1. Poe & The Romantic Period

2. Romanticism Dates 1800-1900 (approximate) Characteristics:
1. Nature as subject of art
2. Transcendence
3. Wild, irregular, grotesque
4. Human rights & animal life
5. Interest in the past
6. “Sentimental Melancholy” (deep sadness)
7. Love

3. Key Ideas 1. Individual over Society 2. Melancholy
3. Altered state of consciousness
4. Reaction against Enlightenment
5. Social Causes
6. Simplicity
7. Mystical
8. Nature

4. EuropeanRomanticism “liberalism in literature” –Hugo
In France, leading figures: Hugo, Dumas, Chateaubriand, Lamartine, Neval, Gautier, Vigny
Romantic Musicians
Berlioz (France); Verdi (Italy); Chopin (Polish but settled in France); Wagner (Germany); Beethoven (German)
Artists (Girodet, Gericault, Delacroix, Goya (transition)

5. Symbolists Group of poets in France Used heavily symbolic language
“fleeting moments”
Dark subjects
Rimbaud, Verlaine, Baudelaire, Mallarme’
“beauty in darkness”
Decadent Movement (reaction against the “naïve” views of Romanticism); inspired by the Gothic movement & Poe; describes an erosion of moral, ethical, or sexual traditions.
Fin de Siecle, or “end of century”; term given to a group of writers (including Symbolists) in France at the end of the 19th century that “celebrates a romantic and willful sense of decay.” It influenced the Bohemian and other counter-culture movements of the 20th century.

6. French Romanticism
“La vague des passions” – waves of passions and sentiment.
“Le mal du siecle’”– the pain of the century.
The first is represented by the Romantic poets, writers, and artists; the second is typified by the offshoots of the genre, such as the Gothic writers and the Symbolists.

7. England William Blake– father of Romantic Poetry; artist and engraver
William Wordsworth– Lyrical Ballads (1798); nature & imagination
Blake, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge

8. America Transcendentalists Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau
Whitman– Leaves of Grass
Social reform, nature, individual spirituality
Dark side = Gothic = Edgar Allan Poe
American Renaissance
Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter) & Melville (Moby Dick)
After = Realism & Modernism

9. Poe & Gothic Romantic Literature
Gothic: Germanic, Medieval
Architecture: pointed arch, vault, stained glass, flying buttresses, etc.
Literature: “all the extravagancies of an irregular fancy”
Richness, mystery, aspiration
Examples of Gothic in today’s society?

10. Gothic “Sublime” – exalted Entrapment Terror & Horror Characteristics:
Past, decay, ruin, fallen, death, supernatural

11. 3 Types of Gothic 1. High Gothic (supernatural)
2. Enlightenment Gothic (explanation)
3. Ambiguous Gothic (keeps us guessing)
Grotesque– outgrowth of interest in the irrational, distrust of cosmic order, frustration; fantastic representations of human and animal forms, distortions, absurd, ugly, caricature.
Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque

12. Poe 1809-1849 Macabre: horror of death & decay
Detective story, gothic horror, symbolic fiction
1st person– LIVING THE STORY
Raised in Virginia
Virginia Clemm TB
“The Muders in the Rue Morgue” (1841)– detective story
Poem: “The Raven” (1845)
Died poor
Became a major literary figure when he was recognized by Baudelaire as an important figure upon the translation of his works into French.

13. Poe