1. Romanticism

2. A literary and philosophical theory which tends to see the individual at the very center of all life and all experience. Began in 18 th century, but flourished in early years of 19 th century in England with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and later with American romantics such as Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Poe, and Melville

3. Characteristics of Romanticism Highly values imagination over reason, formal rules, or sense of fact/actual “Liberalism in literature” – freeing the artist from the restraints and rules of the classicists and suggesting individualism, revolutionary political ideas

4. Two Types of Romantics Transcendentalists – believed that we all have God within and all around us in nature; very optimistic belief that all human beings have the potential to achieve perfection Dark Romantics – disagree with transcendentalists; believed in Original Sin; focused on the darker aspects of mankind: effects of sin, guilt, revenge, etc.

5. Transcendentalists

6. Dark Romantics: Edgar Allan Poe & Nathaniel Hawthorne

7. Characteristics of Romanticism

8. Nature is associated with truth and God (pantheistic) – Love of Nature!

11. Enthusiasm for wild, irregular, grotesque

12. Sympathetic Interest in the Past

13. Mysticism (the Occult)

14. Emotional psychology in fiction

15. Strangeness rather than order in beauty

17. A psychological desire to escape from unpleasant realities

19. Idealization of rural life

20. Primitivism – Enthusiasm for uncivilized or natural

21. Bolder figures

22. Individualism & Interest in Human Rights

23. Sympathy with animal life

24. Use of experimental verse forms in poetry

25. Fresher language

26. Sentimental melancholy