Unit+3+American+Romanticism

Unit 3: American Romanticism

**Overview**

 * Students explore this period as America’s first prolific one of literature, by examining works from Cooper and Irving to Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau. The prominent theme during this period in American literature of “manifest destiny” may be introduced by reading John O’Sullivan’s essay “Annexation.” Students will wrestle with how the romantics perceive individualism and how this focus on individualism relates to other themes in American literature. Transcendentalism is explored as an aspect of American romanticism and students should compare the “romantics” with the “transcendentalists.” Teachers are encouraged to select one novel and a variety of the other poetry and prose in order to give students maximum exposure to the various works of the period.

Focus Standards

 * **RL.11-12.2:** Determine two or more themes or central ideas of a text and analyze their development over the course of the text, including how they interact and build on one another to produce a complex account; provide an objective summary of the text.
 * **RL.11-12.9:** Demonstrate knowledge of eighteenth-, nineteenth-, and early-twentieth-century foundational works of American literature, including how two or more texts from the same period treat similar themes or topics.
 * **RI.11-12.5:** Analyze and evaluate the effectiveness of the structure an author uses in his or her exposition or argument, including whether the structure makes points clear, convincing, and engaging.
 * **W.11-12.3:** Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, well-chosen details, and well-structured event sequences.
 * **SL.11-12.4:** Present information, findings, and supporting evidence, conveying a clear and distinct perspective, such that listeners can follow the line of reasoning, alternative or opposing perspectives are addressed, and the organization, development, substance, and style are appropriate to purpose, audience, and a range or formal and informal tasks.
 * **L.11-12.4:** Determine or clarify the meaning of unknown and multiple-meaning words and phrases based on grades 11–12 reading and content, choosing flexibly from a range of strategies.

Suggested Student Objectives

 * Define the major characteristics of American romanticism (e.g., use of symbols, myth, and the “fantastic”; veneration of nature, celebration of the “self,” isolationism).
 * Define transcendentalism as an aspect of American romanticism and explain how it differs from it.
 * Trace characterization techniques in American romantic novels.
 * Analyze the structure and effectiveness of arguments in transcendentalist essays studied

**LITERARY TEXTS** Novels Short Stories Poetry **INFORMATIONAL TEXTS** Narrative Essays Speeches **ART, MUSIC, AND MEDIA**
 * //The Scarlett Letter// (Nathaniel Hawthorne) []
 * //The Pioneers// (James Fenimore Cooper) []
 * //Moby-Dick// (Herman Melville) []
 * //Uncle Tom’s Cabin// (Harriet Beecher Stowe) []
 * “Billy Budd” (Herman Melville) []
 * “The Fall of the House of Usher” (Edgar Allan Poe) []
 * “The Piazza” (Herman Melville) []
 * “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (Washington Irving) []
 * “Rip Van Winkle” (Washington Irving)
 * []
 * “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (Nathaniel Hawthorne) []
 * “The Minister’s Black Veil” (Nathaniel Hawthorne) []
 * “Young Goodman Brown” (Nathaniel Hawthorne) []
 * “The Old Oaken Bucket” (Samuel Woodworth)
 * “The Raven” (Edgar Allan Poe) []
 * “Annabel Lee” (Edgar Allan Poe) []
 * “Song of Myself” (Walt Whitman) []
 * “I Hear America Singing” (Walt Whitman)
 * “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (Walt Whitman) []
 * “A Bird came down the Walk” (Emily Dickinson)
 * “This my letter to the World” (Emily Dickinson)
 * “Because I could not stop for Death” (Emily Dickinson) []
 * //Walden//: or, //Life in the Woods// (Henry David Thoreau)
 * “Self Reliance” (Ralph Waldo Emerson) []
 * “Society and Solitude” (Ralph Waldo Emerson)
 * “Civil Disobedience” (Henry David Thoreau)
 * “Annexation” (John O’Sullivan – United States Magazien and Democratic Review, 17, No. 1, 1845)
 * “Anne Hutchinson: Brief Life Harvard’s ‘Midwife’: 1595-1643” (Peter J. Gomes)
 * “Address to William Henry Harrison” (1810 – Shawnee Chief Tecumeh)
 * Frederic Church, //Niagara// (1857)
 * George Inness, //The Lackawanna Valley// (1855)
 * Asher Durand, //Kindred Spirits// (1849)
 * Albert Beirstadt, //Looking Down Yosemite Valley// (1865)