Literary Movements: Puritan Plain Style, Romanticism, and Transcendentalism
Puritan Plain Style:
”Plain” does not mean ”rustic” or ”rude”, much less ”artless”. It means ”unadorned” by elaborated figures of speech and learned references, just as the church building, services, and the ministers themselves must be unadorned. Literary conceits and classical allusions were signs of human vanity. Puritans favored simple, short words rather than long, fancy ones. They got to the point immediately, with no exaggerated descriptions. It is based on directness and clarity.
Satan’s Sophistry:
It is to be obsessed with the devil, which is at all times trying to take away souls from Christianity. It is Satan’s psychological warfare against those who wish to think of themselves as the Elect. But if a person has doubts about his spirituality, he is not one of the elect; however, if a person is sure that he is one of the elect, he is guilty of pride, and this is the work of the devil.
American Romanticism (1800-1860):
It is a literary, artistic, and philosophical movement that originated in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It emphasized the imagination and the emotions. Characterized by a reaction against Neoclassicism, it was marked especially in English literature by sensibility and the use of autobiographical material, an exaltation of the primitive and common man, an appreciation of external nature, an interest in the remote, a predilection for melancholy, and the use of other verse forms in poetry.
Romantic Escapism:
- Romanticism focused on simple natural beauties.
- Romantics saw God in this contemplation.
- Romantic writing looked for exotic settings from the past.
- Romantics believed in contemplating, or becoming one with, the natural world.
Romanticism:
- Abandonment of the heroic couplet in favor of blank verse, the sonnet, and experimental verse forms.
- Dropping of the conversational poetic diction in favor of fresher language and bolder figures.
- Idealization of rural life (Goldsmith).
- Enthusiasm for the wild, irregular, or grotesque in nature and art.
- Unrestrained imagination (no limits: imagination over reason).
- Enthusiasm for the uncivilized or ”natural”.
- Interest in human rights.
- Sympathy with animal life.
- Sentimental melancholy.
- Emotional psychology (fiction) – Gothic Romance.
- Initiation of popular ballads.
- Interest in mythology.
- The term designates a literary and philosophical theory that tends to see the individual at the center of all life, and it places the individual at the center of art.
Dark Romanticism:
(often conflated with Gothicism or called American Romanticism). It is a literary subgenre of Romanticism, often defined as a historical, literary phenomenon. In the late 18th century, authors reacted against the Age of Enlightenment and its blind materialism and faith in reason. It has been suggested that Dark Romantics present individuals as prone to sin and self-destruction, not as inherently possessing divinity and wisdom. Their main theory is that the self is the only thing that can be known or verified. For Dark Romantics, the natural world is dark, decaying, and mysterious. When it does reveal truth to man, its revelations are evil and hellish. Thus, their main characteristics are:
- There is a focus on the tragic.
- The belief in sin and evil.
- An attention paid to the mysteries of life.
- Does not emphasize the cynical.
- A reverence for human nature, and all its struggles.
eg. Edgar Allan Poe ”The Raven”.
Transcendentalism:
It is considered a Romantic movement. Transcendentalism is a philosophical and literary movement that provides an open way of questioning the authority of institutions and communion with nature. For them, the empirical appearance of things is not reliable since the material properties of natural objects are not only the extended sign these use as a wrapping to conceal their spiritual essence. The world is not a collection of different phenomena but a vast symbol of spiritual or divine message. So, man’s real mission on earth is to see beyond matter and discover the spiritual meaning hidden behind it. They are simply symbols of something spiritual. What man has to do is to decode their meanings to find out what they are. Nevertheless, matter is corruptible, a time-bound phenomenon, and therefore perishable. Matter is not the essence of the universe; it is just an unchangeable and accidental vesture which underlies the form of things. And the language is a spiritual whole whereby the linguistic signs are only a symbol of the transcendentalist reality and cannot be apprehended by man’s senses.
Positivism:
It is a philosophical theory which only accepts as true that which can be apprehended by the senses. It only relies on empirical sources of knowledge. If something is not empirical, it is rejected. The only valid method of knowledge starts from the empirical information we get from the material appearance of things, which will result in the formulation of hypotheses that will be tested with the aim of some criteria.