1. Performer - Culture & Literature Marina Spiazzi, Marina Tavella, Margaret Layton © 2012 The Romantic spirit 1798, publication of the Lyrical Ballads

2. The Romantic spirit Performer - Culture&Literature the period in which new ideas and attitudes arose in reaction to the dominant 18 th -century ideals of order, calm, harmony, balance, rationality 1. The word ‘Romantic’ Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, 1818 The Romantic Age

3. The Romantic spirit Performer - Culture&Literature Enlightened trends Emphasised reason and judgement. Focused on society as a whole. Followed authority. Interested in science and technology. Romantic trends Emphasised imagination and emotion. Valued individuals. Looked for freedom. Represented common people. Interested in the supernatural. 2. Romanticism vs Enlightenment

4. The Romantic spirit Performer - Culture&Literature 3. English Romanticism English Romanticism influenced by the French Revolution and the English Industrial Revolution. a revolt of the English imagination against the neoclassical reason. The Romantics: expressed a negative attitude towards the existing social or political conditions; placed the individual at the centre of art; argued that poetry should be free from all rules.

5. The Romantic spirit Performer - Culture&Literature Focus on the beauties of nature, seen as a living being. Use of creative imagination. Exaltation of emotion over reason and senses over intellect. A new view of the artist as an individual creator. Fascination with the irrational, the past, the mysterious, the exotic. 4. The Romantics’ key ideas John Constable, The white horse, 1819, New York, Frick Collection

6. The Romantic spirit Performer - Culture&Literature Opposed to reason. A substitute for traditional religion. A vehicle for self-consciousness. A source of sensations. A provocation to a state of imagination and vision. An expressive language: natural images provide the poet with a way of thinking about human feelings and the self. 5. The Romantic nature J. M. Turner, Landscape with Distant River and Bay, c. 1840-50; Musée du Louvre, Paris

7. The Romantic spirit Performer - Culture&Literature A creative power superior to reason. Shaped the poets’ fleeting visions into concrete forms. A dynamic, active, rather than passive power. Allows human beings to ‘read’ nature as a system of symbols. 6. The Romantic imagination J.M.W. Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed – The Great Western Railway, 1844, London, The National Gallery

8. The Romantic spirit Performer - Culture&Literature Wordsworth and Coleridge were known as Lake Poets because they lived together in the last few years of the 18 th century in the district of the great lakes in Northwestern England. In 1798, they published the Lyrical Ballads, the manifesto of English Romanticism. 7. The Lake poets

9. The Romantic spirit Performer - Culture&Literature 8. The manifesto of English Romanticism Linked to nature, emotions, feelings Interested in the lives of the humble Nature, memory, children Simple, common used to liberate imagination ThemesLanguageThe poet The Preface to the Lyrical Ballads 1798

10. The Romantic spirit Performer - Culture&Literature Percy B. Shelley, George Byron and John Keats died very young and away from home; experienced political disillusionment reflected in their poetry; were linked to individualism, escapism. 9. The second generation of Romantic poets

11. The Romantic spirit Performer - Culture&Literature 10. The Romantics on nature NATURE WordsworthColeridgeByronShelleyKeats a source of joy inspiration and knowledge a mother and a moral guide a universal force the representation of God’s will and love the companion of his loneliness the counterpart of his stormy feelings when it was violently upset a source of enjoyment and inspiration pervaded by a guiding power leading man to love the creative mind benefits from the beauty of the natural landscape a kind of muse to the poet’s artistic quest

12. The Romantic spirit Performer - Culture&Literature In the Napoleonic era: the British navy dominated the sea; the French army dominated the European continent; the great hero of the British navy was Admiral Horatio Nelson defeated the French-Spanish fleet off Cape Trafalgar on the Atlantic coast of southern Spain in 1805. 11. The Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815)

13. The Romantic spirit Performer - Culture&Literature The total defeat of Napoleon in 1815 at the battle of Waterloo in Belgium where the British troops, commanded by Arthur Wellesley, overcame the French. Their consequences 1.the acquisition of the Cape of Good Hope, Trinidad, Singapore, Ceylon and Malta was of strategic interest; 2.enormous financial costs; 3.Britain was on the verge of starvation, bankruptcy and evolution. 11. The Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815)

14. The Romantic spirit Performer - Culture&Literature 12. The Luddites They caused so much alarm that the government made machine-breaking punishable by death. Deteriorating working conditions Mechanical looms and spinners replacing skilled craftsmen Poverty led to outbursts of machine-breaking culminating in the ‘Luddites Riots’ of 1811-1812.

15. The Romantic spirit Performer - Culture&Literature In 1819, during a peaceful public meeting in Manchester, soldiers fired into a crowd and eleven people were killed  the so-called ‘Peterloo Massacre’. 12. The Luddites

16. The Romantic spirit Performer - Culture&Literature The period between 1811 and 1820: the Regency. The Prince Regent, later to become George IV, acted as monarch during the illness of his father George III (1760-1820). In 1830 William IV succeeded his brother and his short reign saw a new political awareness leading to the new age of reforms. 13. The Regency