1. Romanticism

2. The Romantic movement was a reaction to the ideas and values of the Enlightenment and Neoclassicism. The Enlightenment generation had prized the rational, formal, and scientific.

3. After a generation of war, revolution, and upheaval, many were skeptical about the Enlightenment concept of “progress.” In particular, the Industrial Revolution, the American and French Revolutions, and the Napoleonic Wars left many suspicious of Enlightenment values. The “skeptical intellectual” gave way to the “sublimely inspired poet.”

4. Key Tenets of Romanticism (1/2) Imagination, spontaneity, and emotion over reason; the mysterious and superstitious over the rational. Subjectivity over objectivity Freedom and individualism over society; the appeal of the solitary life and self-sufficiency

5. Key Tenets of Romanticism (2/2) Devotion to beauty and worship of untamed nature Preoccupation with genius and the concept of the hero, of his passions and inner struggles. Fascination with an idealized, mythical past; fascination with the medieval. Science and industry do not improve or perfect nature, but deform and destroy it.

6. Key English writers: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. The English Romantic movement was primarily a poetic one. The Romantics began to shift away from the strict poetic forms of their predecessors.

7. Key American writers: Emerson, Hawthorne, Poe, Thoreau, Melville, Whitman. In the United States, the novel assumed greater importance for romantic writers. The work of American Romantics often took a darker tone than their English counterparts.

8. From the Romantics’ fascination with the medieval and weird came gothic poetry (Edgar Allen Poe’s poetry) and the gothic novel (Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”).

9. Key American works of the era: The Scarlet Letter- Nathaniel Hawthorne Moby Dick- Herman Melville Self-Reliance- Ralph Waldo Emerson Walden- Henry David Thoreau

10. Key English works of the era: Lyrical Ballads- William Wordsworth Frankenstein- Mary Shelley Prometheus Unbound- Percy Bysshe Shelley Rime of the Ancient Mariner- Samuel Taylor Coleridge Childe Harold's Pilgrimage- Lord Byron