LITERATURA INGLESA: ROMÁNTICOS Y VICTORIANOS

BLOQUE 1: THE ROMANTIC PERIOD

1. INTRODUCTION: SENSIBILITY AND POLITICS

-Social trends
-Political trends
-Cultural trends

Romantic period vs Romantic ideology

☼Reaction to the Enlightenment – What does the enlightenment represent?

Revolutions – 1776 American Revolution

– 1789 French Revolution

→1789 The French Revolution

The French Revolution brings right… to men. Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen

-Individual men have rights, which are not violable by arbitrary power.
-Any authority must be rest on the consent of those governed.
-Individuals should be self-governed.
-Individuals must be free from government control.

All these principles exclude women explicitly. Men means only men.

→The Industrial Revolution – A different kind of revolution

→Abolition of slave trade

→Great Reform Act of 1832 (An Act to amend the representation of the people in England and
Wales)

-One in five adult males allowed to vote

-‘Rotten Boroughs’ eliminated
-New towns included

→Wars

→The British Empire: American colonies lost, other colonies acquired

☼Romantic concepts

-IMAGINATION vs RATIONALITY

-EMOTION vs REASON
Art is, according to Romanticism, not a mirror of reality, alight on the self, an interior journey.

-CHILD vs ADULT

-NATURE (organic) vs CITY (machine/artificial)

Before, ‘nature’ was evil, dangerous, and tried to kill you!

-SYMBOL AND MYTH vs FACT

LITERATURA INGLESA: ROMÁNTICOS Y VICTORIANOS

BLOQUE 1: THE ROMANTIC PERIOD

-EXPRESSIVE vs MIMETIC

-RULES (neoclassicism, ‘ancient regime’ vs FREE EXPERIMENTATION

-BOLDNESS vs RESTRAINT

-SUGGESTIVENESS vs CLARITY

-INSPIRATION vs MASTERY

-DYING* FOR LOVE vs. MARRYING FOR CONVENIENCE

Literally: sometimes also losing one’s reputation

-COLLECTIVE SYSTEMS (external rules, religion) vs INDIVIDUALITY (personal search,

meditation)

-COMMON LANGUAGE, SPONTANEOUS FOLK STORIES, SHAKESPEARE, FOR EVERYONE

vs POETIC DICTION, SOPHISTICATED, CLASSIC, FOR THE VERY FEW

Imagination for the view of poetry, nature for the view of the world, and symbol and myth for
poetic style. – Rene Wellek as cited by McGann

Alienation: distance between artist and public (the misunderstood artist)

Glorification of the ordinary, the disgraced, outcast, delinquent:

‘convicts, female vagrants, gypsies… idiot boys and mad mothers’ – Hazlitt, 1818, ‘On the living
poets’

‘situations from common life… a certain coloring of imagination, whereby ordinary things should be
presented to the mind in an unusual aspect’ – Wordsworth

The ‘paradoxical’ beautiful soul in ugly body: The Hunchback of Notre Dame (Hugo, 1831),
Frankenstein (Mary W. Shelley, 1818, 1831)

Wordsworth says that all good poetry is ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’.

☼‘The Big Six’ authors of Romantics

- Blake
- Wordsworth
- Coleridge
- Byron
- Shelley
- Keats