Romanticism in 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 Stourhead, Wiltshire Temple of Apollo 1741-1780 Castle Howard, Yorkshire 1699-1712

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 tools and machines 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 First generation of Romantic poets 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 Kubrick Novel by Thomas Hardy

Pre-Romantics William Blake (1757 – 1827): poet, painter, and printmaker 1790-93 1784 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

Cloister Graveyard in the Snow Wanderer above the Sea of Fog Images Caspar David Friedrich (1774 – 1840) Cloister Graveyard in the Snow 1817-19 Wanderer above the Sea of Fog 1818

Boat-building near Flatford Mill Salisbury Cathedral from 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