Brit Lit: The Romantic Period

Instead of acts of love, romanticism referred to…

rebellion against oppression

Who was blamed for the loss of the American colonies?

King George III

What happened in 1789?

The French Revolution broke out, resulting in Napoleon’s dictatorship

What happened in 1793?

The French Empire engaged the British Empire in a 25-year war, beginning this year

What happened in 1805?

The British Empire dismantled the French Navy at the Battle of Trafalgar

What happened in 1814?

Napoleon was captured and exiled

Napoleon’s final defeat

Battle of Waterloo (1815)

What happened in 1812?

The US declared war on Britain (War of 1812)

What happened in 1828?

Noah Webster published An American Dictionary of the English Language

William Blake

• 1757-1827

• Poet and artist

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• 1772 - 1834

• English Romantic poet

• Famous poems: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan

Tchaikovsky

• 1840-1893

• Russian composer

• “Truly there were be reason to go mad if not for music”

Poets

• Blake

• Wordsworth

• Coleridge

• Byron

• Shelley

• Keats

The number of people who _____________ increased

could read

How did the British state try to control what was printed and read?

By charging authors with sedition or blasphemy

Who said:

“…the divine arts of imagination; imagination, the real and eternal world of which this vegetable universe is but a faint shadow.”

William Blake

Who said:

“Fear not for the future. Weep for the past.”

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Who said:

“I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the heart’s affections, and the truth of imagination”

John Keats

Romanticism

A reaction to the industrial revolution, enlightenment, progress, and urbanization

Values of Romantics

• Nature

• Childhood - Age of Innocence

• Emotion

• Religion -- faith, mystical notion that can’t be understood

  • revival of Catholicism

• Romantic Love (marriage based on love, not economics)

• Nostalgia for middle ages and chivalry

Characteristics of the Enlightenment

Reason, human nature, man > nature, forward-looking, disregard for middle ages

Characteristics of Romanticism

Passion and emotion, nature, nature > man, backward-looking, loved middle ages

Romanticism exposes the ugliness of…

Progress

Goldsmith’s The Deserted Village

Focuses on rural life, depopulation of the countryside

The Enclosure Movement

A movement to privatize previously public or open grazing land that was commonly owned by villagers.

• Led to increase in rich people living in countryside, increase of poor flocking to cities

William Blake’s Jerusalem likens the Industrial Revolution to the

Bible