Romanticism Exam - Brit Lit 2

The Chimney Sweeper

William Blake

The Lamb

William Blake

Introduction (Innocence)

William Blake

Introduction (Experience)

William Blake

The Tables Turned

William Wordsworth

Preface to Lyrical Ballads

William Wordsworth

Kubla Khan

Samuel Coleridge

Dejection: An Ode

Samuel Coleridge

A Vindication of the Rights of Women

Mary Wollstonecraft

Ozymandias

Percy Shelley

Ode to the West Wind

Percy Shelley

Ode to a Nightingale

John Keats

Ode on a Grecian Urn

John Keats

What’s Romanticism?

• Romance (Adventure, chivalry, Improbability)

• Reason is not the answer

• Art, Aesthetics, Activism

• The Relationship of Past to the Present

• Emotion over Reason: A focus on intense personal feelings, spontaneity, and inner passion.

• Nature Worship: Viewing nature as a spiritual, sublime force, often in contrast to the artificiality of industrialized cities.

• Individualism and Subjectivity:

  Celebrating the solitary individual, the outcast, and the internal, subjective mind over society's rules

  .

• The Supernatural and Exotic: An interest in the occult, medieval, mysterious, and supernatural elements.

• Focus on the Common Man/Childhood: Valuing the innocence of children and the language of everyday people, rather than just aristocrats.

Political Background

Started the late 18th century

• The American Revolution 1776

• The French Revolution 1789

• The Haitian Revolution 1791

Habeas Corpus

legal right requiring that a detained person be brought before a judge to determine the legality of their imprisonment. During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the suspension of habeas corpus in Britain—driven by fears of the French Revolution—became a focal point for Romantic writers

Poet

Artist/Prophet/ Genius, Not different in kind but in degree

Poetry

1. Spontaneity, Imagination

2. Lyricism, Subjectivity

3. Everyday Language, Glorifying the Commonplace

4. Sublime Subject

5. Nature

6. The Supernatural

7. Anti–Materialism

Lyrical Ballads

• A variety of forms, not necessarily ballads

• An Experiment

Preface to Lyrical Ballads…purpose

Glorifying the Commonplace, The core of human nature, Conversational

Fancy - Coleridge

superficial, mechanical, and playful rearranging of existing memories or fixities

Imagination - Coleridge

a creative, transformative, and vital power that synthesizes new realities

Primary imagination - Coleridge

the universal, unconscious power of human perception that forms sensory images

Secondary imagination -Coleridge

a conscious, active, and creative faculty peculiar to artists, which "dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate" raw sensory data into new artistic forms.

Willing suspension of disbelief - Coleridge

the deliberate, conscious choice of an audience to set aside skepticism and logic to accept the implausible or impossible premises of a story for the sake of enjoyment