【正文】 ng. The spread of industrialism, the sudden influx of immigration, and the “pioneers” pushing the frontier further westall these produced something of an economic boom and, with it, a tremendous sense of optimism and hope among the people. A nation bursting into new life for literary expression. The buoyant mood of the nation and the sprit of the times seem in some measure responsible for the spectacular outburst of romantic feeling in the first half of the nineteenth century. The literary milieu proved fertile and conducive to the imagination as well. Among other things, magazines appeared in everincreasing numbers, of which The North American Review, The New York Mirror, The American Quarterly Review, The New England Magazine, The Southern Review, The Southern Literary Messenger, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s Magazine and Knickerbockers Magazine played an important role in facilitating literary expansion in the country. Foreign influences added incentive to the growth of romanticism in America. The Romantic Movement, which had flourished earlier in the century both in England and Europe, proved to be a decisive influence without which the upsurge of American romanticism would hardly have been possible. Sir Walter Scott, Samuel Taylor Cole ridge, William Wordsworth, Byron, Robert Burns and many other English and European masters of poetry and prose all made a stimulating impact on the different departments of the country’s literature. The influence of Sir Walter Scott was particularly powerful and enduring. His border tales and Waverley romances inspired many American authors such as James Fennimore Cooper with irresistible creative impulses. Scott’s Waverley novels were models for American historical romance, and his The Lady of the Lake, together with Byron’s Oriental romances, helped toward the development of American Indian romance. He was, in a way, responsible for the romantic description of landscape in American literature. The Gothic tradition, and the cult of solitude and of gloom came through interest in the works of writers like Mrs. Radcliff, . Hoffman, James Thomson and the “graveyard’ poets. Robert Burns and Byron both inspired and spurred the American imagination for lyrics of love and passion and despair. The impact of Lyrical Ballads of Wordswoth and Coleridge added, to some extent, to the nation’s singing strength. Thus American romanticism was in a way derivative: American romantic writing was some of them modeled on English and European works.On the other hand, American romanticism had distinct features of its own. Different from their European counterparts, American romantics tended to moralize, to edify rather than to entertain. They presented an entirely new experience alien to European culture. The exotic landscape, the frontier life, the westward expansion, the myth of a New Garden of Eden in America, and the Puritan heritage were just a few examples of the native material for an indigenous literature. Evidently, it produced a feeling of “newness” which inspired the romantic imagination.Part II. Writers of the period1. Washington Irving (17831859) of his life and works: Washington Irving was the first American writer of imaginative literature to gain international fame. He became, in the words of the English novelist Thakeray, “ the first Ambassador whom the new World of letters sent to the old.” Irving was born the youngest of seven children of a precious reader and the author of juvenile poems, plays and essays when he was 16。 he began the study of the law for which he had little relish. He preferred instead to pass his time in desultory reading and in the society of literary wits of New York. At 19, he began to contribute a serious of sketches or “l(fā)etters” on society and the theater to the Morning Chronicle, a New York newspaper. When he was 21, Irving went on a grand tour of Europe. Two years later he returned to New York to be admitted to the bar and to begin the leisurely life of a gentleman lawyer。 shortly afterward, Irving started work on what was to be his first literary triumph, his “History of New York (1809) by “Derrick Knickerbockers.” It was an irreverent to spoof of historical scholarship, salted with offcolor ments. The book satirized the placent Dutch burghers of early New York and pointed at the political follies of 19th century America. It also marked the beginning of the “Knickerbockers school” of New York literary satirists including Paulding, Fitzgreen Hallack and Joseph Rodman Drake who took their names and humorous tone from Irving’s knickbocker History and flourished in New York in the first decades of the 19th century.At the end of the war of 1812, Irving was sent to England to supervise the Liverpool Branch of the family firm, but in 1818, as a result of the war and bad management, the firm went bankrupt. Irving was left only with a dislike for the “dirty soulkilling” world of business and a need to find a livelihood. His “History of New York” has earned the magnificent sum of $3000, so he turned to writing and began preparation of “The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent(1820). It was the first work by an American to receive wide international acclaim and it made Irving a celebrity, praised alike in America and England. In it was the two tales that brought him his most enduring fame. “Rip Van Winckles” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”With his new literary success, Irving gave up all thought of returning to America and the world of trade or law. He set out to bee a professional man of letters. The Sketch Book was soon followed by Bracebridge Hill (1822), a series of sketches on England country life. In 1824, he published “Tales of a Traveller”, his first volume of fiction, filled with years of the supernatural and clanking with the ghostly machinery of romantic Gothicism. In 1826 his literary fame earned him appointment as an American diplomatic attach233。 in Spain and there he gathered material for a biogra