During the Romantic period writers shared common themes which they used in their stories and poems. ... In William Cullen Bryant's poem, "To a Waterfowl," he illustrated how life's path is nature's path and some higher "Power" is the power of the human itself. ... In the short story, "The Big Bear of Arkansas," many themes are explored. ... It also goes back to the idea that nature is big and beautiful. ... From the aforementioned examples the themes of Romanticism and how they are illustrated in some short stories and poems become more visible. ...

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• Grade Level: High School

Such works include, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass, Henry David Thoreau's Walden, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Edgar Allan Poe's short stories (Hurley 13, 15). ... Examining questions of human identity, imagination, and intuition, these writers turned inward for a source of truth. The instability of American society also inspired the Romantic faith in nature. Nature was a place of beauty, simplicity, and truth for American Romantics. They looked to nature as a metaphor for the human e...

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A Story such as "The Fall of the House of Usher," is a great example of his imagination. ... With Poe's writing skills the gloomy atmosphere plays as much a role in the story as the warped characters. ... Poe wrote stories purely for economic reasons, by choice he was a poet. ... His unique plot construction contributed to the creation of the short story. ... His works romanticize darkness and the boundaries of the human mind; they probe the depths of human nature to the extent of chaos. ...

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Arising from these new techniques came the Romantic approach to the development of Gothic novels, and short stories. ... Particularly in the works of Poe, the Gothic took on a new edge toward the psychological exploration of the human mind. In Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher", the author depicts the workings of a human mind on the verge of insanity through the use of an allegory of which all characters and events of the story symbolize the human mind's transition into madness, universally conveying the terror that overwhelms and finally destroys the fragile mind of ...

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• Grade Level: Undergraduate

In her 1831 introduction, Shelley declares her desire to think of a story which would speak to the "mysterious fears of our nature and awaken thrilling horror " one to "curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart". ... Nature and weather plays an important role in foreshadowing dark evil acts, events and confrontation to come in the novel. ... This aspect links the Gothicism of the novel to the Romantic period, a period closely related with nature. ... Through the setting, Shelley shows that if an individual tries to play God and mess the order of nature, it will deliver the c...

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• Grade Level: Undergraduate

For romantics, the imagination, spontaneity, individual feelings, and nature were of greater value than reason, logic, planning, and cultivation. ... The transcendentalists, writers of this period, optimistically believed in human perfectibility. ... Transcendentalism influenced writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, who is responsible for the writing of NATURE and SELF-RELIANCE. ... Realistic novelists often relied on the emerging sciences of human and animal behavior-biology, psychology, and sociology-as well as on their own insights and observations. The most well-known writer of this tim...

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In fact, there were a number of stories circulating which focused upon sexually transgressive clergymen, and this may have been an influence on Hawthorne's portrayal of Arthur Dimmesdale. ... Although romanticism was not a clearly conceived system, it does tend to present certain characteristics: there is often a tendency toward primitivism, an interest in nature and the natural world, a pressuring of the past, and a foregrounding of the concerns of individualism. ... The political influences on American romanticism include 18th century notions about human perfectability, the ideals of ...

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• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Nature was also greatly used and admired during the Romantic Movement. ... During the novel Shelley poses the question are all humans born innocent and then changed and corrupt by society. ... After the creature's rejection from the DeLacy's he comes across William Frankenstein's young brother and believes the child to young to be corrupted and turned by society, ...An idea seized me, that this little creature was unprejudiced, and had lived too short a time to have imbibed a horror and deformity. ... Therefore Shelley subtitles her novel, The Modern Prometheus as Promethe...

• Word Count: 2951
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• Grade Level: Undergraduate