The Romantic Age 1798-1832

“The present contains nothing more than the past, and what is found in the

effect was already in the cause.”

Henri Bergson

Hadleigh Castle

(1829) John Constable

The Bard

John Martin

1789-1854

Romantic painters sought out the spectacular aspects of nature.

The bard stood for vision and imagination.

AlexandrDumasGeorge Sand

French Novelists

Victor Hugo

French Novelists

German Writers

Goethe Heinrich Heine

Grimm’s Fairy Tales

American Romantic Fervor

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Coleridge

Wordsworth

Lyrical Ballads

Wordsworth & Coleridge

leave specialized, formal language of 18th century “poetic diction”

replace with experimental attempts to fit “metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation”

“the real language of men”

British Romantic Poetry

Shelley Keats

Byron

Writers Lived in Age of Change

1807 gas street lights, London

20 years later, Age of Electricity

1798-1832, railroads sprang up

photography invented typewriter patented

Jean Jacques Rousseau

Most of what passes for progress is

really corruption

Rousseau (1712-1778)

Forerunner of the

Romantic period

Literary Forms in Upheaval

No important playsnew genre “verse

dramas”meant to be read, not

acted out

Gothic Novels

Travel Became Commonplace

Steamboat & steam locomotive

travel-writing essays, poems, &

prose narratives

Karl Baedeker’s travel guides

Romanticism

Art, music, & literature reflected the spirit of revolution sweeping France & America

Romanticism

Characteristics interest in nature, exaltation of

imagination protest against

“correctness” increased faith in the

worth of the individual

Historical Background

Revolution

and Reaction

The Industrial Revolution

Romanticism” as a Period and a Concept

Began 1798 Lyrical Ballads

Ends 1832 Sir Walter Scott’s death

Scott wrote in a mode he himself called “romance,” “the interest of which turns upon marvelous and uncommon incidents.”

The end!

Thank you for your attention.

Mrs. Lewis