The Romantic Period The Romantic Period

1.1. Historical and Intellectual BackgroundHistorical and Intellectual Background 2.2. General Features of RomanticismGeneral Features of Romanticism 3.3. A list of RomanistsA list of Romanists

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Historical and Intellectual BackgroundHistorical and Intellectual Background

• the Romantic Movement

• philosophers and thinkers

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the Romantic Movementthe Romantic Movement1. The Industrial

Revolution • a country of pleasant

farm lands and cottage workers to an industrial giant.

• The farm workers were leaving the small farms.

• Machine-made goods were replacing the manual work of the peasants .

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the Romantic Movementthe Romantic Movement2. American Revolution in 1775 • individual rights and the principle of self-determination • the desire of man for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of

happiness” • the right of the individual to have a voice in the process

of government

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the Romantic Movementthe Romantic Movement

3. The publication of William Blake's Poetical Sketches

4. The French Revolution Its battle cry of “liberty,

equality, fraternity” was heard all across Europe, announcing the end of an absolute monarchy

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the Romantic Movementthe Romantic Movement

5. Lyrical Ballads The publication of the second edition of

Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge, the Preface to which by Wordsworth serves as the manifesto of Romanticism.

6. Sir Walter Scott's collection of ballads entitled Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border, 1802.

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the Romantic Movementthe Romantic Movement

7. The passage of the Reform Bill of 1832 in England, which gave voting powers to members of the lower middle-class who had not before this enjoyed these rights.

8. The accession of Queen Victoria in 1837.

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philosophers and thinkers who were worth philosophers and thinkers who were worth mentioningmentioning

1. Jean Jacques Rousseau • the father of Romanticism • He published The New

Heloise in 1761 and Emile in 1762.

• These two works stressed the basic goodness and benevolence of man's nature. The artificial elements in society were to be rejected in favor of the goodness of nature and the intuitive prompting of the heart. 23/4/2023/4/20 88

philosophers and thinkers who were worth philosophers and thinkers who were worth mentioningmentioning

2. Edmund Burke

He links the sublime and the beautiful to human emotions and physical senses as well as imagination, thus elevating the function of instincts and emotions in his earlier work A Philosophical Enquiry into Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1756).

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philosophers and thinkers who were worth philosophers and thinkers who were worth mentioningmentioning

3. Thomas Paine

The Rights of Man

a. It is the right of the people to overthrow a government that opposes humanity.

b. Opposition to

neoclassicist's thinking of binding oneself to traditions and conventions

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General Features of RomanticismGeneral Features of Romanticism 1. An emphasis on subjectivism romantic poets • the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings

• the uniqueness of his response to the world

• looking inward and examine the peculiarity, the particularity, of their own private emotional history

• a religion of the heart • Romantic stove for heroic madness neoclassicists • believing in an intelligible world and emphasizing reason • Man possesses faculties, notably a mind, that enables him to make some

kind of sense of the universe and that what is dark and obscure is probably not worth man's attention .

• a religion of the head• Neoclassical writers strove for common sense

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General Features of RomanticismGeneral Features of Romanticism

2. A love for nature Romantic poets are practically all worshipersof nature. They either find some consolation for their lonelysoul in nature, taking nature as a living entity thatshares the poets' feelings, or read in nature somemysterious force which gives them specialinspiration, or even regard nature as the revelationof God.

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General Features of RomanticismGeneral Features of Romanticism

• Natural scene has become a primary poetic subject.

• Romantic “nature poems” are in fact meditative poems, in which the presented scene usually serves to raise an emotional problem or personal crisis whose development and resolution constitute the organizing principle of the poem.

• The view of natural objects corresponds to an inner or a spiritual world and serves as an understructure for a tendency to write a symbolist poetry .

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General Features of RomanticismGeneral Features of Romanticism

3. A belief in individuality and freedom • Romantic poets put an immensely higher

estimate on human potentialities and powers.• Romantic poets put great emphasis on the

value of individuality and freedom. The aspect of humanity becomes a glory and a triumph instead of a sin or an error .

• The human being refuses to submit to any limitations and persists in setting infinite goals.

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General Features of RomanticismGeneral Features of Romanticism

• Romantic poets sing high the effort to keep one's own individuality as a man and peculiarity and originality as an artist.

• They also express their fervent love for individual freedom as well as national liberation and their determination to fight against any chain set on human nature.

• The immediate act of composition should be spontaneous, that is, arising from impulse, and free from all rules and artful manipulation of means to foreseen ends.

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General Features of RomanticismGeneral Features of Romanticism

4. The glorification of the commonplace • to choose incidents and situations from common life • selection of language really spoken by men • the prime service of their poetry to awaken in the reader “freshness of sensation” in the presentation of “familiar objects • a revival of folk literature, a real awakening of

interest in the life of the common people • their appreciation for the simple but happy life of

the common people, or show their deep sympathy for the sufferings of the lower classes, or even find aspiration in their effort to help those people. 23/4/2023/4/20 1616

General Features of RomanticismGeneral Features of Romanticism

5. An interest in the past, the unusual, the unfamiliar, the bizarre or the picturesque

6. A feeling of loneliness The theme of exile, loneliness and a longing

for the infinite, for an indefinable and inaccessible goal is commonly found in the poems of the romanticists.

This may be partly because of their over-emphasizing the individuality, but the main reason for this lies in their great dissatisfaction with the stark reality which a single individual can not do much to cope with.

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General Features of RomanticismGeneral Features of Romanticism

• a revolt against authority and tradition.

• dissatisfaction with the social reality and their deep hatred for any political tyranny, economic exploitation and any form of oppression, feudal or bourgeois. In the realm of literature, they revolt against reason, rules, regulation, objectivity, common senses, etc.

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General Features of RomanticismGeneral Features of Romanticism

• Jane Austen lived mainly in the romantic period, but her writings belong to the realistic category for she weaves vivid pictures of the everyday life of simple country society around the seemingly romantic love stories.

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A list of RomanistsA list of Romanists

• William Blake

• Robert Burns

• William Wordsworth

• Samuel Taylor

• , George Gordon Byron

• Percy Bysshe Shelley

• John Keats

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A list of RomanistsA list of Romanists

• Charles Lamb

• Walter Scott

• Jane Austen

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