1. The Romantic Movement (1785-1832)

2. Stuff Happening:
1783: Treaty of Paris ends American Revolution
1788: Great Britain begins sending convicts to Australia, rather than America
1789: Storming of the Bastille!
1791: Mozart dies in Vienna
1799: Napoleon.
1800: World Population about one billion
1801: United Kingdom formed
1802: Slave rebellion in Haiti
1803: Louisiana Purchase, Morphine derived from opium
1807: UK outlaws slave trade across Atlantic
1811: King George III is declared insane – Regency Period
1815: Napoleon defeated at Waterloo
1829: Scotch Tape invented
1830: First railway station in US opens, lawn mower and sewing machine invented

3. Terms Explained
romance: the actions and feelings of people who are in love, especially behavior which is very caring or affectionate.
Romance: episodic narratives concerned with the exploits of knights, chivalry, and courtly love (generally Medieval)
Romanticism: a literary style and philosophy focused on subjective experience, nature, imagination, and the individual (late 1700s)

4. The Romantic Creed
“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”
William Wordsworth, The Preface to Lyrical Ballads

5. Tenets of Romanticism Nature is beautiful, powerful, untamable
Humanity must look to Nature to understand itself
Emotions are important
Poetry should be about common people!
Written in common language, accessible
Common people are closer to nature, less artificial

6. Romanticism is Reactionary!
Pre-Romanticism
Industrialization and Urbanization
Enlightenment: Reason over Emotion
Enlightenment: All about the over-educated
American and French Revolutions
Romanticism
Industry is artificial, Nature is Real
Emotion over Reason!
The common people are Real, should have voice
The commoners do have power!

12. Pre-Romantics Pre-Romantic Poetry: Romantic tendencies
Emotional explorations
Nature is powerful and untamed
Neoclassic influences
Imitating traditional literary forms
Thomas Gray
Robert Burns
William Blake

13. Romantics! First Generation Second Generation William Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
About twenty years younger
Lord Byron
Percy Bysshe Shelley
John Keats

14. There’s Prose too!
Gothic Novels: so Romantic--suspense, mystery, magic, the macabre, untamed nature, and Medieval settings
Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley
Novel of Manners: satirical look at society
Jane Austen.
Historical Romance Novels: set in a period before the life of their author (often medieval), with fictional and nonfictional characters
Sir Walter Scott