 Natural rights of man  Superiority of nature (over technology, industrialization, and urbanization)  Importance of imagination & spontaneity (over intellect & mechanization)

Rational thinking of the Enlightenment Era culminated in the fall of the French monarchy (execution of Louis XVI) in 1789.

Napoleon Bonaparte was crowned emperor in 1804 and defeated at Waterloo in (The revolutionary becomes the new despot.)

 The events in France led some to question the legitimacy of monarchical rule in England.  One influential text in this regard was William Godwin’s Inquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), which predicted the inevitable evolution of society toward equal distribution of property and absence of government.

The “Natural Rights of Man” idea also combined with the Industrial Revolution to threaten monarchical rule during the period in that it (the Industrial Revolution) created an ever-wealthier middle class that did not have a traditional aristocratic background.

This new social class had made its wealth through manufacturing rather than agriculture and started to demand a power in government proportionate to their wealth.

Industrialization had started in Europe in the mid- 18 th century and was aggressively propelled forward when James Watt perfected the steam engine in 1765.

 The steam engine allowed steam power to replace wind and water as the primary source of power in one industry after another.  In England, textile production was the main industry.

 In addition to the creation of new wealth, industrialization also caused  Rapid growth of cities  Increased privatization of land (in order to make farming and animal husbandry more efficient since food production had to keep pace with population growth)  The creation of a completely landless underclass in which people were in some ways worse off than they had been when they had access to land that they could cultivate for basic sustenance

 The government maintained a “laissez-faire” policy concerning these developments; it did nothing to regulate the new industries.  The end result was that the great majority of the laboring class suffered from inadequate wages, long work hours under harsh discipline in filthy conditions, and the large-scale employment of women and children for tasks that destroyed physical and mental health.

 The poets and writers whose names are now synonymous with the Romantic Period generally supported the spirit of revolution  Viewed technology, industrialization, and urbanization in a negative light.  These artists thought “truth” and “inspiration” were to be found in nature, not in cities.  They also delved deeply into the nature of the imagination and wrote poetry that was more about emotion than about “rules.”  Some also experimented with drugs like opium.

 During this era, the lyric poem was developed to a high degree.  A lyric poem is the kind most recognizably modern; it is a poem told from the viewpoint of one speaker, about his or her personal experience or emotion, and doesn’t have to follow a specific rhyme or meter.  Images of the natural world were also prominent in Romantic poetry as a revolt against the worldviews of scientific philosophers who represented the ultimate reality as a mechanical world consisting of physical particles in motion.

 During the Romantic Period, a new literary form emerged, the Gothic Novel.  Named after the setting most frequently used: a gloomy (Gothic) castle  Revolved around mystery and terror  Featured craggy, mist-shrouded, and generally forbidding landscapes  Featured ghosts and other supernatural phenomena  Featured the sexual persecution of a maiden by a craven and undesirable suitor  A precursor to the “psychological novel” in which the terrors of the subconscious mind drive suspense

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