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Performer - Culture & LiteratureMarina Spiazzi, Marina Tavella,
Margaret Layton © 2012
The Romantic spirit
1798, publication of the Lyrical Ballads
The Romantic spirit
Performer - Culture&Literature
the period in which new ideas and attitudes arose
in reaction to the dominant 18th-century ideals of order,
calm, harmony, balance,rationality
1. The word ‘Romantic’
Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, 1818
The Romantic AgeThe Romantic Age
The Romantic spirit
Performer - Culture&Literature
Enlightened trends• Emphasised reason and judgement.• Focused on society as a whole.• Followed authority.• Interested in science and technology.
Romantic trends• Emphasised imagination and emotion.• Valued individuals.• Looked for freedom.• Represented common people.• Interested in the supernatural.
2. Romanticism vs Enlightenment
The Romantic spirit
Performer - Culture&Literature
3. English Romanticism
English Romanticism
influenced by the French Revolution and the English Industrial Revolution.
a revolt of the English imagination against the neoclassical reason.
The Romantics:•expressed a negative attitude towards the existing social or political conditions;•placed the individual at the centre of art;•argued that poetry should be free from all rules.
The Romantic spirit
Performer - Culture&Literature
• Focus on the beauties of nature, seen as a living being.• Use of creative imagination.
• Exaltation of emotion over reason and senses over intellect.
• A new view of the artist as an individual creator. • Fascination with the irrational, the past, the
mysterious, the exotic.
4. The Romantics’ key ideas
John Constable, The white horse, 1819, New York, Frick Collection
The Romantic spirit
Performer - Culture&Literature
• Opposed to reason.• A substitute for
traditional religion.• A vehicle for
self-consciousness.• A source of sensations.• A provocation to a state
of imagination and vision. • An expressive
language: natural images provide the poet with a way of thinking about human feelings and the self.
5. The Romantic nature
J. M. Turner, Landscape with Distant River and Bay, c. 1840-50; Musée du Louvre, Paris
The Romantic spirit
Performer - Culture&Literature
• A creative power superior to reason.
• Shaped the poets’ fleeting visions into concrete forms.
• A dynamic, active, rather than passive power.
• Allows human beings to ‘read’ nature as a system of symbols.
6. The Romantic imagination
J.M.W. Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed –The Great Western Railway, 1844, London, The National Gallery
The Romantic spirit
Performer - Culture&Literature
Wordsworth and Coleridge were known as Lake Poets because they lived together in the last few years of the 18th century in the district of the great lakes in Northwestern England.
In 1798, they published the Lyrical Ballads, the manifesto of English Romanticism.
7. The Lake poets
The Romantic spirit
Performer - Culture&Literature
8. The manifesto of English Romanticism
Linked to nature,
emotions, feelings
Interested in the lives
of the humble
Nature, memory, children
Simple, common
used to liberate imagination
Themes LanguageThe poet
The Preface to the Lyrical Ballads 1798
The Romantic spirit
Performer - Culture&Literature
Percy B. Shelley, George Byron and John Keats• died very young and away from home;• experienced political disillusionment reflected in their
poetry;• were linked to individualism, escapism.
9. The second generation of Romantic poets
The Romantic spirit
Performer - Culture&Literature
10. The Romantics on nature
NATURE
Wordsworth Coleridge Byron Shelley Keats
a source of joy
inspiration and knowledge
a mother and a moral guide
a universal force
the representation of God’s will and love
the companion of his loneliness
the counterpart of his stormy feelings when it was violently upset
a source of enjoyment and inspiration
pervaded by a guiding power leading man to love
the creative mind benefits from the beauty of the natural landscape
a kind of muse to the poet’s artistic quest
The Romantic spirit
Performer - Culture&Literature
In the Napoleonic era:• the British navy dominated
the sea; • the French army dominated
the European continent;• the great hero of the British
navy was Admiral Horatio Nelson
defeated the French-Spanish fleet off Cape Trafalgar on the Atlantic coast of southern Spain in 1805.
11. The Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815)
The Romantic spirit
Performer - Culture&Literature
The total defeat of Napoleon in 1815 at the battle of Waterloo in Belgium where the British troops, commanded by Arthur Wellesley, overcame the French.
Their consequences1.the acquisition of the Cape of Good Hope, Trinidad, Singapore, Ceylon and Malta was of strategic interest;2.enormous financial costs; 3.Britain was on the verge of starvation, bankruptcy and evolution.
11. The Napoleonic Wars (1799-1815)
The Romantic spirit
Performer - Culture&Literature
12. The Luddites
They caused so much alarm that the government made machine-breaking punishable by death.
Deteriorating working
conditions
Mechanical looms and spinners
replacing skilled craftsmen
Poverty
led to outbursts of machine-breaking culminating in the ‘Luddites Riots’ of 1811-1812.
The Romantic spirit
Performer - Culture&Literature
In 1819, during a peaceful public meeting in Manchester, soldiers fired into a crowd and eleven people were killed the so-called ‘Peterloo Massacre’.
12. The Luddites
The Romantic spirit
Performer - Culture&Literature
The period between 1811 and 1820: the Regency.
The Prince Regent, later to become George IV, acted as monarch during the illness of his father George III (1760-1820).
In 1830 William IV succeeded his brother and his short reign saw a new political awareness leading to the new age of reforms.
13. The Regency