Qarshi davlat universiteti xorijiy tillar fakulteti ingliz tili va adabiyoti kafedrasi

 
Dark romanticism
is a literary subgenre of Romanticism, reflecting popular fascination with the 
irrational, the demonic and the grotesque. Often conflated with Gothicism, it has shadowed the 
euphoric Romantic movement ever since its 18th-century beginnings. Edgar Allan Poe is often 
celebrated as the supreme exponent of the tradition. 

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Romanticism's celebration of euphoria and sublimity has always been dogged by an equally 
intense fascination with melancholia, insanity, crime and shady atmosphere, with the options of 
ghosts and ghouls, the grotesque, and the irrational. The name “Dark Romanticism” was given to 
this form by the literary theorist Mario Praz in his lengthy study of the genre published in 1930, 
‘’The Romantic Agony’’. 
 
EDGAR ALLAN POE 
(1809-1849) 
Edgar Poe was an American romanticist. But, unlike many English romantic writers he had no 
special interest in the feudal times. As the history of America had not known a feudal period, it 
was natural that Poe and other American writers took slight interest in the Middle Ages. On the 
other hand, neither had Poe that revolutionary spirit of protest, which made the poetry of Shelley 
and Byron. But, as some romantic authors in England and other countries, Poe was fond of the 
mysterious, the horrible and the supernatural. His life was most unhappy, his health weak, and 
his mind often took an unhealthy pleasure in playing with the awful and the mystic.
The contemporary reader is interested in Poe not so much when he tells of horrible and 
impossible things, as when he mingles scientific facts with fantastical impossibilities or displays 
accurate reasoning and his knowledge of human psychology. Thus in “The Adventures of one 
Hans Pfall” he tells us about the adventures of a man, who made a wonderful balloon and flew to 
the moon. In other stories he solves the mystery of a crime by careful observation of psychology 
and analysis of the details of the case. This makes him one of the principle founders of the 
modern detective story. 
But Poe was also well-known as a poet. He had a peculiar manner of writing. He considered that 
the poem should be short, should have the force of “monotone” and should serve to one purpose 
which he himself called “totality effect”.
Historical fiction is a literary genre in which the plot takes place in a setting located in the past. 
Although the term is commonly used as a synonym for the historical novel, it can also be applied 
to other types of narrative, including theatre, opera, cinema, and television, as well as video 
games and graphic novels. 
An essential element of historical fiction is that it is set in the past and pays attention to the 
manners, social conditions and other details of the depicted period.[1] Authors also frequently 
choose to explore notable historical figures in these settings, allowing readers to better 
understand how these individuals might have responded to their environments. Some subgenres 
such as alternate history and historical fantasy insert speculative or ahistorical elements into a 
novel. 
Works of historical fiction are sometimes criticized for lack of authenticity because of readerly 
criticism or genre expectations for accurate period details. This tension between historical 
authenticity, or historicity, and fiction frequently becomes a point of comment for readers and 
popular critics, while scholarly criticism frequently goes beyond this commentary, investigating 
the genre for its other thematic and critical interests. 
Historical fiction as a contemporary Western literary genre has its foundations in the early-19th-
century works of Sir Walter Scott and his contemporaries in other national literatures such as the 
Frenchman Honoré de Balzac, the American James Fenimore Cooper, and later the Russian Leo 
Tolstoy. However, the melding of "historical" and "fiction" in individual works of literature has a 
long tradition in most cultures; both western traditions (as early as Ancient Greek and Roman 
literature) as well as Eastern, in the form of oral and folk traditions (see mythology and folklore), 
which produced epics, novels, plays and other fictional works describing history for 
contemporary audiences. 

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James Fenimore Cooper (September 15, 1789 – September 14, 1851) was an American writer of 
the first half of the 19th century. His historical romances depicting frontier and Native American 
life from the 17th to the 19th centuries created a unique form of American literature. He lived 
much of his boyhood and the last fifteen years of life in Cooperstown, New York, which was 
founded by his father William Cooper on property that he owned. Cooper became a member of 
the Episcopal Church shortly before his death and contributed generously to it. He attended Yale 
University for three years, where he was a member of the Linonian Society. 
After a stint on a commercial voyage, Cooper served in the U.S. Navy as a midshipman, where 
he learned the technology of managing sailing vessels which greatly influenced many of his 
novels and other writings. The novel that launched his career was The Spy, a tale about 
espionage set during the American Revolutionary War and published in 1821. He also created 
American sea stories. His best-known works are five historical novels of the frontier period, 
written between 1823 and 1841, known as the Leather-stocking Tales, which introduced the 
iconic American frontier scout, Natty Bumppo. Cooper's works on the U.S. Navy have been well 
received among naval historians, but they were sometimes criticized by his contemporaries. 
Among his most famous works is the romantic novel The Last of the Mohicans, often regarded 
as his masterpiece. Throughout his career, he published numerous social, political, and historical 
works of fiction and non-fiction with the objective of countering European prejudices and 
nurturing an original American art and culture. 
Historical and nautical work 
His historical account of the U.S. Navy was well received, though his account of the roles played 
by the American leaders in the Battle of Lake Erie led to years of disputes with their 
descendants, as noted below. Cooper had begun thinking about this massive project in 1824, and 
concentrated on its research in the late 1830s. His close association with the U.S. Navy and 
various officers, and his familiarity with naval life at sea provided him the background and 
connections to research and write this work. Cooper's work is said to have stood the test of time 
and is considered an authoritative account of the U.S. Navy during that time. 
In 1844, Cooper's Proceedings of the naval court martial in the case of Alexander Slidell 
Mackenzie, a commander in the navy of the United States, &c:, was first published in Graham's 
Magazine of 1843–44. It was a review of the court martial of Alexander Slidell Mackenzie who 
had hanged three crew members of the brig USS Somers for mutiny while at sea. One of the 
hanged men, 19-year-old Philip Spencer, was the son of U.S. Secretary of War John C. Spencer. 
He was executed without court-martial along with two other sailors aboard the Somers for 
allegedly attempting mutiny. Prior to this affair, Cooper and Mackenzie had disputed each other's 
version of the Battle of Lake Erie. However, recognizing the need for absolute discipline in a 
warship at sea, Cooper still felt sympathetic to Mackenzie over his pending court martial. 
In 1843, an old shipmate, Ned Myers, re-entered Cooper's life. To assist him—and hopefully to 
cash in on the popularity of maritime biographies—Cooper wrote Myers's story which he 
published in 1843 as Ned Myers, or a Life before the Mast, an account of a common seaman still 
of interest to naval historians. 
The self-confidence and nationalism of the newly created United States of America energized 
fiction as well as nonfiction. Historical fiction took off first, influenced by Sir Walter Scott, an
enormously popular British writer who established the genre. Historical fiction was an 
expression of romanticism in its probings of human nature and emotions and its 
romanticizing of the American past and the American frontier. The first generations of 
Puritans in New England, the Salem witchcraft trials, white conflicts with Native Americans, and 
the American Revolution provided popular subjects for American historical fiction. One of the 
earliest examples of the genre was Samuel Woodworth's The Champions of Freedom (1816). 
James Fenimore Cooper was the first American master of the form, however. 
In 1846, Cooper published Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers covering the 
biographies of William Bainbridge, Richard Somers, John Shaw, John T. Shubrick, and Edward 

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Preble. Cooper died in 1851. In May 1853, Cooper's Old Ironsides appeared in Putnam's 
Monthly. It was the history of the Navy ship USS Constitution and, after European and 
American Scenery Compared, 1852, was one of several posthumous publication of his writings. 
In 1856, five years after Cooper's death, his History of the Navy of the United States of America 
was re-published in an expanded edition. The work was an account of the U.S. Navy in the early 
19th century, through the Mexican War. Among naval historians of today, the work has come to 
be recognized as a general and authoritative account. However, it was criticized for accuracy on 
some points by some contemporaries, especially those engaged in the disputes over the roles of 
their relatives in Cooper's separate history of the Battle of Lake Erie. Whig editors of the period 
regularly attacked anything Cooper wrote, leading him to numerous suits for libel, for example 
against Park Benjamin, Sr., a poet and editor of the Evening Signal of New York. 
Critical reaction 
Cooper's writings of the 1830s related to current politics and social issues, coupled with his 
perceived self-promotion, increased the ill feeling between the author and some of the public. 
Criticism in print of his naval histories and the two Home novels came largely from newspapers 
supporting The Whig party, reflecting the antagonism between the Whigs and their opposition, 
the Democrats, whose policies Cooper often favored. Cooper's father William had been a staunch 
Federalist, a party now defunct but some of whose policies supporting large-scale capitalism the 
Whigs endorsed. Cooper himself had come to admire Thomas Jefferson, the bete-noire of the 
Federalists, and had supported Andrew Jackson's opposition to a National Bank. Never one to 
shrink from defending his personal honor and his sense of where the nation was erring, Cooper 
filed legal actions for libel against several Whig editors; his success with most of his lawsuits 
ironically led to more negative publicity from the Whig establishment. 
Buoyed by his frequent victories in court, Cooper returned to writing with more energy and 
success than he had had for several years. As noted above, on May 10, 1839, he published his 
History of the U.S. Navy;[43] his return to the Leatherstocking Tales series with The Pathfinder, 
or The Inland Sea (1840) and The Deerslayer (1841) brought him renewed favorable reviews. 
But on occasion he returned to addressing public issues, most notably with a trilogy of novels 
called the Littlepage Manuscripts addressing the issues of the anti-rent wars. Public sentiment 
largely favored the anti-renters, and Cooper's reviews again were largely negative. 
HARRIET BEECHER-STOWE 
(1811-1896) 
Harriet Beecher-Stowe was born in Litchfield in the North of America. She was a daughter of a 
clergyman. In 1830 the family moved to Cincinnati. In January 1934 she published “Uncle Lot” 
which won in the magazine “Western Monthly”. It was followed by a great number of other 
stories and later she made it a collection under the title “Mayflower, or Sketches of Scenes and 
characters among the Descendants of Pilgrims”, 1843. These early writings were rather 
primitive, they did not contain any serious conflict in social life. Cincinnati was on the border of 
North and South. The inhabitants of the town heard much more horrible stories about cruel 
treatment of the Negroes. Her father was a President of an ecclesiastical Seminary and the 
students of this seminary established an anti-slavery society and opened local schools for Negro 
population. Very many abolitionists lived in this town. The slave-owners were enraged of 
Negroes and their defenders. They did everything to terrorize black people and their supporters.
Under those conditions the writer had all opportunity to learn the life of black people in the 
South. She wrote many articles and short stories but she considered it insufficient and she set 
herself a task of creating and antislavery novel.
Beecher-Stowe carried out her task in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” which was published in the 
magazine “The National Era” (1851-1852), in the serial form. The novel is against the 
oppression of the slaves, the cruel treatment of them by plantation owners. The book produced a 

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tremendous impression on the readers. And immediately the voices of attack, a campaign of 
slander came. They said it was untrue to reality and falsification of life. In answer she published 
a “Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1853), a collection of real, authentic documents on which the 
story was based. The book aroused such an interest throughout the world that during some 
months it was translated into a dozen of world languages. It was for the first time in history the 
slave-owners were portrayed as they were with all their atrocities. When “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” 
saw light all the right thinking people came out demanding the immediate emancipation of 
slaves. 
As for the views of the writer herself, she was far from being radical. She did not call people to 
raise arms against the slavery. She thought that was the task of the church that might preach to 
the people how to eradicate slavery. Her views were temperate. The popularity of the book 
made the author the great public figure. She received so many letters, so many facts after the 
publication of “Uncles Tom’s Cabin”, that then she could write another book “Dred, a Tale of 
the Great Dismal Swamp”, 1856. Her negro in this novel is a leader of an uprising, he is a 
rebellious slave. In this book we see a new approach of the author to the problem. 
When in 1861 the Civil War broke, it found in Beecher-Stowe a supporter. She spoke at 
meetings, she was proud that her son fought in the Yankee Army. She was personally invited by 
Lincoln to the White House. After the Civil War she wrote a number of books, unfortunately 
neither of social nor artistic interest. Harriet Beecher-Stowe’s writing is the transition from 
romanticism to realism. At the same time she is the creator of a social novel in American 
literature.
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 
(1807-1882) 
He was the greatest poet of America, the household poet of American people. He was born in 
Portland. He was a son of a prosperous lawyer and he was educated at Bawdoin College where 
he took his degree in 1825. In 1826 his father sent him to complete his education abroad. For 4 
years he traveled and visited Germany, Spain. When he returned in 1830 he took his 
professorship in Modern Languages at the same college. He worked only for 4 years and then 
went to Europe in 1834. He revisited Germany, visited Denmark, Sweden and Switzerland. Upon 
his return in 1836 for 18 years running he held the chair of modern languages and literature at 
Harvard University. After that he retired in 1854 and traveled very much. In 1842 he visited 
Europe for the third time. His life was a quiet life of an intellectual while it was a stormy period 
in America (Abolitionism, Civil War). He didn’t take an active part in those events. His first 
poems were entitled “Voices of Night” (1839). It was succeeded by another collection “Ballads 
and Other Poems” (1841). In his lyrics Longfellow was the singer of the quiet joys of the family 
hearth. During the period of the fierce struggle Longfellow was preaching reconciliation with 
social injustice and moral self-protection. But the conflict between the industrial North and 
slavery South became sharper which led to the Civil War. And Longfellow couldn’t help paying 
some contribution to that movement. That tribute was in a form of a book “Poems of Slavery” 
(1842). No social protest can be marked in these poems but they are full of sympathy for the 
oppressed. They were popular. The best of them are: “The Slave in the Dismal Swamp” and 
“The Quadroom Girl”. Longfellow joined the circle “Brahmins” when he wrote the poems 
devoted to abolishment movement.
At that time young American bourgeoisie strove to have their own literature and philosophy and 
Longfellow like other outstanding men of letters in America took part in certain work the aim of 
which was to find “sources of the American literature to make it original”. Longfellow wrote a 

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number of ballads on medieval themes and besides he set himself a task of creating the national 
epic song of America. So he created his masterpiece “The Song of Hiawatha” (1855). The poem 
has for its setting North America in the 15th century and the narration of the poem continues up 
to that time of the European step on American soil. That was done purposely. He wanted to show 
hereditary between the culture of old Indians and European settlers. He wanted to assure his 
readers that the Pagan Indians acquired Christianity and European civilization so peacefully and 
even seemed to be glad and joyful to it. So it was influenced by bourgeois morality. All the same 
it is a masterpiece. In the first place the American public could acquaint with Indian folklore. 
The Indians in the poem are portrayed to appear to be a proud, freedom-loving, hardworking 
people. He created a number of other poems. For example: “The Bridge”, “The Old Clock on the 
Stairs”, “Evangeline” (1847) – this poem is full of humanism, it condemns war and colonial 
order and shows a tragic fate of a poor man; he glorifies nobility and courage of “small people” 
and defenses their right to be happy. “The Courtship of Miles Standish” (1859) is a humorous 
poem in which Longfellow shows his mastery in depicting an American scenery.
The last works of his last years are marked with mysticism and decline. Among his later works 
are some plays in verse, he also distinguished himself as a translator. He made a number of 
translations of best writers (Dante) 
It was translated into Russian by the end of 60-ties of the 19th century.
Sentimentalism is a practice of being sentimental, and thus tending toward basing actions and 
reactions upon emotions and feelings, in preference[citation needed] to reason. 
As a literary mode, sentimentalism has been a recurring aspect of world literature. 
Sentimentalism includes a variety of aspects in literature, such as sentimental poetry, the 
sentimental novel, and the German sentimentalist music movement, Empfindsamkeit. European 
literary sentimentalism arose during the Age of Enlightenment, partly as a response to 
sentimentalism in philosophy. In eighteenth-century England, the sentimental novel was a major 
literary genre. Its philosophical basis primarily came from Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of 
Shaftesbury, a pupil of John Locke. 
The form of the American domestic and sentimental novel developed in the late 18th and early 
19th century. Drawing on 18th-century British novels that tended to privilege affective relations, 
such writing became associated with women writers in the 19th century through the rise of 
“separate spheres” ideology. This ideology was always a middle-class and often a white 
phenomenon that encouraged the gendered identification of work with men and home with 
women. During the 19th century, women writers in the United States often coupled the anti-
Enlightenment emphasis on emotion with domestic plots that spoke to the power of feelings to 
effect right action. Popular with women readers, domestic novels written in the sentimental style 
tend to feature a young girl protagonist who must depend on her moral compass to guide her 
through an immoral world, a path that frequently leads to marriage. Literature that evoked a 
sentimental response to a particular injustice became identified with women co-opting 
sentimental conventions to shine light on social problems. The most popular American novel of 
the 19th century, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, used sentimentality to address the 
evils of slavery. Sentimental literature was also often associated with Christianity and/or forms 
of Christian benevolence applied to reform movements. Much of the reform literature addressed 
itself to developing a model of citizenship that dovetailed with class mobility, assuming the goal 
of middle-class belonging. Despite the sentimental genre’s contemporary popularity, it was later 
discriminated against as conventional. Since the 1970s and 1980s, critics have worked to 
resituate sentimentalism in the American literary canon. More recently, critics have also 
analyzed its social and economic impact, including its critique of consumerism and its 
circulation through print media, and they have reevaluated its scientific and ethical basis. Male 

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writers and sentimental tropes have also been considered. Other critics, including Lauren 
Berlant, have sought to expand the cultural epistemology of sentimentalism beyond the 19th 
century to consider 20th century texts and movements. The most popular American writers of 
domestic and sentimental fiction included Lydia Maria Child, Maria Cummins, Catharine Maria 
Sedgwick, E. D. E. N. Southworth, and Susan B. Warner. Sensation fiction and 
temperance/abolition tracts were among the other contemporary genres that used sentimental 
tropes. The controversies over how sentimental literature presents political categories continue to 
be a salient feature of both historical and critical treatments. 
One of the most influential works in this genre is Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe 1982). Written to 
promote resistance to the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Law, the novel sought to produce an 
emotional investment on the part of white readers, especially by drawing attention to the difficult 
conditions faced by mothers in slavery. The novel’s key characters are the titular Uncle Tom 
who travels progressively further south into more confining forms of slavery to meet a heroic 
death after a savage beating, and Eliza, who dramatically crosses the Ohio River by jumping 
from one ice floe to the next, ending in freedom in Canada. The impact of the novel can scarcely 
be overstated even as its presence on the American cultural scene may have been more 
emphatically available through its numerous dramatizations in traveling theaters. Other 
sentimental and domestic fiction responded to poverty, urbanization, and the life of widows after 
deaths from the Civil War. Cummins 1854 is an important novel about urban poverty and 
childhood, a bildungsroman about a poor girl who achieves Christian redemption. Warner 1850 
shifts from the city to the country, following a young girl whose hardships in life are framed and 
eventually redeemed by Christian faith. Phelps 1869 tackles the difficult work of mourning, 
portraying affective communities among mourning women after the Civil War. Southworth 1859 
breaks from some of the conventions of the sentimental novel by putting a tomboyish girl 
heroine into the adventurous plots of sensation fiction, although the story resolves in marriage.
Summary
Theme 11: It presents the definition of abolitionism and the movement against slavery 
in the South. The brief outline of Harriet Beecher-Stowe’s and Henry Longfellow’s life and work 
is also given. 
Questions 
1. 
What is abolitionism and where has it started? 
2. 
What was the result of that movement? 
3. 
What do you know about Harriet Beecher-Stowe and her work? 
4. 
What was H. Longfellow’s contribution to the movement of abolitionism? 
5. 
Why “The Song of Hiawatha” is so important even for a contemporary reader?
6. What is abolitionism and where has it started? 
7. 
What was the result of that movement? 
8. 
What do you know about Harriet Beecher-Stowe and her work? 
9. 
What was H. Longfellow’s contribution to the movement of abolitionism? 
10. 
Why “The Song of Hiawatha” is so important even for a contemporary reader?