A Generic Study Of The American Fiction In The Romantic Period

Based on modern narrative and stylistic theories, this dissertation makes a thorough generic study of the unique artistic features of the American fiction in the romantic period and outlines the trend of the artistic development of the American fiction in the light of new interpretations and ideas of contemporary literary theories such as historicism, formalism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, feminism, deconstruction, post-coloniality and cultural studies.It was a coincidence and a historical inevitability that the rise of Romanticism and the rise of the fiction occurred simultaneously in the United States in the period of 1820-1860, which is elaborated from aspects of American puritanical tradition, Common Sense, ideology, aesthetic standards, social and economic development, urbanization, and the split between household and labor.The central parts of this dissertation focus on the developments and influences of the artistic features and strategies of the American fiction within two genres: the short stories and the novels. Representations of each sub-genre are chosen to analyze from the narration, description, structure, plot, character, and rhetoric devices such as symbols and metaphors and so on. The American short stories were the forerunners in the development of Euro-American fiction, and fostered many new genres such as the detective story, the science story, and the tall tale, and Edgar Allan Poe, the world influential master of the short story, whose theory and the art of doubling in creation are the everlasting stimuli of modern and contemporary critical enthusiasm.The American novel won its Americanness and its identity within the great tradition of the English novel in the romantic period. There were two trends of creations in the American novel: the molded creation and the individual creation. Among the molded creations, the captivity narrative, the historical romance, and the domestic novel were the dominant genres, which even though lacked enduring artistic value, reflected the mainstream culture and ideology, and helped form the fictional creation climate and nurtured literary geniuses. Individual creation endowed the American novel with real artistic value. Cooper's frontier romances, Hawthorne's romances, Stowe's domestic novels, and Melville's sea romances fully displayed their understanding of the spirit of the romantic dialectic concept in inheriting tradition and giving play to their talents. Whether its Cooper's art of redundancy and reduction, or Hawthorn's art of the real and the subjective, or Stowe's art of sentimentalizing, or Melville's art of flux, they all exhibited individual features and the artistic features of their age sharply.Even though the talented writers of fiction preferred different techniques and strategies in their creation, there were evident similarities in the form of all creations in the romantic period, namely, the dialogue and hybrid of voices, discourses, attitudes, cultures, and genres. American writers tried to embrace all contradictory elements in their texts to reflect the complex society full of conflicts of races, classes, and sexes, subverting the Jacksonian rhetoric of exaggeration and superficial romantic enthusiasm. The free and daring forms, and imaginative and creative techniques and strategies like heteroglossia and pictorialism used by the romantic American writers of fiction have provided the future American and even the world's writers with endless artistic inspiration and sources.