English Romanticism (Authors)

ENGLISH ROMANTICISM

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND -THE LAST QUATER OF THE 18TH-CENTURY: revolutionary at any level. The French Revolution (1789, the Fall of the Bastille: National Assembly, rights of man, erasure of Ancient Regime’s feudal rights, democracy, people’s justice and freedom).       - The French Revolution in England: hopes of freedom & justice in Whig aristocrats and intellectual radicals (William Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, 1792: universal suffrage, people’s sovereignty, free universal education, government subsidies for maternity, child-care & old-age pensions, against propertied Church) versus conservative Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution (1790). - Prosperity and national confidence under the younger Pitt (1783-1800). Reform and restoration of public revenues after loss of colonies, East India Company and rebuilt fleet. - Industrial, demographic and social revolutions in England. - Relocation of population, enriched middle-classes and great industrialists supersede aristocrats. Depressed working-classes. - The professional, independent artist: mostly middle-class, conforming a definite literary class with own interests and social/artistic pleas.   

• At the beginning of the 19th-century, end of the Napoleonic wars (1815) & demobilisation of 400000 soldiers: in the domestic  sphere, unemployment & commercial disaster, yet, outwardly, England’s international prestige as most powerful, richest, most industrialized, colonial power. • Growth of great industrial cities & drastic relocation of population: the Industrial Revolution destroyed the family as an economic unit & converted the working individual into an impersonal labour force to be used. • 1811-16: Luddite riots, proletarian protests: British textile artisans against Industrial Revolution.

•1817: Suspension of the Habeas Corpus (prisoner’s release from unlawful detention) and severely penalized seditious assemblies. •1819: Peterloo Massacre (Manchester). •1833: Abolition of slavery in the British colonies. •The Factory Act (1833) tried to alleviate the horrors out of Industrial Revolution (child labour, etc). Emerging of proletarian consciousness. •The decline of the English monarchy (George III) •Parliamentary reforms, capitulation of English landed gentry to middle-class bourgeoisie, now enfranchised. •From Whigs & Tories to Liberals and Conservatives.

t

The Romantic Movement in England •The term. •Contextual factors: –Economic: middle-class individualism bids for social power and status: democracy, self-reliance, self-hood. –Religious: non-conformist spirit that rebels against the dignified yet unspiring Church of England. –Political: steady decline of monarchy, republicanism, democracy and French philosophy. –Social: pursuit of freedom, openness and dynamism

•Imagination and the poet. The poet as seer with demiurgical capacities. Feelings, the seat of the soul. Creative freedom, transforming qualities of imaginative perception. Renewal of reality. Relationship mind-external world in terms of joyous harmony and reciprocity, for the world influences the poet’s mind and the poet in turn responds with an imaginative truthful apprehension of the world. Against Lockean mechanicist theories. Nature. •Romantic language: the symbol fusing form-meaning-world-imagination. •Dreams and visions. •.Other Romantic attitudes: medievalism, orientalism, primitivism, progress and perfectibility of man, sentimentalism, democracy, originality, diversitarianism, confessionalism, the sublime and picturesque.   

THE FIRST GENERATION: BLAKE, WORDSWORTH & COLERIDGE

William Blake (1757-1827) •Poet, engraver & creator of his own mythology based on esoteric and biblical readings. •Vision and revolution. “See through the eye”. E. Swedenborg and millenarianism. •Neoplatonic influence: the doctrine of intentional obscurity; neoplatonist metaphysics (remembrance and repossession of kwoledge through imaginative vision) •Innocence and Experience •Psycho-Symbolic scheme. Balance reason (Urizen), imagination (Los), heart (Luvah) and body (Tharmas). No repression: “the road of excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom”. •From “Beulah” (idyllic slumber of unsconscious) to “Generation” (material world) to “Ulro” (nightmarish experience), up to “Eden” (Imagination).  •The First Period (1789-93):Songs of Innocence (1789); Songs of Experience (1794) •Second Period (1793-97): prophetic books Tiriel, The Book of Thel, The Marriage of Heaven & Hell, The Book of Urizen, The Song of Los. •Third Period (1797-1820): Short Lyrics, Jerusalem, the Emanation of the Giant Albion.

•William Wordsworth (1770-1850) • Lyrical Ballads (1798) with Coleridge. • The Preface (1802): attack on the generic hierarchy & the principle of decorum • Longer Poems:The recluse, or views on man, nature, and society (1798), containing The Prelude…an Autobiographical Poem, The Recluse & The Excursion. • Middle & Later Period: Ode. Intimations of Immortality  (1802-04), Poems in Two Volumes  (1807). • Nature: therapeutic and spiritually renewing. Extension of the self. Identification poet/nature. Natural symbols. • An interaction of mind & the external world that enhances the perception of both. As it is imaginatively perceived, nature makes its own poetry in the poet’s mind, a poetry that is true to itself yet also changed into something more wonderful, capable of constant wondrous, imaginative remaking (“recollections in tranquility”).

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)   - Poems on Various Subjects (1796) - Lyrical Ballads: “The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner” (1797), “Christabel” (1816), “Kubla Khan” (1816) - Biographia Literaria (1817): esemplastic, the nature of the imaginative mind, “higher third”.

George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824) Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (4 cantos) (1812-24)    ,The Prisoner of Chillon (1816) Manfred, a Dramatic Poem                Don Juan (1819-24) Cain: A Mystery (1821) Byronic hero: excentric, sophisticated, mysterious, passionate, arrogant, cynic, seductive, lonely.

John Keats(1795-1821) Poems,by John Keats (1817) Endymion: A Poetical Romance (1817-18) Lamia,Isabella,The Eve of  St.Agnes,and Other Poems (1820), including the five great odes: On Melancholy, to a Nightingale, on a Grecian Urn, on Indolence & to Autumn. “Negative capability”: poet’s impersonality , free from ego, “the state of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. Instead, poetic truth and beatuty and imaginative intensity

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) •Queen Mab (1812-13) •Alastor or the Spirit of Solitude (1815-16) •Ozymandias (1817-18) •Prometheus  Unbound (1818-20), “Ode to the West Wind” •A Defense of Poetry (1820): poets as moral teachers. Reason (discriminates, enumerates) and Imagination (resting on known things to create  a new synthesis, truthful and spiritually authentic reality. •Adonais (1821) •Hellas (1821) •From skeptic communism to platonic idealism: Universal Spirit revealed as natural beauty and human love. Poet’s divine madness whereby he is inspired to spot eternal beauty and truth.

Jane Austen (1775-1817): Neoclassic continuity Sensibility drew on philosophical beliefs in the innate goodness of man (emotionally enriching for men, but dangerous for women). Half-way between actual love (marriage, position) and sentimental love,; highly ambivalent position which allows heroine’s maturity and heroic sensibility.  Humour, irony and “sotto voci”, Awakening of  female conscience and personal discovery. Landed Hampshire gentry in detail. Sense and Sensibility (1795)  Pride and Prejudice (1812)  Northanger Abbey (1818) Mansfield Park (1814)  Emma (1816) Persuasion (1818)

The Romantic Historical Novel: Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) Scottish revival and setting . For all historical inadequacy, he provides the pattern of the modern historical novel: historical background, realistic characterization (minor characters) and central characters incarnating the author’s contemporary perspective on the past. Waverley (1814), Rob Roy (1817), Ivanhoe (1819), The Abbot (1820), Redgauntlet (1824)

The Romantic Novel Revisited: Mary (Godwin) Shelley (1797-1851)

Frankenstein or the Modern Prometheus (1818), The Last Man (1826

English Romanticism