Romanticism in English Culture and Literature By Anna Lazzari

Romanticismin

English Culture and Literature

By Anna Lazzari

Main points

• From the Augustan Age to Romanticism

• Historical framework

• The three moments

– Main writers

• Images

Augustan Age vs Romanticism

• Influence of classicism

• Importance of reason and order

• Control of emotion and imagination

• Rational thinking and argumentation

• Society placed before the individual

• Re-discovery of the Middle Ages

• Importance of feelings and intuition

• Free imagination• Importance of

individualism• Interest in humble

and everyday life

Augustan Age vs Romanticism

• Art seen as the aesthetic expression of social order

• Interest in real life• Rise of journalism• Rise of the novel• Satire • Use of sophisticated

and artificial language in poetry

• Art seen as the expression of the soul and celebration of the freedom of nature and individual experience

• Use of everyday language

• Observation of nature and everyday situations

Augustan Age vs Romanticism

Castle Howard, Yorkshire1699-1712

Stourhead, WiltshireTemple of Apollo

1741-1780

Romanticism - Keywords

Romantic: "literature depicting emotional matter in an imaginative form." (German poet Friedrich Schlegel)

Sublime: natural beauty that was not neat and well-ordered like a garden but complex, uncontrollable and impressive, leading to feelings of awe. (E. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757)

Beauty: changes the viewer, brings the viewer in touch with God or some greater truth. Experiencing nature creates awe for God's creation.

Historical Framework

18th Century Britain – Enormous changes

•From a farming country to an industrial one

•People from the countryside to towns and cities

•Around 1759: great increase in population

•Higher demand for food, clothes and work

•Worsening in the quality of life of the poor

Historical Framework Industrial revolution

•1712: Thomas Newcomen builds the first

steam engine to pump water out of mines

•1733: The flying shuttle for looms

•1764: James Hargreaves invented the

spinning jenny (a type of loom)

• 1775: James Watt patented a more powerful steam engine

Historical Framework

Improvements of transport •New waterways and roads built

New tools and machines

•1785: The automatic flour mill invented by Oliver Evans

•1786: The threshing machine invented by Andrew Meikle

•1811: Luddites riots

Historical Framework

The Age of Revolutions

•1775-1783: American Independence War•1776: American Declaration of Independence•1789: French Revolution•1793: Britain at war against Revolutionary France•1796 on: Ascent of Napoleon to the power•1800-1815: Napoleonic Wars

The three moments

• Pre-Romantics– Thomas Gray and William Blake

• First generation of Romantic poets– The Lake poets: Wordsworth, Coleridge and

Southey

• Second generation of Romantic poets– Byron, Shelley and Keats

Pre-Romantics

Thomas Gray (1716 – 1771): poet, letter-writer, classical scholar and professor at Cambridge University

•1751: Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

– Meditation upon death and remembrance after death

Pre-Romantics

Famous quotes from the Elegy

•"The Paths of Glory"

•"Celestial fire"

•"Some mute inglorious Milton"

•"Far from the Madding Crowd"

•"The unlettered muse"

•"Kindred spirit"

Film by Stanley KubrickFilm by Stanley Kubrick

Novel by Thomas HardyNovel by Thomas Hardy

Pre-Romantics

William Blake (1757 – 1827): poet, painter, and printmaker

1784

1790-93

1793

Romanticism: Manifesto«Preface» to Lyrical Ballads, 1800

The principal object… which I proposed to myself in these Poems was to chose incidents and

situations from common life, and to relate or describe them… in a selection of language really

used by men; and, at the same time, to throw over them a certain colouring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual way…; …Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in

tranquillity.

First generation – The Lake poets

William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850)

•1788 – Lyrical Ballads

•1807 – Poems (in two books)

•1810 – Guide to the Lakes

•1850 – The Prelude

First generation – The Lake poets

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834)

•1798 - Rime of the Ancient Mariner (in LB)

•1816 - Kubla Khan

•1817 – Biographia Literaria

«Willing suspension of disbelief»”... It was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth on the other hand was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind's attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us ...”

Second generation - Politics

• George Gordon Byron (1788 – 1824)

• Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822)

• John Keats (1795 – 1821)

Images

William Turner (1775 – 1851)

Fishermen at Sea, 1796

Images

Caspar David Friedrich (1774 – 1840)

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog1818

Cloister Graveyard in the Snow1817-19

Images

John Constable (1776 – 1837)

Boat-building near Flatford Mill 1815

Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Garden

1825

Images

Blake, The Lovers' Whirlwind, 1824-27

Images

Blake, Oberon and Titania, 1786 ca

Images

Blake, Newton, 1795

Images

Blake, The Ghost of a Flea, 1819-20

Summary

• From the Augustan Age to Romanticism

• Historical framework

• The three moments

– Main writers

• Images