A Study of Literature Isms

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People undergo changes with every passing generation, but literature has remained a constant driving force throughout. There are four fundamental classifications of literature: Romanticism, Realism, Naturalism, and Existentialism. Romanticism centers around "art as inspiration, the spiritual and aesthetic dimension of nature, and metaphors of organic growth" (VanSpanckeren, "The Romantic Period: Essayists and Poets"). VanSpanckeren states that Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the most influential writers of the Romantic era, asserts in his essay "The Poet": "For all men live by truth, and stand in need in expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is expression" (qtd. in "The Romantic Period: Essayists and Poets"). Romantic literature emerged as a reaction to the neoclassicism and formal orthodoxy of the preceding period (Holman and Harmon). "Romanticism arose so gradually and exhibited so many phases that a satisfactory definition is not possible" (Holman and Harmon). According to VanSpanckeren, the development of the self became a major theme in Romanticism, and self-awareness was a primary method. The Romantic theory posits that self and nature are the same, and self-awareness is not a selfish dead end but a mode of knowledge opening up the universe (VanSpankeren, "The Romantic Period: Essayists and Poets"). With this newfound idea of self, new compound words with positive meanings emerged: self-realization, self-expression, and self-reliance (VanSpanckeren, "The Romantic Period: Essayists and Poets"). Romanticism stresses individualism, affirms the value of the common person, and looks to the inspired imagination for its aesthetic and ethical values (VanSpanckeren, "The Romantic Period: Essayists and Poets"). In New England, Romanticism prospered, and the New England transcendentalists, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and their associates, were inspired to a new optimistic affirmation by the ideas of Romanticism (VanSpanckeren, "The Romantic Period: Essayists and Poets"). The transcendentalists believed that the soul of each individual was identical with the world (VanSpanckeren, "The Romantic Period: Essayists and Poets"). Some examples of Romantic writers include the New England Transcendentalists, such as Emerson, Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, and William Ellery Channing, as well as Oliver Wendell Holmes and Edgar Allan Poe (VanSpanckeren, “The Romantic Period: Essayists and Poets”). The New England Transcendentalists elevated the expression of philosophical and religious ideas to a high level through their essays and lectures (Holman and Harmon). In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s first publication, Nature, he expresses his Romantic view of life and how human beings should enjoy the universe. In the opening of the essay, he writes, "Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchers of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should we not also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should we not have a poetry of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?" Embosomed in nature for a season, whose floods of life stream around and through us, and invite us by the powers they supply to action proportioned to nature, why should we grope among the dry bones of the past? The sun shines today also. There is more wool and flax in the fields. There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship (qtd. in VanSpanckeren, “The Romantic Period: Essayists and Poets”). Oliver Wendell Holmes’ work was renowned for his refreshing versatility (VanSpanckeren, “The Romantic Period: Essayists and Poets”). His works interpreted everything from society and language to medicine and human nature (VanSpanckeren, “The Romantic Period: Essayists and Poets”). In one of his philosophical poems, “The Chambered Nautilus,” he writes in the last line, “Leaving thine outgrown shell by life’s unresting sea!” (Holmes 35). Edgar Allan Poe’s poems told of solitary individuals witnessing lonely visions from the grave (VanSpanckeren, “The Romantic Period: Fiction”).

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