the novel. When it first appeared, Moby Dick was described as a `wild and mad novel', but it was quickly recognised as an important development in the novel genre. The metaphysical and symbolic style, the juxtaposition of tones and the innovative narrative technique make it a rich and a complex work which encompasses many themes, including the battle between man and nature, the conflict between good and evil and man's quest to live in a largely hostile world. The emergence of the Transcendentalist movement in New England in the middle years of the century marked a significant break from the Puritan tradition. Influenced by English Romanticism and German and Eastern philosophies, the Transcendentalist exalted feeling and intuition over reason. They rebelled against the materialism of contemporary society and rejected the established Church. Unlike the Puritans, they believed that man was fundamentally good and should be allowed to develop free from rules and restrictions
peopled by "noble savages", similar to the philosophical theory of Rousseau, exemplified by Uncas, from The Last of the Mohicans. There are picturesque "local color" elements in Washington Irving's essays and especially his travel books. Edgar Allan Poe's tales of the macabre and his balladic poetry were more influential in France than at home, but the romantic American novel developed fully with the atmosphere and melodrama of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850). Later Transcendentalist writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson still show elements of its influence and imagination, as does the romantic realism of Walt Whitman. The poetry of Emily Dickinson--nearly unread in her own time--and Herman Melville's novel MobyDick can be taken as epitomes of American Romantic literature. By the 1880s, however, psychological and social realism was competing with romanticism in the novel.
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