3/25 notes: Romanticism ctd.

-People go on longer than the movement and keep writing until the end of the century, for example Whitman (a transcendental) and Melville (a Gothic).
-Key Romanesque concept: no one understands you and appreciates you until after you're dead. Romantic poets lived a misunderstood live and then everyone laments the fact that they were not understood during their own lives
-These two authors are the beginning of great American literature , however, the educational system wasn't changing-- it is identical to the education of the Europeans
-Taylor Edwards and Ben Franklin are not published yet
-American's had access to European literature about a month after it was released in Europe

-The biggest issue was the gender difference in education. Both men and women got rudimentary educations, however past that it was unequal. It was not the reason of women belong in the household and don't need an education, it was more based on a censorship value. Men did not want women reading what they deemed inappropriate. The men found sexual references to be immoral for women to read. Higher class women had more of a chance to be educated. Another strong feeling was that women should not be allowed to read fiction. It is keeping the Puritan notion of fantasy and lies = evil. Since fiction is fantasy it had the power to inflame womens' passions, which were believed to be uncontrollable by women. Women were belived to be very vulnerable to these fantasies, which is why the father's main goal for his daughter is to find him a husband to take care of her. Women could not read novels as well.
-There were these same warnings for men, however it was believed men could control themselves
-This idea continues to the Civil War
-Poetry is the highest of civil virtues, it is amazing to most how poets can put great moments in time into literature
-America wanted a National Poem, but it turned out awful and was stopped by Walter Scott.
-Walter Scott was the prototype of American Prose. He was the single most popular writer in America. Scott put fiction in historical settings -- it gave people something they understood and something they didn't -- the first historical drama
-Walter Scott switched the focus of writing a National Poem to novels.
-James F. Cooper: wrote the "first" successful novel, although he took basically all the same ideas from Walter Scott's 'The Pirate' and wrote 'The Spy'
-This novel was so well recieved because it was about the frontier, which people in Europe knew nothing about. Cooper could virtually make everything up and the Europeans wouldn't know the difference.

-Neoclassism Test Friday!!!

-Sammi