Poetry of the romantic age is often uninviting to students, leaving them puzzled because they do not sense the connections between the poetry and themselves. Yet, much romantic poetry can be enjoyed and comprehended if approached in terms of some personal, reflective, and connective readings. Wordsworth and Whitman are often avoided because they…

In 1933 in Paris, a new literary movement was born: negritude, a black French-language movement. Its principal figures were Leopold Sedar Senghor, Aime Cesaire, and Leon Damas. The chief features of the movement included: (1) awareness of African cultural history; (2) acceptance of and pride in the black racial identity; (3) a style which combined…

Shakespeare's lifetime coincided with the consolidation of modern capitalism, and his plays reveal his interest in economics--defined as a rational system for calculating and comparing the value of commodities--and especially the economics of time. Shakespeare's plays offer a critique of the new capitalism by showing the extent to which it can and…

One of the Afro-American writers who spoke out clearly during the postreconstruction period was Albery A. Whitman (1851-1902). A romantic poet, Whitman produced seven volumes of poetry. His profound belief in freedom and equality for his race is expressed forcefully in two long narrative poems, "Not a Man and Yet a Man" and "The…

If children are not present in most travel literature--precisely because the genre has most typically been the domain of solitary male travelers who are escaping domestic obligation, routine, the familiar, and the family--they nevertheless are an integral part of the genre. The traveler is in many ways a child, an innocent abroad. Traveler writers…

In recent years the High Romantic concept of the solitary author has been intensely challenged. Compositionists and various theorists have deconstructed the concept of isolated authorship and critiqued the Romantic notion of individual genius. Meanwhile, the reconstruction of the female literary tradition introduced the question of gender and…

This paper traces the historical development of melodrama in the theatre and discusses its influence on twentieth century drama. Melodrama is a responsible literary mode based on romance and allegory, and its deliberate exaggeration of external actions represents figuratively the interior or psychological dimensions of imagination. Good melodrama…

The book "Mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada" by Clarence King, a late-ninteenth-century American geologist, writer, art critic, and romantic, is discussed in this paper. In the writing and revision of this book, King was attempting a metamorphosis of landscape description into popular reading as he moved from being a symbolic writer to…

One way of making connections among various authors in a survey course is to emphasize recurring themes, images, and tropes; the instructor can point out how they are transformed by a constantly changing ethos and set of historical circumstances. A case in point is the second part of a British survey, typically going from William Blake or William…