The New York City In American Literature In The Romantic Period

The American literature of romantic period is the first period in literary since the urbanization during the late18th and early19th centuries. The rapid urbanization has caused New York some social issues such as population explosions, income disparities and cultural conflicts. American writers who lived during this period, has paid a lot attention to this City. They looked at the different aspects of New York, created a large number of literary works of the city’s every aspect, and presented a characteristic city image.This paper contains five parts, discussing the urban writing of this period, and trying hard to return a complete New York image at this stage. The introduction part summarizing the survey about the New York urban literature at home and abroad, reviews the differences by domestic and foreign scholars about the focus, the study approach and the literary ideas, etc., mainly deals with the significance of study, the research questions and the methodological problems. The first chapter cleans up the rise and change history of New York to apperceive the overall relationship between literature creation and city, as well as the New York writing in literature through a process from unconscious, germination, and development to maturation. The second chapter analyzes the city dreams of rural natural amorous feelings with peace and harmony in Washington Irving’s works, but also the impact of modern civilization. The third chapter proposes a city image with boisterous, indulgent, corrupt and desire in the perspective of Herman Melville, conveys a bad dream brought with darkly and sin to lowly people caused by city. The fourth chapter discusses the image of Paumanok, Brooklyn and Manhattan in Walt Whitman’s works, puts forward his special point about real New York, conveys his daydreams of hope, happy or inspired. The conclusion part is the basis of above text analysis, through analysis of the different aspects of city images, combining difference urban imagining by those three writers around the same time, summarizes the research meaning of "The City in Literature".