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    The Romantics

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    The document summarizes the Romantic period in British literature from 1790-1837. Some of the key aspects covered include: 1) The publication of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads in 1798 signaled the beginning of the Romantic era in literature, moving away from the more polished style of the 18th century. 2) Romanticism valued innovation over tradition and focused on the poet's own feelings and experiences with nature rather than using literature as a mirror of human life. 3) Major Romantic poets discussed include Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Keats, as well as Romantic

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    The Romantics

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    360 views15 pages
    The document summarizes the Romantic period in British literature from 1790-1837. Some of the key aspects covered include: 1) The publication of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads in 1798 signaled the beginning of the Romantic era in literature, moving away from the more polished style of the 18th century. 2) Romanticism valued innovation over tradition and focused on the poet's own feelings and experiences with nature rather than using literature as a mirror of human life. 3) Major Romantic poets discussed include Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Keats, as well as Romantic

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    The document summarizes the Romantic period in British literature from 1790-1837. Some of the key aspects covered include: 1) The publication of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads in 1798 signaled the beginning of the Romantic era in literature, moving away from the more polished style of the 18th century. 2) Romanticism valued innovation over tradition and focused on the poet's own feelings and experiences with nature rather than using literature as a mirror of human life. 3) Major Romantic poets discussed include Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Keats, as well as Romantic

    Copyright:

    Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
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    Download as pptx, pdf, or txt
    360 views15 pages

    The Romantics

    Uploaded by

    VEEVOO*
    The document summarizes the Romantic period in British literature from 1790-1837. Some of the key aspects covered include: 1) The publication of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads in 1798 signaled the beginning of the Romantic era in literature, moving away from the more polished style of the 18th century. 2) Romanticism valued innovation over tradition and focused on the poet's own feelings and experiences with nature rather than using literature as a mirror of human life. 3) Major Romantic poets discussed include Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Keats, as well as Romantic

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    The Romantics

    1790-1837
    • The main stream of poetry in the eighteenth
    century had been orderly and polished,
    without much feeling for nature.
    • The publication of the Lyrical Ballads (1798)
    came as a shock. The critics considered
    the language too simple and the change
    too violent.
    • This important book- the signal of the
    beginning of the romantic age-was the
    joint work of William Wordsworth and
    Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
    • Wordsworth’s preface to the second edition
    in 1800 was a statement of revolutionary
    aims, in which he denounced the upper-
    Romanticism
    • Romanticism is a complex artistic, literary,
    and intellectual movement that originated
    in the second half of the 18th century in
    Western Europe, and gained strength in
    reaction to the Industrial Revolution. It
    was partly a revolt against aristocratic
    social and political norms of the
    Age of Enlightenment and a reaction
    against the scientific rationalization of
    nature, and was embodied most strongly
    in the visual arts, music, and literature.
    (wikipedia)
    • The French revolution in the early 1790s
    fostered the sense in Romantic writers
    that theirs was a great age of new
    beginnings and high possibilities.
    Neoclassic and Romantic
    Prominent features
     • Neoclassic authors exhibited a strong
    traditionalism.

    • Literature was conceived to be primarily an
    “art”; that is, a set of skills which, though it
    requires innate talents, must be perfected by
    long study and practice.
    • Human beings were regarded as the primary
    subject matter of the major forms of
    literature. Poetry was held to be an imitation
    of human life “a mirror held up to nature”.
    Poetry was meant to please and instruct at
    the same time.
    • Emphasis was placed on what human beings
    possess in common-representative
    characteristics and widely shared
    experiences, thoughts, feelings and tastes.
    • Romantic authors favored innovation over
    traditionalism in the materials, forms, and
    style of literature.
    • In his preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth
    repeatedly declared that good poetry is
    “the spontaneous overflow of powerful
    feelings”.Poetry is not a mirror of men in
    action, on the contrary, its essential
    component is the the poet’s own
    feelings. “If poetry comes not as naturally
    as the leaves to a tree,” Keats wrote, “it
    had better not come at all.”
    • The outer scene is not presented for its own
    sake but as a stimulus for the poet.
    Transcendentalism
    • A philosophical and literary movement,
    centered in and around Boston in the
    mid-19th century. It was influenced by
    German and British Romanticism. The
    leading Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo
    Emerson issued what was the
    movement’s manifesto in his essay
    Nature, which presents natural
    phenomena as a symbol of higher
    spiritual truths.
    • anther famous transcendentalist is
    Henry David Thoreau.
    William Wordsworth
    • Lyrical Ballads
    • Poems in Two Volumes “Immortality
    Ode”
    • The Prelude or Growth of a Poet’s
    Mind: It is a blank verse memoir in
    fourteen books. In this most
    worthwhile long poem of the 19th
    century, Wordsworth records his
    mental and psychic growth with
    determined integrity.
    • Among his best sonnets are “The
    Samuel Taylor Coleridge
    • His own exceptional gifts produced five
    absolutely remarkable poems:
    • “The Ancient Mariner” in Lyrical ballads
    • “Frost at Midnight”
    • “Kubla Khan”
    • “Christabel”
    • “Dejection: An Ode”
    • Biographia Literaria is an attempt to give his
    ‘literary life and opinions’ on poetry more
    systematically. The centre of Coleridge’s
    critical thinking is that literature is less a work
    of art than a natural product of the
    imagination.
    Younger Romantics
    • Lord Byron:
    Byron’s distinction and originality is found in his

    anti-romantic “Don Juan”, a satirical poem


    portraying Don Juan as a man easily seduced by
    women.
    • Percy Shelley:
    His major achievement lies in his philosophical

    poems such as “Mont Blanc”, “Prometheus


    Unbound” and “The Triumph” of Life and the
    pastoral elegy “Adonis”. Critics described his
    poetry as lacking the touch with reality. Defence
    of Poetry’s argument was that love and
    imagination, the sources of moral feelings, can
    be developed by poetry.
    “Ozymandias” is frequently anthologized and is

    probably Shelley's most famous short poems.


    • John Keats:
    Keats reputation rose at his death and

    has not fallen.


    Between April and September 1819,

    Keats wrote six Odes. His odes are


    usually addresses to abstract
    entities: the Nightingale, the Grecian
    Urn and Autumn.
    • Romantic poetry changed priorities in
    English literature. Poetry is henceforth
    about personal experience rather
    than the public and moral concerns of
    a classical Christian Augustanism. In
    this general cultural shift to finding
    meaning in personal rather than
    collective experience, poetry showed
    the way. And whereas the 18th
    century novel of Fielding focused on
    moral action, the 19th century novel
    chronicles the emotional development
    of character-or of a leading character
    with whom we are expected to
    Romantic Prose
    • Fiction:
    • Mary Shelley
    She wrote the ghost story

    Frankenstein which is an epistolary


    narrative with three narrators and is
    a cross between the Gothic tale and
    the fable of ideas. Pg 246.
    Its interest is cultural, moral,

    philosophical and psychological.



    • Jane Austen
    Despite its sudden spring in the mid

    18th century, the novel became a


    major for again only after 1800.
    before Austen, there were Gothic
    tales, novels of sensibility, social
    entertainments, experiments of ideas
    but the novel reached perfection with
    Jane Austen. It went on to popularity,
    periodical publication, and bigger
    things.

    • Her novels are cast in the form of the
    comedy of manners: accuracy of social
    behavior and dialogue, moral realism,
    elegance of style, and ingenuity of plot.
    Austen is distinctly a moral idealist.
    1.Sense and Sensibility
    2.Northanger Abbey
    3.Pride and Prejudice
    4.Mansfield Park
    5.Emma
    6.Persuasion
    Her novels offered an ‘admirable copy of life’.
    Next Week
    • Victorian Literature
     To 1880

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