Transcript The Romantic Period

The Romantic Period
1. Historical and Intellectual Background
2. General Features of Romanticism
3. A list of Romanists
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Historical and Intellectual Background
• the Romantic Movement
• philosophers and thinkers
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the Romantic Movement
1. The Industrial
Revolution
• a country of pleasant
farm lands and cottage
workers to an industrial
giant.
• The farm workers were
leaving the small farms.
• Machine-made goods
were replacing the
manual work of the
peasants .
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the Romantic Movement
2. American Revolution in 1775
•
individual rights and the principle of self-determination
•
the desire of man for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of
happiness”
•
the right of the individual to have a voice in the process
of government
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the Romantic Movement
3. The publication of
William Blake's Poetical
Sketches
4. The French Revolution
Its battle cry of “liberty,
equality, fraternity” was heard
all across Europe, announcing
the end of an absolute
monarchy
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the Romantic Movement
5. Lyrical Ballads
The publication of the second edition of
Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and
Coleridge, the Preface to which by
Wordsworth serves as the manifesto of
Romanticism.
6. Sir Walter Scott's collection of ballads
entitled Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border,
1802.
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the Romantic Movement
7. The passage of the Reform
Bill of 1832 in England, which
gave voting powers to
members of the lower
middle-class who had not
before this enjoyed these
rights.
8. The accession of Queen
Victoria in 1837.
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philosophers and thinkers who were worth
mentioning
1. Jean Jacques Rousseau
• the father of Romanticism
• He published The New
Heloise in 1761 and Emile
in 1762.
• These two works stressed
the basic goodness and
benevolence
of
man's
nature.
The
artificial
elements in society were to
be rejected in favor of the
goodness of nature and
the intuitive prompting of
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the
heart.
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philosophers and thinkers who were worth
mentioning
2. Edmund Burke
He links the sublime and
the beautiful to human
emotions
and
physical
senses
as
well
as
imagination, thus elevating
the function of instincts and
emotions in his earlier work
A Philosophical Enquiry into
Origin of Our Ideas of the
Sublime and the Beautiful
(1756).
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philosophers and thinkers who were worth
mentioning
3. Thomas Paine
The Rights of Man
a. It is the right of the people
to overthrow a government
that opposes humanity.
b. Opposition to
neoclassicist's thinking of
binding oneself to
traditions and conventions
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General Features of Romanticism
1. An emphasis on subjectivism
romantic poets
• the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings
•
the uniqueness of his response to the world
•
looking inward and examine the peculiarity, the particularity, of their own
private emotional history
• a religion of the heart
• Romantic stove for heroic madness
neoclassicists
• believing in an intelligible world and emphasizing reason
• Man possesses faculties, notably a mind, that enables him to make some
kind of sense of the universe and that what is dark and obscure is
probably not worth man's attention .
• a religion of the head
• Neoclassical writers strove for common sense
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General Features of Romanticism
2. A love for nature
Romantic poets are practically all worshipers
of nature.
They either find some consolation for their lonely
soul in nature, taking nature as a living entity that
shares the poets' feelings, or read in nature some
mysterious force which gives them special
inspiration, or even regard nature as the revelation
of God.
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General Features of Romanticism
•
Natural scene has become a primary poetic
subject.
•
Romantic “nature poems” are in fact
meditative poems, in which the presented scene
usually serves to raise an emotional problem or
personal crisis whose development and
resolution constitute the organizing principle of
the poem.
•
The view of natural objects corresponds to an
inner or a spiritual world and serves as an
understructure for a tendency to write a
symbolist poetry .
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General Features of Romanticism
3. A belief in individuality and freedom
•
Romantic poets put an immensely higher
estimate on human potentialities and powers.
•
Romantic poets put great emphasis on the
value of individuality and freedom. The aspect of
humanity becomes a glory and a triumph instead
of a sin or an error .
•
The human being refuses to submit to any
limitations and persists in setting infinite goals.
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General Features of Romanticism
•
Romantic poets sing high the effort to keep
one's own individuality as a man and peculiarity
and originality as an artist.
•
They also express their fervent love for
individual freedom as well as national liberation
and their determination to fight against any chain
set on human nature.
•
The immediate act of composition should be
spontaneous, that is, arising from impulse, and
free from all rules and artful manipulation of
means to foreseen ends.
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General Features of Romanticism
4. The glorification of the commonplace
• to choose incidents and situations from
common life
• selection of language really spoken by men
• the prime service of their poetry to awaken
in the reader “freshness of sensation” in the
presentation of “familiar objects
• a revival of folk literature, a real awakening of
interest in the life of the common people
• their appreciation for the simple but happy life of
the common people, or show their deep sympathy
for the sufferings of the lower classes, or even find
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General Features of Romanticism
5. An interest in the past, the unusual, the
unfamiliar, the bizarre or the picturesque
6. A feeling of loneliness
The theme of exile, loneliness and a longing
for the infinite, for an indefinable and
inaccessible goal is commonly found in the
poems of the romanticists.
This may be partly because of their overemphasizing the individuality, but the main
reason for this lies in their great dissatisfaction
with the stark reality which a single individual
can not do much to cope with.
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General Features of Romanticism
• a revolt against authority and tradition.
• dissatisfaction with the social reality and
their deep hatred for any political tyranny,
economic exploitation and any form of
oppression, feudal or bourgeois. In the
realm of literature, they revolt against
reason, rules, regulation, objectivity,
common senses, etc.
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General Features of Romanticism
• Jane Austen lived mainly in the romantic
period, but her writings belong to the
realistic category for she weaves vivid
pictures of the everyday life of simple
country society around the seemingly
romantic love stories.
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A list of Romanists
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
William Blake
Robert Burns
William Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor
, George Gordon Byron
Percy Bysshe Shelley
John Keats
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A list of Romanists
• Charles Lamb
• Walter Scott
• Jane Austen
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