| Basic Concepts: Adventurism: Fascination
with the Far Away in Time, Place, and Human Experience
One of the Romantic themes, "adventurism" in the nineteenth century was the diversion afforded from the angst associated with daily living that many people found in the imaginative excursion to the fringes of human experience. Writers fed what was to become a fascination for travel literature which took readers in imaginative flights beyond the boundaries of the landscape, time, and and even conventional human experience. . Fascination with the Far Away in Time In the late eighteenth century, European popular novelists and essayists began drawing on an idealized medieval tradition. The chivalric tradition with its heroic code and all the trappings of knight-errantry entranced European readers. However, without mouldering castles and vine-covered ruins of libraries and monasteries, the American complement was divined in the wilderness. With more and more reports filtering back from explorers of the Western frontiers, ancient and rude abandoned indigenous sites conjured impressions of rustic, pastoral civilizations. While European travel literature continued to salve the yearning for ties to the "old countries," Americans were beginning to be comfitted by the growing number of artifacts in their own, expansive backyard. . Fascination with the Far Away in Place The excursions of the explorers during the Renaissance and afterwards to the Far East, Africa, and both to North and South America instilled an eager interest in the world beyond the European horizons. The images of "untamed" populations and their exotic regalia and lifestyles, reports of new wildlife and plants, the chronicles of conflicts and squirmishes between colonists and indigenous populations, and the ceaseless flow of wealth from remote corners of the earth drove the profits from book sales to readers who had no other way of participating in the international frenzy for expropriating the new worlds. . Fascination with the Far Away in Human Experience An image from the folklore of English Romanticism suggests William Wordsworth and his co-author of the Lyrical Ballads (1798) drawing straws to determine which of them would address the familiar and natural in human experience and which of them would explore the unfamiliar and the darker, exotic edges of human experience. Which one drew the "short straw" is a matter of perspective, but clearly, Wordsworth writes of the "cottage scene" while Coleridge slips into the night and all its attending terrors. . Gothic literature (the literature of the dead and dying) had already flooded the popular reading stalls by the onset of the Romantic Movement in Europe, and it complemented the Romantics' exploration of spirituality and mysticism. In America, Hawthorne defends his use of the supernatural in his "Preface" to "The House of the Seven Gables," distinguishing between the necessities of the writer of the "novel" to adhere strictly to the familiar and the expected in human affairs, while the writer of the "romance" was free to assume a certain latitude in the use of the "marvelous." Whatever the justification, American readers, like their European counterparts, enjoyed the thrill of all "that goes bump in the night" and the attending melancholy that laced its corridors. . Online Connections .
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