1. Romanticism

2. Learning Goals
To identify the major authors and literary contributors of the Romantic period.
To recognize the major literary characteristics of the period.
To understand how the politics of a time period can influence its literature.
To identify major vocabulary needed to analyze the literature of the period.

3. What’s going on at the time…
Industrial Revolution ( ish)
American Revolution ( )
French Revolution ( )

4. The House of Hanover continues…
George III 1760 – 1820 – very popular, though bouts of mental illness. Great interest in agricultural matters, science, and religious piety. Greatly helped forward the Industrial Revolution. Very fiscally conservative.
George IV 1820 – 1830 – extravagant, ruled under regency from 1811 until his father died. Hated both his father and his wife, gentlemanly and cultured, but spoiled and a wasteful spender.
William IV 1830 – 1837 – First child labor act passed, abolished slavery, Reform Act of 1832 (increased voting population)

5. Where it begins… Sturm und Drang
Storm and Stress
Anti-Aristocratic
The name of a movement in German literature and music taking place from the late 1760s through the early 1780s in which extremes of emotion were given free expression in response to the confines of rationalism imposed by the Enlightenment.

6. Where it begins: The Sorrows of Young Werther
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1774)
Werther spends an idyllic few months in the country and falls in love with Lotte, a peasant girl.
She’s engaged, and Werther leaves due to the pain of never being able to be with her.
He eventually takes his own life, and is buried alone.
Becomes wildly popular among young men in Europe who attempt to imitate Werther and go on pilgrimages to Goethe’s home.

7. Romanticism: A Reaction against Enlightenment
Increasing interest in nature and natural, primitive, and uncivilized ways of life
Growing interest in scenery, especially untamed or disorderly scenery
Association of human mood with the moods of nature

8. Characteristics of Romanticism
Emphasis on need for spontaneity in thought and action
Increasing importance of natural genius and the power of the imagination.
Tendency to exalt the individual and his needs, free expression

9. Characteristics of Romanticism
Cult of the Noble Savage
Rejection of authoritarianism, materialistic values, and industrialization
Emphasis on natural religion

10. Main British Romantics
William Blake
Robert Burns
William Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Percy Shelley
Lord Byron
Mary Shelley
John Keats
Ann Radcliffe
Transition Figures
Sir Walter Scott
Jane Austen
Emily Bronte

11. Main American Romantics (1770-1860)
Washington Irving
Edgar Allan Poe
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Herman Melville
James F. Cooper
Emily Dickinson
Walt Whitman
Frederick Douglass
Henry W. Longfellow
William C. Bryant
Transcendentalists
Henry David Thoreau
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Margaret Fuller

12. Gothic Fiction Combines horror and romance
Believed to have been popularized by the English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto.
Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein .

13. Gothic Fiction, continued
Characteristics include: terror (both psychological and physical), mystery, the supernatural, ghosts, haunted houses and Gothic architecture, castles, darkness, death, decay, doubles, madness, secrets and hereditary curses.

14. William Blake ( )
Largely unknown in his lifetime. Poet, Printer, Painter
Considered a lunatic by his contemporaries
Very religious, but anti-church.
Hated scholars like Isaac Newton, Rene Descartes, Francis Bacon, etc. who had declared the world/nature/universe was measurable / scientific, etc.
Believed in the autonomy of the imagination

15. William Blake
“If the doors of perception were cleansed, everything would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, until he sees all things through the narrow chinks of his cavern.”
Where the band The Doors got their name… =)
Believed the physical, corporeal world was a trap meant to ensnare the senses from relying upon the imagination to see the true reality that lay beneath.
“Where man is not, Nature is barren”

16. Blake’s Newton

18. “He who sees the infinite in all things sees God
“He who sees the infinite in all things sees God. He who sees the ratio only sees himself.”
The Ancient of Days

19. Blake’s Songs of Innocence
The mental state of childhood innocence.
Point of view is important… how do you look at things?
Songs about & from the POV of innocence
Prelapsarian (before the Fall)
Blake does NOT consider innocence as perfect or utopian… experience is needed

20. Blake’s Songs of Experience
Postlapsarian world
Innocence is too dependent on those who take care of it… parents, priests, governments, etc.
Blake says, “I must create my own system or be enslaved by another man’s”
“Without Contraries is No Progression”
Man creates “mind-forg’d manacles”
Envy, jealousy, selfishness, and fear pervade the poems of this section

21. Literary Terms to Know…
Lyric poem/poetry
Pastoral
Gothicism
Sturm and Drang
Doppelganger
Byronic Hero
Epistolary Novel