Introduction

This collection of essays explores the mutually constitutive relationships among Romantic conceptions of education, childhood, and American literature across the long nineteenth century. Continental and British Romanticism came late to America, but when it arrived, it strongly influenced a developing literature in a new nation that witnessed an explosive growth in print culture, rising literacy rates, and an increased concern about educational access. Romantic education was a liberating pedagogy that spiritually elevated both childhood and the natural world while it rebelled against what its practitioners saw as the insufferably mechanical in Lockean and monitorial methods of teaching. In its most idealistic forms, it sought to replace the schoolroom habits of memorization and recitation with what Amos Bronson Alcott called “Conversations” and what we might term the rudiments of critical thinking. Romantic educational practices included an effort to substitute externalized corporal punishment with internalized self-government and to cultivate affective bonds between teachers and students in ways that moved away from emotions such as fear. Romantic education was represented in nineteenth-century American literature and at times offered a generic identity for literary productions themselves in an age in which the literary and the didactic were often blended. Romantic pedagogies were developed during a time when expanding educational opportunities symbolized the strength of a nation and a belief in the power of education became almost an article of faith in a country that revered education as a path to citizenship but that was profoundly divided over the extent to which equality could or should be extended. The long nineteenth century in the U.S. was a period in which assimilation was an accepted doctrine, African Americans were systematically denied access to full literacy as well as full citizenship, and women struggled for educational parity. Romantic education in nineteenth-century American literature both challenged and reinforced the era’s inequalities. The chapters in this collection show how a range of literary works embraced Romantic educational tenets.