1. Chapter 28
The Romantic Hero

3. Romanticism Nature Emotion: sentimentality // nostalgia // melancholy
Imagination: exotic // ecstatic // fantastic // gothic

4. Romanticism
The sublime
Subjectivity
Spontaneity
Mysticism

5. “While Enlightenment writers studied the social animal, the romantics explored the depths of their own souls.”
(Fiero 705)

6. (Rousseau, Confessions;
“I am made unlike anyone I have ever met: I will even venture to say that I am like no one in the whole world. I may be no better, but at least I am different.”
(Rousseau, Confessions;
quoted in Fiero 706)

7. Nationalism

8. Nationalism =
“an ideology (or belief system) grounded in a people’s sense of cultural and political unity” (Fiero 705)

9. Nationalism ↔ Liberalism
After the first French Revolution (1789)
nationalism
= political change
= freedom

10. Nationalism ↔ Conservativism
An appreciation/veneration of the past
Demanding the sacrifice of individual’s freedom for the common good

11. National Identity Nation = narration = an imagined community
= a system of cultural
signification (Homi Bhabha)

12. National Identity Creation of national institutions
Participation of national rituals (holidays, festivals)
Identifying with a national community
National imagery: heroes

13. Nationalism & Romanticism
Romantic writers insisted on the uniqueness of cultures by idealizing history and community.
Germany:
the Volk (the common people)
Volksgeist (the spirit of the people)

15. Nationalism & Romanticism
The state was itself a natural historic organism. Future rested on understanding a nation’s past.

16. Extreme nationalism German racial nationalists
“Like their Nazi successors, Volkish thinkers claimed that the German race was purer than, and therefore superior to, all other races. (453)
--Taken from W.C. by Marvin Perry

17. The Romantic Hero

18. The Romantic Hero
Gifted with intellect and imagination, the hero is at odds with the “common herd” of mankind.
The hero’s desires are insatiable; his is a will not satisfied with ordinary things.
The Promethean hero: an over-reacher who unsettles traditional moral categories.

19. Types of the Romantic Hero
The Faustian hero: Goethe’s unique treatment of the Faust myth (the fact that he never finds satisfaction on earth is what ultimately redeems him) ; Victor Frankenstein
The abolitionist: see Frederick Douglass’ defense of stealing from his slave-masters: “The morality of free society can have no application to slave society”.
The Byronic hero: aristocratic, darkly handsome, manly, brooding, brilliant, erotic, melancholy, indomitable.
The Gothic villain-hero

20. Napoleon Bonaparte
An example of the Romantic hero and its contradictions:
a Corsican peasant who crowns himself emperor
a champion of the “revolutionary ideals of liberty, fraternity, and equality” (Fiero 30) who yet went on to wage an imperial war against nations of Europe

21. Napoleon Bonaparte
a brilliant military tactician who over-reached himself in the Russian campaign (lost 500, 000 men!)
an individual with petty habits and towering egotism

22. Jacques-Louis David, Napoleon Crossing the Great Saint Bernard Pass, 1800

23. Ingres, Napoleon on his Imperial Throne 1806

24. Jacques-Louis David. Consecration of the Emperor Napoleon I and Coronation of the Empress Josephine on 2 December

25. Jean-Léon Gérôme, Napoleon and His General Staff in Egypt, 1867

26. Antoine-Jean Gros, Napoleon Bonaparte Visiting the Plague-stricken at Jaffa, 1799

27. Food for Thought
What makes Napoleon a Romantic hero?

28. The Promethean Hero Shelley, Prometheus Unbound
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus

32. The Gothic Novel Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto
Features
Anti-rationalism (horror & the supernatural)
A revived interest in the medieval past

33. Food for Thought
Who is the modern Prometheus in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein?

34. The Byronic Hero Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1813-1814)
Don Juan ( )

37. The Byronic Hero A rebel Isolated from society
Moody by nature or passionate about a particular issue
Arrogant, confident, abnormally sensitive and extremely conscious of himself
Rejects the values and moral codes of society

38. The Byronic Hero
Characterized by a guilty memory of some unknown sexual sin.
A figure of repulsion as well as fascination

39. Goethe’s Faust

46. paradox and problems the conflicted political background and legacy
what does this mean for women?
scrutinizing romantic mythmaking:  the noble savage and the mythology of imperialism.
the tricky morality:  an ethics based on the imagination, emotions?