mgr Katarzyna Bronk

Pre-romanticism/Romanticism

pre-Romanticism mid-XVIII - 1789

Romanticism 1789 - 1815

late Romantic or early Victorian 1815-1830

• history:

• 1756 Seven Years War against Austria, France, Sweden and Russia; (end:1763)

• French Revolution

• America fights for independence

• Napoleon (1797- 1815); Battle of Trafalgar; the Vienna Congress; Waterloo (1815);

• culture and literature (interests, ideas and concepts):

• "Romantic" meaning “in the Romance” or vernacular; denoting focus on imagination, the non-rational, the supernatural; emotional, intuitive,

• fascination with a world beyond reality

• Sentimentalism: a shift of emphasis from reason and materialism towards emotions and sensibility; goodness in humanity and nature; nature as a teacher; perception through the senses; J.J. Rousseau and the "noble savage"

• the wild and the picturesque

• Nature (a hero; as a living organism)

• interest in humanitarian movements and reforms, the rights of man, the freedom of the individual

• women's rights: Mary Wollstonecraft (the mother of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein)Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792)

• preference for the simple life, primitive religions, folk-poetry (use of local lg/dialects)

• interest in the medieval period

• the beautiful and the sublime

• Edmund Burke A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757):

• pleasure and pain represented by the aesthetic concepts of beauty and sublimity

• when the individual is not actually in pain or in danger it may be a pleasurable form of fear (delight by caused by the sublime)

• the sublime causes the strongest emotions ( may produce pain, fear, or terror; may cause admiration, reverence; fear robs the mind of reason, evoking the sublime); causes awe, wonder, dread, fear, and terror

• the sublime may be caused by darkness, solitude, silence; by immensity or infinity; by grandeur

• the sublime qualities reveal beauty include: lightness, mildness, clearness, smoothness, gracefulness;

• the beauty of a work of art may inspire love or admiration;

• development of the historical novel; national histories/identity

• revival or imitation (also translation) of older forms of verse: ballads, sonnets; odes

• children and their perception (childhood; innocence)

• the pastoral / countryside

• interest: in death, mutability, mourning, melancholy

• poets as inspired artists/outcasts

• poetry

• Edward Young (1683-1765): additional info

1742/1745 The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death and Immortality

• mysteries of life and death

• immortality of artists

• The Graveyard School / Poets

• death, solitude, melancholic reflections on mortality

• Thomas Gray “The Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”

• Robert Burns (1759-1796):

• a farmer's son

• Scottish bard

• 1786 Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect

• folk tradition in a dialect (vernacular; everyday speech)

• social interests: poverty; class inequality

“To a mouse”:

• mice and men equal (their strife in life)

• pantheism (the entire universe is divine; a blurring of the distinction between the Creator and the creation)

• feelings emphasized to such an extent that man begins to relate to nature and animals

• the mouse has only the present to worry about

• William Blake (1757-1827)

• engraver (illustrations for the Book of Job); poet;

• scarcely known as an author during his lifetime ("mostly unintelligible"; "incomprehensively wild")

• Emmanuel Swedenborg (XVII/XVIII; communicated with angels); gnosticism, druidism

• the world divided into celestial, spiritual, natural

• poems: mystical allegories

• contrary states of human soul

• childlike Songs of Innocence

• "The true Man is the source, he being the Poetic Genius" (Blake 1991:6)

• God is a Divine Human

Songs of innocence 1789

• the Universal is linked with the individual

• primal innocence and pure perception

• child's perspective

• "The Lamb": Christian symbolism: the child and the Lamb (incarnation; the Passion); translating Christian dogmas into a child's language (nursery rhyme)

• social issues (inexperienced; naive (?) perception):

Songs of experience 1794

• disillusionment; maturity; experience

• “The Tyger”: tiger as the force of nature /God/creativity; destruction; evil is needed for "fearful symmetry"

• social issues: working children; orphans; death and children

• 1^st generation of Romantic poets:

• William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

• belongs to the Lake Poets

• poetic manifesto in The Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1798 in co-op with Coleridge)

1. dealing with the “natural” man

2. showing rustic life (the essential passions of the heart find a better soil)

3. being closer to ordinary men

4. simple lg (conveys feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions)

5. all good poetry is "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" (experienced in solitude; based on emotions)

6. the poet is a teacher (who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than one supposed to be common among mankind)

• ballads:

• traditional: folk ballad; rural community; basis of romantic ballad: escaping reality

• street ballad: crime tales with comic elements; realistic

• “We are seven”:

• a folk ballad

• child's world and perspective (children and the supernatural realm; death)

• maturity vs child's innocence

• gothicism:

• “Gothic”:

1. barbaric/primitive tribes of Goths

2. idealized medievalism (location, time, architectural style)

3. the fantastic, supernatural and the sublime (mixture of pain and admiration which allows the mind to transcend limits; remoteness of danger allowing pleasure)

4. sites: castles, dungeons, graveyards, ruins, monasteries

5. idealized heroines; sinful villains (perversions; lack of restraints)

6. idealized Middle Ages / medievalism / remote past: fascination/awe and loathing

Samuel T. Coleridge

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner - romantic features

1. Romantic Nature (powerful; one of the characters; may punish)

• the albatross as a divine being: the bird is God's messenger (pantheism) and later on is hung upon the neck of mariner in the place of a cross (Christian symbolism): (`Instead of the cross, the Albatross about my neck was hung')

2. Romantic protagonist: the Mariner is an outcast

3. Man(kind) corrupts the unspoiled nature

- nature responds to the act of killing the bird and no longer helps the sailors

- killing of the albatross is the crime

- punishment - man has to humble oneself to the nature; first the mariner has to learn how beautiful is the world of nature, only then he is able to pray and get rid of the bird's corpse

4. the supernatural/gothic elements: permeable barrier between physical and spiritual world

- the phantom ship

- souls of the dead mariners arising from their bodies (life-in-death; death-in-life)

• resurrection of the sailors

• the way in which the Mariner stopped the Wedding-Guest - kind of hypnosis (a spell; paralysis)

5. Medieval literature as the source of inspiration

- stylization on the medieval ballad (stanzas; repeating verses)

- semi-allegorical figures - Death and the Night-mare Life-in-Death

6. Using folk tradition, importance of imagination and dream visions

7. Respect for nature and its admiration as a rescue for the sinner

(Pre-)Romantic Drama

Horace Walpole The Mysterious Mother 1768 (a gothic tragedy)

• inspirations: Eurypides's tragedy Hippolytus; Marguerite de Navarre's L'Heptameron (1558); Racine's Phedre

• scandalous and unpublished till a few years after its creation

• the motif of incest in literature

• the gothic theme: incest (even worse: mother/son incest); unnatural passions and desires; tragic, unstoppable fate (not a planned crime)

• gothic elements: incest; gloomy atmosphere; remote times; a caste; strange events (the fallen cross); crime repeating itself; mischievous clergy; chaste virgins (Adeliza)

• the necessarily tragic end of "criminals"?

MAKE SURE YOU RE-READ THE POEMS! HAND-OUT INTERPRETATIONS ARE VERY GENERAL!!!

3

---