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Chapter 28
The Romantic Hero
Romanticism• Nature
• Emotion: sentimentality // nostalgia // melancholy
• Imagination: exotic // ecstatic // fantastic // gothic
Romanticism• The sublime
• Subjectivity
• Spontaneity
• Mysticism
• “While Enlightenment writers studied the social animal, the romantics explored the depths of their own souls.”
(Fiero 705)
• “I am made unlike anyone I have ever met: I will even venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world. I may be no better, but at least I am different.”
(Rousseau, Confessions;
quoted in Fiero 706)
•Nationalism
Nationalism =• “an ideology (or belief syste
m) grounded in a people’s sense of cultural and political unity” (Fiero 705)
Nationalism ↔ Liberalism• After the first French Revolution
(1789)
nationalism = political change= freedom
Nationalism ↔ Conservativism
• An appreciation/veneration of the past
• Demanding the sacrifice of individual’s freedom for the common good
National Identity• Nation
= narration
= an imagined community
= a system of cultural
signification (Homi Bhabha)
National Identity• Creation of national institutions
• Participation of national rituals (holidays, festivals)
• Identifying with a national community
• National imagery: heroes
Nationalism & Romanticism
• Romantic writers insisted on the uniqueness of cultures by idealizing history and community.
• Germany: the Volk (the common people) Volksgeist (the spirit of the peopl
e)
Nationalism & Romanticism
• The state was itself a natural historic organism. Future rested on understanding a nation’s past.
Extreme nationalism• German racial nationalists
• “Like their Nazi successors, Volkish thinkers claimed that the German race was purer than, and therefore superior to, all other races. (453)
--Taken from W.C. by Marvin Perry
•The Romantic Hero
The Romantic Hero• Gifted with intellect and imagination, the he
ro is at odds with the “common herd” of mankind.
• The hero’s desires are insatiable; his is a will not satisfied with ordinary things.
• The Promethean hero: an over-reacher who unsettles traditional moral categories.
Types of the Romantic Hero• The Faustian hero: Goethe’s unique treatment of t
he Faust myth (the fact that he never finds satisfaction on earth is what ultimately redeems him) ; Victor Frankenstein
• The abolitionist: see Frederick Douglass’ defense of stealing from his slave-masters: “The morality of free society can have no application to slave society”.
• The Byronic hero: aristocratic, darkly handsome, manly, brooding, brilliant, erotic, melancholy, indomitable.
• The Gothic villain-hero• http://www.georgiasouthern.edu/~dougt/hero.htm
Napoleon Bonaparte• An example of the Romantic hero an
d its contradictions: – a Corsican peasant who crowns himself emp
eror– a champion of the “revolutionary ideals of li
berty, fraternity, and equality” (Fiero 30) who yet went on to wage an imperial war against nations of Europe
Napoleon Bonaparte
– a brilliant military tactician who over-reached himself in the Russian campaign (lost 500, 000 men!)
– an individual with petty habits and towering egotism
• http://www.georgiasouthern.edu/~dougt/hero.htm
Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon Crossing the Great Saint Bernard Pass, 1800
Ingres, Napoleon on his Imperial Throne 1806
Jacques-Louis David. Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon I and Coron
ation of the Empress Josephine on 2 December 1804. 1808.
Jean-Léon Gérôme, Napoleon and His General Staff in Egypt, 1867
Antoine-Jean Gros, Napoleon Bonaparte Visiting the Plague-stricken at Jaffa, 1799
Food for Thought
• What makes Napoleon a Romantic hero?
The Promethean Hero• Shelley, Prometheus Unbound
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus
The Gothic Novel• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto
• Features
Anti-rationalism (horror & the supernatural)
A revived interest in the medieval past
Food for Thought
• Who is the modern Prometheus in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein?
The Byronic Hero• Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
(1813-1814)
• Don Juan (1819-1824)
The Byronic Hero• A rebel• Isolated from society• Moody by nature or passionate about a
particular issue • Arrogant, confident, abnormally sensitive
and extremely conscious of himself• Rejects the values and moral codes of
society
The Byronic Hero
• Characterized by a guilty memory of some unknown sexual sin.
• A figure of repulsion as well as fascination
• http://www.umd.umich.edu/casl/hum/eng/classes/434/charweb/CHARACTE.htm
•Goethe’s Faust
paradox and problems• the conflicted political background and legacy • what does this mean for women? • scrutinizing romantic mythmaking: the noble sava
ge and the mythology of imperialism. • the tricky morality: an ethics based on the imagin
ation, emotions?
• http://www.georgiasouthern.edu/~dougt/rom.htm
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