1. Chapter Seventeen The Romantic Era
Edgar Allen Poe, American Romantic Author

2. This is as romantic as romantic gets.
Caspar David Friedrich’s “Mountianeer in a Misty Landscape”

3. This is as romantic as romantic gets.
Man alone, finding himself in the awesome world of nature
Caspar David Friedrich’s “Mountianeer in a Misty Landscape”

4. Industrial Development, Social Progress, Scientific Progress
First era of Feminism and Workers’ Rights (Trade Unions, Socialism)
Industrial Revolution: industry overtakes agriculture as source of national wealth
Urbanization:More people living in cities than country for first time in human history
Steam power, railroads, factories
“a wilderness of human beings”
Scientific Discoveries
Louis Pasteur ( ) discovers source of disease in germs; proposes vaccination
Charles Robert Darwin ( )
Theory of evolution, natural selection
“Social Darwinism”

5. The Concerns of Romanticism
Exploration of oppositions and relations between things
Expression of personal feelings
Emotionality, subjectivity (in place of intellectual concerns of Enlightenment era)
Individual creative imagination (sometimes led to sense of artist’s alienation from society)
Mystical attachment to nature, the wild, the unpredictable, and the unexplored
Love of the fantastic and exotic
Attempt to “re-humanize” urbanization, science, and the industrial revolution
Often very politicized

6. The Idealist Intellectual Background
Immanuel Kant ( )
Transcendental idealism
Critique of Judgment (1790)
Art reconciles opposites; unites general with particular, reason with intellect
Friedrich Hegel ( )
Applies Aristotelian dialectic to working of material world itself: synthesis of thesis (pure infinite being), antithesis (world of nature)
“World Spirit” the result of world’s synthesis of its own differences

7. The Intellectual Background: Thinking in Terms of Interrelations
Karl Marx ( )
Universal proletariat, revolution
Progressive, materialist, dialectical sense of history; developed by ‘standing Hegel on his head’
Artistic realism: social and political
Pro-worker
Charles Darwin ( )
Natural selection, dialectic of species and environment
On the Origin of Species

8. Nineteenth-Century Literature: British Romantic Poetry
William Wordsworth ( )
Founded Romantic movement
“Emotion recollected in tranquility”
Lord Byron ( )
Tormented Romantic hero, Byronic
Personal liberty, freedom

9. Nineteenth-Century Literature: Romantic Poetry
Percy Bysshe Shelley ( )
Atheism, anarchy
Perfectability of humanity
Unification of extreme emotions
John Keats ( )
Tragedy of existence, peace of death

10. The Romantic Era in America: American Literature
European influences+individuality
Transcendentalists
Unity of humans with nature
Emerson, Thoreau
Walt Whitman ( )
Importance of the individual, freedom
Humanity united with the universe

11. The Romantic Era in America: American Literature
Edgar Allan Poe invents the short story form
Emily Dickinson ( )
Balance of passion, reason
Psychology, faith, skepticism
Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter (1850)
Evil in society
Melville’s Moby Dick (1851)
Profound moral issues
Search for truth, self-discovery

12. Romantic Art: Painting at the Turn of the Century
Francisco Goya, romantic extraordinaire ( )
The Third of May, 1808
Execution of the Madrileños
No idealization
Persuasive emotionality
Personal commitment, vision

14. Goya’s “Saturn Devouring One of His Sons”

15. Romantic Art: Painting in France
Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1818)
Romantic art of Delacroix ( )
Use of color to create form
Violent, emotional scenes
The Death of Sardanapalus (1826)

18. Romantic Art: Realist Painting in France
Another art movement of this time that didn’t attempt to romanticize the world but to represent how it really is. However, those realistic representations are also very individualistic statements.
French Realists
Honoré Daumier ( )

19. Daumier’s realist “Third Class”

20. Daumier’s “The Legislative Belly.” What reality is this commenting on?

21. Romantic Art: Painting in Germany and England
Landscape as Romantic device
Friedrich’s Sea of Ice (1810)
Constable’s Hay Wain (1821)
Turner’s Slave Ship (1840)

22. Friedrich’s “Sea of Ice.” How is this romantic?

23. Constable’s Hay Wain (1821)

25. The Romantic Era in America: American Painting
Significance of landscape painting
Natural beauty=moral beauty
Hudson River School (Thomas Cole), Luminists (Martin Johnson Heade)
Winslow Homer ( )
Realism, naturalism, drama
Thomas Eakins ( )
Scientific accuracy, objective truth

26. American romantic painters such as Thomas Cole in his “Landscape with Figures” celebrated the virgin land of the young nation. How is this a romantic landscape? (do you see the figures?)

27. Another work of Thomas Cole. What is he saying about America?

28. Heade uses oils to remove all trace of brushstroke from his painting of Lake George in New York. The result is luminous and almost photographic.

29. Winslow Homer’s “Gulf Stream,” a very powerful American romantic vision. What does this seemingly terrifying image represent?

30. Eakins’ Miss Van Buren (1889)
The angle of the subject’s head and the position of the chair make us approach the subject as a person.
We wonder: what is she thinking? Looking at?

31. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Pit and the Pendulum.”
American Romanticism. What is romantic about this?