As Deliberately as Nature

• Introduction
• American Romanticism
• Romantic Poetry
• Emerson and Thoreau
• Modern Connections

Unit 2 of the course introduces American romanticism, the first of our literary periods. Romanticism refers to a historic movement in literature and the arts that was at its height in the first half of the nineteenth century. But the questions it poses about the place of the individual in a mass culture and the value of nature in the modern world are still with us today.

In this unit we will look at the major concerns and characteristics of romanticism, with a particular focus on Henry David Thoreau and his major work Walden. Because this course focuses on rhetorical analysis, we will look carefully at the arguments posed by Thoreau and other romantic writers, and will examine modern-day advocates of simple lifestyles to see if they echo the rhetoric of their nineteenth-century predecessors.