Romanticism

A movement in art and literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in revolt against the Neoclassicism of the previous centuries. It lasted from the 1770s to 1850.

Whereas during much of the 17th and 18th centuries learned allusions, complexity and grandiosity were prized, the new romantic taste favored simplicity and naturalness, and these were thought to flow most clearly and abundantly from the "spontaneous" outpourings of the untutored common people.

The Key Writers The men are known as “The Big Six.”

William Blake

William Wordsworth

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Lord Byron

John Keats

Percy Shelley

Mary Shelley

Elements of Romanticism

Emotion The romantic, especially the gothic, writers evoked all manner of irrational scenes designed to horrify and amaze. Romantic writers generally also prized the more tender sentiments of affection, sorrow, and romantic longing.

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Exoticism Another important aspect of Romanticism is the exotic. Just as Romantics responded to the longing of people for a distant past, so they provided images of distant places. Generally anywhere south of the country where one was residing was considered more relaxed, more colorful, and more sensual.

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Supernatural Fairies, witches, angels--all the fantastic creatures of the Medieval popular imagination came flooding back.

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Medieval Increased focus on tales of knights, castles, etc.

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Religion One of the most complex developments during this period is the transformation of religion into a subject for artistic treatment far removed from traditional religious art. As time passed, sophisticated writers and artists were less and less likely to be conventionally pious, but during the Romantic era many of them were drawn to religious imagery in the same way they were drawn to Arthurian or other ancient traditions in which they no longer believed.

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Individualism A tendency to exalt the individual and his needs and emphasis on the need for a freer and more personal expression

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Nature An increasing interest in nature and in the natural, primitive, and uncivilized way of life The Romantics, just as they cultivated sensitivity to emotion generally, especially cultivated sensitivity to nature.

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Imagination An increasing importance attached to natural genius and the power of the imagination.

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Other Characteristics Fascination with the past Freedom from rules Solitary life rather than life in society Beliefs that imagination is superior to reason Devotion to beauty

Literary Terms

metaphor A figure of speech that expresses an idea through the image of another object. Metaphors suggest the essence of the first object by identifying it with certain qualities of the second object.

For Example… An example is "But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?/ It is the east, and Juliet is the sun" in William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.

simile A comparison, usually using "like" or "as", of two essentially dissimilar things

For Example… "He sounded like a broken record."

onomatopoeia The formation and use of words that suggest, by their sounds, the object or idea being named or the imitation of natural sounds by words such as “bang” or “buzz.” It is a figure of speech and is especially useful for rhetorical effect.

For Example… The following lines end Dylan Thomas' "Fern Hill:" Out of the whinnying green stable On to the fields of praise.

allusion A reference in a literary work to a person, place, or thing in history or another work of literature. Allusions are often indirect or brief references to well-known characters or events.

For Example… “I doubt if Phaethon feared more - that time he dropped the sun-reins of his father's chariot and burned the streak of sky we see today - or if poor Icarus did - feeling his sides unfeathering as the wax began to melt, his father shouting:  "Wrong, your course is wrong" (Canto XVII: 106-111).

personification A figure of speech that gives human qualities to abstract ideas, animals, and inanimate objects.

For Example… Hey diddle, Diddle, The cat and the fiddle, The cow jumped over the moon; The little dog laughed To see such sport, And the dish ran away with the spoon.

alliteration A pattern of sound that includes the repetition of consonant sounds.  The repetition can be located at the beginning of successive words or inside the words.

For Example… For instance, in the Inferno, Dante states: "I saw it there, but I saw nothing in it, except the rising of the boiling bubbles" (261).

consonance The repetition of consonant sounds with differing vowel sounds in words near each other in a line or lines of poetry.

For Example… Land’s End

assonance The repetition of vowel sounds in a literary work, especially in a poem.

For Example… Edgar Allan Poe's "The Bells" contains numerous examples. Consider these from stanza 2: “Hear the mellow wedding bells// and From the molten-golden notes, The repetition of the short e and long o sounds

figurative language Writing that is not literal.

For Example… An author may compare a person to an animal: "He ran like a hare down the street" is the figurative way to describe the man running, and "He ran very quickly down the street" is the literal way to describe him.

imagery A word or group of words in a literary work which appeal to one or more of the senses: sight, taste, touch, hearing, and smell. The use of images serves to intensify the impact of the work.

For Example… The following example of imagery in T. S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table.

oxymoron A figure of speech in which two contradictory words or phrases are combined to produce a rhetorical effect by means of a concise paradox.

For Example… Romeo in Act 1, scene 1 of Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet:" Why then, O brawling love! O loving hate! O heavy lightness, serious vanity; Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms! Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!

lyric A lyric is a song-like poem written mainly to express the feelings of emotions or thought from a particular person.

For Example… Emily Dickinson's "I Heard a Fly Buzz-When I Died" is a lyric poem wherein the speaker, on a deathbed expecting death to appear in all its grandeur, encounters a common housefly instead.

symbol Something that suggests or stands for something else without losing its original identity. In literature, symbols combine their literal meaning with the suggestion of an abstract concept. Literary symbols are of two types: those that carry complex associations of meaning no matter what their contexts, and those that derive their suggestive meaning from their functions in specific literary works.

For Example… In Willaim Blake's "The Lamb," the speaker tells the lamb that the force that made him or her is also called a lamb: Little lamb, who made thee? Little lamb, who made thee? Little lamb, I'll tell thee, Little lamb, I'll tell thee! He is called by thy name, For he calls himself a lamb; The symbol of the lamb in the above lines corresponds to the symbolism of the lamb in Christianity wherein Christ is referred to as The Lamb of God.

Byronic hero A kind of hero found in several of the works of Lord Byron. Like Byron himself, a Byronic hero is a melancholy and rebellious young man, distressed by a terrible wrong he committed in the past.

For Example… The character of Lestat from Interview with the Vampire.

ode Name given to an extended lyric poem characterized by exalted emotion and dignified style. An ode usually concerns a single, serious theme. Most odes, but not all, are addressed to an object or individual.

ballad a relatively short narrative poem, written to be sung, with a simple and dramatic action. The ballads tell of love, death, the supernatural, or a combination of these

For Example… “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

frame narrative A story within a story, within sometimes yet another story

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pastoral a literary composition on a rural theme characters and language of a courtly nature are often placed in a simple setting

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