1. Romanticism in English Culture and Literature
By Anna Lazzari

2. Main points From the Augustan Age to Romanticism Historical framework
The three moments
Main writers
Images

3. 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

4. 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

5. Augustan Age vs Romanticism
Stourhead, Wiltshire
Temple of Apollo
Castle Howard, Yorkshire

6. 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.

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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

10. Historical Framework The Age of Revolutions
: 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
: Napoleonic Wars

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

14. Pre-Romantics
William Blake (1757 – 1827): poet, painter, and printmaker
1784
1793

15. 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.

16. 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

17. First generation – The Lake poets
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834)
Rime of the Ancient Mariner (in LB)
Kubla Khan
1817 – Biographia Literaria

18. «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 ...”

19. Second generation - Politics
George Gordon Byron (1788 – 1824)
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822)
John Keats (1795 – 1821)

20. Images
William Turner (1775 – 1851)
Fishermen at Sea, 1796

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

22. 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

23. Images
Blake, The Lovers' Whirlwind,

24. Images
Blake, Oberon and Titania, 1786 ca

25. Images
Blake, Newton, 1795

26. Images
Blake, The Ghost of a Flea,

27. Summary From the Augustan Age to Romanticism Historical framework
The three moments
Main writers
Images