Notes

Ideas relating to the Project
 * there were far more important issues to discuss, like the ever-expanding slavery (shown through the families)
 * the stupidity of the families as they've forgotten what it is they were fighting for
 * romantics were forever dedicated to their causes until death, as seen above
 * didnt always think with reason (as in now the families constantly lose members and live in fear)
 * the whole fight was for emotion and pride, which are ideals of romantics
 * may have been Twain refering or poking at the American authors before him: Melville, Dickenson, Thoreau, Emerson, Longfellow, Whitman, etc... maybe saying they should have done something or written directly about their topics as he did... (?)
 * too much emphasis on nationalism as the nation was entirely divided into the north and south
 * romantics dealt a lot with man's connection with nature and the inevitable, maybe Twain felt that the war was preventable
 * Twain uses nature in showing that the river is like the north whereas the land is like the south.
 * Does nature determine as much as we think it does? are we tied to it?
 * Twain was against religion
 * Twain was against expansion and slavery
 * expansion was a mechanism for nationalism (valued by romantics)

Romanticism
 * originated in late 18th century Western Europe
 * a revolt against aristocratic, social, and political norms of the Enlightenment period
 * reaction against the rationalization of nature
 * stressed strong emotion as a source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror, and the awe experienced in confronting the sublimity of nature
 * influenced by ideas of the Enlightenment and elevated medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived to be from the medieval period
 * The name "romantic" itself comes from the term "romance" which is a prose or poetic heroic narrative originating in medieval literature.
 * elevated the achievements of what it perceived as misunderstood heroic individuals and artists that altered society
 * It also legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority which permitted freedom from classical notions of form in art
 * strong connection of history and natural inevitability in the representation of its ideas
 * a key moment in the Counter-Enlightenment
 * emphasized intuition, imagination, and feeling, to a point that has led to some Romantic thinkers being accused of irrationalism.

In Literature
 * The Scottish poet James Macpherson influenced the early development of Romanticism with the international success of his Ossian cycle of poems published in 1762, inspiring both Goethe and the young Walter Scott.
 * An early German influence came from Johann Wolfgang Goethe whose 1774 novel //The Sorrows of Young Werther// had young men throughout Europe emulating its protagonist, a young artist with a very sensitive and passionate temperament.
 * Since the Romanticists opposed Enlightenment, they often focused on emotions and dreams (vs. rationalism) in their works.
 * //Romanticism// in British literature developed in a different form slightly later, mostly associated with the poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose co-authored book "Lyrical Ballads" (1798)
 * The poet and painter William Blake is the most extreme example of the Romantic sensibility in Britain, epitomised by his claim

//“I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's.”//
Blake's artistic work is also strongly influenced by Medieval illuminated books.
 * The painters J.M.W. Turner and John Constable are also generally associated with Romanticism. Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and John Keats constitute another phase of Romanticism in Britain.
 * the plays, poems and novels of Victor Hugo (such as Les Misérables and Ninety-Three), and the novels of Stendhal.
 * Romanticism played an essential role in the national awakening of many Central European peoples lacking their own national states, particularly in Poland
 * Patriotism, nationalism, revolution and armed struggle for independence also became popular themes in the arts of this period.
 * In the United States, the romantic gothic makes an early appearance with Washington Irving's //Legend of Sleepy Hollow// (1819), followed from 1823 onwards by the fresh //Leatherstocking// tales of James Fenimore Cooper, with their emphasis on heroic simplicity and their fervent landscape descriptions of an already-exotic mythicized frontier peopled by "noble savages", similar to the philosophical theory of Rousseau, like Uncas, "The Last of the Mohicans".
 * Edgar Allan Poe's tales of the macabre and his balladic poetry were more influential in France than at home, but the romantic American novel is fully developed in Nathaniel Hawthorne's atmosphere and melodrama.
 * Later Transcendentalist writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson still show elements of its influence, as does the romantic realism of Walt Whitman
 * But by the 1880s, psychological and social realism was competing with romanticism.
 * The poetry which Americans wrote and read was all romantic until the 1920s: Poe and Hawthorne, as well as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. The poetry of Emily Dickinson– nearly unread in her own time – and Herman Melville's novel //Moby-Dick// can be taken as the epitomes of American Romantic literature, or as successors to it.
 * the assertion of nationalism, which became a central theme of Romantic art and political philosophy

Mark Twain
 * When Twain was four, his family moved to [|Hannibal], a port town on the Mississippi River that would serve as the inspiration for the fictional town of St. Petersburg in //[|The Adventures of Tom Sawyer]// and //[|Adventures of Huckleberry Finn]//.
 * At that time, Missouri was a [|slave state] in the union and young Twain was familiar with the institution of slavery, a theme he later explored in his writing.
 * Twain was colorblind, a condition that fueled his witty banter in the social circles of the day.
 * In March of 1847 when Twain was eleven, his father died of pneumonia
 * He had a meager education.
 * Twain became a printers apprentice and in 1851 began working as a typesetter and contributor of articles and humorous sketches for the Hannibal Journal, a newspaper owned by his older brother, Orion.
 * worked as a printer in [|New York], [|Philadelphia], [|St. Louis], and [|Cincinnati].
 * On a voyage to New Orleans down the Mississippi, the [|steamboat] pilot, "Bixby", inspired Twain to pursue a career as a steamboat pilot, the third highest paying profession in America at the time earning $250 per month ($155,000 today), a "princely amount".
 * A steamboat pilot needed a vast knowledge of the ever-changing river to be able to stop at any of the hundreds of ports (to take on and discharge passengers and freight) and wood-lots along the river banks (to purchase fuel for the steam boilers).
 * Twain meticulously studied 2000 miles of the Mississippi for more than two years until he finally received his steamboat pilot license in 1858.
 * He worked as a river pilot until the [|American Civil War] broke out in 1861
 * [|Missouri], although a [|slave state] and considered by many to be part of the South, declined to join the [|Confederacy] and remained loyal to the [|Union].
 * When the war began, Clemens and his friends formed a [|Confederate] [|militia] (an experience he depicted in his 1885 short story, "[|The Private History of a Campaign That Failed]"), but he saw no military action and the militia disbanded after two weeks.
 * His friends joined the [|Confederate Army]; Clemens joined his brother, Orion, who had been appointed secretary to the territorial governor of [|Nevada], and headed west.
 * Once in Nevada, Clemens became a [|miner], hoping to strike it rich discovering silver in the [|Comstock Lode].
 * Clemens obtained work at a newspaper called the //[|Daily Territorial Enterprise]// in Virginia City. It was there he first adopted the pen name "Mark Twain".
 * During this tour of Europe and the Middle East he wrote a collection of widely popular travel letters which would, in [|1869], be culmunized into his book entitled //[|The Innocents Abroad]//.
 * Here Clemens met Charles Langdon, who showed him a picture of his sister [|Olivia]. Clemens claims to have fallen in love at first sight; in [|1868], Clemens met her. Twain was editing a daily [|Buffalo, New York] newspaper for a few months when the two, a year later, became engaged, then married in February 1870
 * In 1871 Twain moved his family to [|Hartford, Connecticut], the site of his established residence. There Olivia gave birth to three daughters: Susy, Clara, and [|Jean].
 * Twain made a second tour of Europe, summarized and recorded in the 1880 book, //[|A Tramp Abroad]//. He returned to America in [|1900], having paid off his debts to his old firm. The Clemens' marriage lasted for 34 years until Olivia's death in [|1904].
 * In [|1906] he began his [|autobiography] in the //[|North American Review]//. [|Oxford University] issued him a [|Doctorate] of Literature a year later.
 * Clemens outlived Jean and Susy. Clemens passed through a period of deep [|depression], which began in 1896 when he received word on a lecture tour in England that his favorite daughter, Susy, had died of [|meningitis]. His wife's death in 1904, and the loss of a second daughter, Jean, on December 24, 1909, deepened his gloom.[|[9]] He died in [|Redding, Connecticut] on [|April 21], [|1910].
 * Beginning as a writer of light, humorous verse, Twain evolved into a grim, almost profane chronicler of the vanities, hypocrisies and murderous acts of mankind.
 * At mid-career, with //Huckleberry Finn//, he combined rich humor, sturdy narrative and social criticism in a way that is almost unrivaled in world literature.
 * Twain was a master at rendering [|colloquial speech], and helped to create and popularize a distinctive American literature built on American themes and language.
 * Twain also had a fascination with [|science] and scientific inquiry. He developed a close and lasting friendship with [|Nikola Tesla], and the two spent quite a bit of time together in Tesla's laboratory, among other places.
 * Mark Twain was opposed to [|vivisection] of any kind, not on a scientific basis, but rather an [|ethical] one, in which he states that no sentient being should be made to suffer for another without consent. He later commented on his views

Realism = = Background Intellectual Background
 * In the arts, the accurate, detailed, unembellished depiction of nature or of contemporary life. **Realism** rejects imaginative idealization in favor of a close observation of outward appearances
 * Rejection of the artificiality of both the Classicism and Romanticism of the academies
 * necessity for contemporary society in an effective work of art
 * Realists attempted to portray the lives, appearances, problems, customs, and mores of the middle and lower classes
 * the unexceptional, the ordinary, the humble, and the unadorned
 * Realists conscientiously set themselves to reproducing all the hitherto-ignored aspects of contemporary life and society--its mental attitudes, physical settings, and material conditions
 * Political
 * Technological
 * Intellectual Developments
 * __Positivism__: an encouragement for understanding the cause and effect of nature through precise observation
 * __Sociology__: natural laws of human society for the betterment of industrialized humans
 * Charles Darwin published //The Origin of Species// in 1859, and creates a worldwide stir which exists to this day. Darwin suggests that life developed gradually from common ancestry and that life favored "survival of the fittest."
 * The implications of Darwin's theory were threefold:
 * 1.people were controlled by heredity and environment
 * 2.behaviors were beyond our control
 * 3.humanity is a natural object, rather than being above all else
 * **Karl Marx (1818-1883)** in the late 1840s espoused a political philosophy arguing against urbanization and in favor of a more equal distribution of wealth
 * In most people's minds, the years following the Civil War symbolized a time of healing and rebuilding.
 * For those engaged in serious literary circles, however, that period was full of upheaval. A literary civil war raged on between the camps of the [|romantics]and the [|realists] and later, the [|naturalists].
 * People waged verbal battles over the ways that fictional characters were presented in relation to their external world.
 * Using plot and character development, a writer stated his or her philosophy about how much control mankind had over his own destiny.
 * For example, romantic writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson celebrated the ability of human will to triumph over adversity.
 * On the other hand, Mark Twain, William Dean Howells and Henry James were influenced by the works of early European Realists
 * These American realists believed that humanity's freedom of choice was limited by the power of outside forces.
 * The industrial revolution that took place at the end of the 19th century changed our country in remarkable ways.
 * People left rural homes for opportunities in urban cities. With the development of new machinery and equipment, the U.S. economy became more focused on factory production; Americans did not have to chiefly rely on farming and agriculture to support their families. At the same time, immigrants from all over the world crowded into tenements to take advantage of new urban opportunities.
 * In the end, the sweeping economic, social, and political changes that took place in post-war life allowed American Realism to prevail.
 * The factory workers of Upton Sinclair and Rebecca Harding David
 * Paul Lawrence Dunbar and Charles Chesnutt's stories of black life
 * Kate Chopin's views of marriage and women's roles
 * The industrial revolution called for standardization, mass production of goods and streamlined channels of distribution.
 * America was leaping into a new modern age and people feared that local folkways and traditions would be soon forgotten.
 * Responding to these sentiments, realistic writers set their stories in specific American regions, rushing to capture the "local color" before it was lost.
 * They drew upon the sometimes grim realities of everyday life, showing the breakdown of traditional values and the growing plight of the new urban poor.

P5 MKunert