Week Nine

Paper Discussion
MLA Style Guide

Background to English Romanticism - Eighteenth Century (1700s)

Culture/Politics/Economics

-          Expanding Middle Classes

-          Consumers in need of entertainment

-          Women with leisure time

-          Social stability = Boredom

-          Revolutions (America and France)

-          Industrial Revolution

-          Social consciousness: sentimental and political concern for the poor

Science

-          Rationality

-          Broadening of scientific knowledge in all fields

-          Science as a means of controlling the world

France

-          Rousseau: noble savage, radical democratic politics

-          Enlightenment and optimism for (social) progress

Germany

-          Goethe: Sorrows of Young Werther, Faust parts I and II

-          Kant’s transcendentalism and idealism

-          Prussian militarism and rationalized national expansion

-          Revived interest in folklore, myth, supernaturalism, nature, idealism, etc.

Eighteenth Century Novel

-          Long, realistic: suspension of disbelief, verisimilitude

-          Samuel Richardson,  Pamela (1741)

-          Henry Fielding: Shamela (1741), Joseph Andrews (1742), Tom Jones (1749)

-          Sentimental novel: Lawrence Sterne: Tristram Shandy (1759-67), A Sentimental Journey (1768)

Gothic Novel

-          Gothic Revival Architecture: Strawberry Hill (Walpole); Fonthill Abbey (Beckford)

-          Horace Walpole: Castle of Otranto (1765)

-          Mrs. (Ann) Radcliffe: Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)

-          Matthew “Monk” Lewis: The Monk (1796)

-          Oriental Tale: William Beckford: Vathek (1786)

Romanticism: early 1800s

-          Return to Nature (compare Rousseau)

-          Emotions as subject matter

-          Rejection of Science and Rationalism (but also enthusiasm for science)

-          Folklore

-          Supernatural

-          Nationalism

-          Class consciousness, social reform (William Godwin, Mary Wolstonecraft Godwin)

-          Supernatural

-          Two early Romantic poets: William Blake, Robert Burns

-          Sir Walter Scott

-          Romantic Painting:  William Blake, J. M. W. Turner, and (for paintings of rustic life he made in the 1780s, the case could be made for Thomas Gainsborough)

Romanticism: Lake Poets

-          Liberals who became conservative/Tory (Violence and excesses of the French Revolution scared people away from Republicanism)

-          William Wordsworth

-          Samuel Taylor Coleridge

-          Robert Southey

-          Lyrical Ballads, collection of poetry by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.  From the Preface to Lyrical Ballads: “The proper subject matter of poetry is strong emotions recollected in tranquility.”

Romanticism: Shelley and His Circle

-          Half generation younger than the Lake Poets; remained committed to Classical Liberal/Republican Politics (compare Milton, Locke, Jefferson)

-          Percy Bysshe Shelley

-          George Gordon, Lord Byron: Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, The Corsair, Don Juan

-          Thomas Love Peacock: Nightmare Abbey (1818)

-          Mary Godwin Shelley: Frankenstein (1818)

Sonnet

-          Italian (Petrarchan)

-          English (Shakespearean)

Nineteenth Century English Novel

-          Jane Austin; Northanger Abbey (1818)

-          Emily Bronte: Wuthering Heights

-          Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre

Romanticism gives way to the early Victorian period in culture and literature

-          John Keats

Victorian Literature

Alfred, Lord Tennyson 

The Pre-Raphaelites, 2

Lewis Carroll  (Charles Dodgson, 1832-1898)

George MacDonald  (1824-1905)
Lilith
Phantastes

William Morris (1834-1896)
The Well at the World's End