INCANDESCENCE AND FRAGMENT: THE SWORD-DIALECTIC OF ROMANTICISM IN THE FORGING OF BRITISH AND AMERICAN CULTURES

Abstract

This article undertakes a comparative exegesis of Romanticism as it manifested in Great Britain and the United States of America, illuminating the quintessential distinctions that cleave these two literary traditions. Anchored by the venerable William Wordsworth, British Romanticism evokes a transcendent communion with nature and the introspective and sublime, whilst its American counterpart, epitomised by Edgar Allan Poe, delves into the labyrinthine recesses of the human psyche and the spectral unknown. The inquiry is enriched by the theoretical frameworks of Raymond Williams, who conceptualises temporality as a socio-cultural construct within the British milieu, and Frederick Jackson Turner, whose Frontier Thesis delineates a uniquely American temporal and spatial consciousness. Studying these differences is indispensable for understanding contemporary literature, for within them lies the cutting blade that scrutinizes the two cultural identities in their most incandescent radiance.