to another, I say, break the law!
• The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.

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Transcendentalism

• Perfect Whole
• The Oversoul