Romanticism in literature american and british, Lecture notes of Literature

Download Romanticism in literature american and british and more Lecture notes Literature in PDF only on Docsity! Williare Wordsworth Samuel Taylor Coleridge William Blake tord Byron Percy Shelley tohn Keats Romanticism 1798-1850 William Wordsworth Samuel Taylor Colerdige Francisco Goya’s The Sleep of Reason produces Monsters - The limits of reason and the power of irrational human fragile mind. To be Romantic means to have sympathy for madness Dove Cottage, Lake District. Where Wordworth wrote the best English poetry, about the natural world under threat (daffodils, trees, butterflies) - An abiding hatered for everything that is mechanical. The side of nature against industry Romanticism was a REACTION against the enlightement • Political: democratic ideals, social equality (monarchy, feudalism) • Art: a turn away from neoclassicism perfection • Philosophy: contends with rationalism- the belief that truth could be discerned by logic and reason. • An idealization of the individual. Characteristics • In art, it marked a fascination with the individual genuis and elevated the artist, philosopher, and poet above all others. • A deep appreciation of the beauties of nature • Romantics tried to capture the feelings nature inspired in them. • They emphasized the importance of the subjective experience. They believed that emotions and feelings and the senses could lead to higher truths than either reason or the intellect. Characteristics • They supposed that feelings such as fear, delight, joy and wonder, were keys that could unlock the mysteries of the world. Imagination • The imagination became one of the highest faculties of human perception. • In the preface to « Lyrical Ballads », Wordsworth professes all the basic principles of romanticism. • He exults the power of the romantic poet to give voice to individual feeling. • He speaks of the power of nature to show the way of/to the spirit. Wordsworth felt the imagination could take the experiences of everyday men and women and turn them into art. The aim of the Lyrical poems was “to choose incidents and situations from common life” and “to throw over them a certain colouring of magination,whereby ordinary things should be presented to the mind in an unusual aspect.” By thus highlighting the ordinary, Wordsworth points to the deeper spirit that lives in all things; the problem, as he sees it, is that human habit has made these wonders too familiar. There was an important difference: Romanticism in America coincided with the period of national expansion and the discovery of a distinctive American voice. The solidification of a national identity and the surging idealism and passion of Romanticism nurtured the masterpieces of “the American Renaissance.” • Art, Romantics argued, could best express universal truth. The Romantics underscored the importance of expressive art for the individual and society. In his essay “ThePoet” (1844), Ralph Waldo Emerson, perhaps the most influential writer of the Romantic era, asserts: “For all men live by truth, and stand in need of expression. In love, in art, in avarice, in politics, in labor, in games, we study to utter our painful secret. The man is only half himself, the other half is his expression.” The development of the self became a major theme; self-awareness, a primary method. If, according to Romantic theory, self and nature were one, self-awareness was not a selfish dead end but a mode of knowledge opening up the universe. The idea of “self” — which suggested selfishness to earlier generations — was redefined. New compound words with positive meanings emerged: “self- realization,” “self-expression,” “self-reliance.” Transcendentalism • Perhaps the best way to understand Transcendentalism is that it also went a little beyond European Romanticism, causing many to define the transcendental movement as American Romanticism. Like European Romanticism, Transcendentalism shares many of the same characteristic attitudes: a deep appreciation of nature; a preference of emotion over reason; a belief in the self and the potential of the individual; a predilection for the artist in particular and the creative spirit in general; and a distrust of classical forms and traditions. Emerson’s philosophy • “To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child. The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood.” • Emerson alludes to the “childlike” appreciation of nature intentionally, for he believes that the appreciation of nature is innate in human beings, but lost over time as people go about the business of living (which he defines as “COMMODITY”). Thus the fascination with such evidences of community as could be found or imagined, a fascination seen in the works of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle, and Matthew Arnold in England, and in those of Chateaubriand, Tieck, Schiller, and Goethe on the Continent. In a great deal of the Romantic writing of the early nineteenth century there is to be seen a fascination with themes provided by the individual in his relation to the soil, to village, to family, and to other reminders of the traditional society that had been so severely damaged, it was believed, by the impacts of industrialism and mass democracy. The often-noted renascence of interest in the Middle Ages, of which the Gothic novel was a part, was, at bottom, a renewal of devotion to those values, structures, and symbols which had been dominant during the medieval epoch.