Authors - Lou

William Blake

1757-1827
British Romantic poetry
poet, painter, engraver
"infernal method"
french revolution supporter
personal mythilogy (bible)

"songs of innocence" (The Lamb)
"songs of experience" (The Tyger, London)

Anna Laetitia Barbauld

1743-1825
British Romantic poetry

Radical Religious beliefs, free thinkers
dissenter, teacher, writer, editor
children's literature
poetry:

• nature, personal meditations, self-awareness, transformation

• Admired by Coleridge & Wordsworth

• Topic often daily life, common things and people (same as Coleridge & Ww)

political pamphlets and essays

celebrity in own lifetime

late arrival in the canon ("Britain's forgotten poet")

"The rights of Woman"

William Wordsworth

1770-1850
British Romantic poetry
"lake poet"
sister Dorothy and Samuel taylor coleridge
poet laureate (1843-50)
"Lyrical Ballads" Preface added in 1800 (2nd version) - wanted to bring back traditional ballads
"lines written in Early Spring"
"Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey"
"Ode: Intimations of immortality"

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

1772-1834
British Romantic Poetry
lake poet

Troubled life, troubled mind

Similar in style to Wordsworth (free verse, conversational)

But more about imagination, supernatural, uncommon

"lyrical ballads" (The rime of the ancient mariner)
Biographia Literaria (autobiography, own views on poetry, willing suspension of disbelief)

"Dejection: an ode"
"Kubla Kahn"

Lord Byron (George Gordon)

1788-1824
British Romantic poetry
George Gordon
celebrity writer
travel, adventure, passion, exoticism, sensation, aristocrat → love affairs (men and women)
"byronic hero": admired by a lot of people, mysterious, carries guilt, seen as superior, gloomy and dark, strong erotic element (Mr. Rochester)

Didn’t theorise about poetry unlike others

Emphasis on leading a life of sensation → ultimate romantic poet

Victorians reacted against him, ‘too sensational, immoral’

Romantic qualities: exotic, adventure, passion, individuality (leads to sense of alienation)

"Childe Harold's pilgrimage" → led to popularity
"So, we'll go no more a roving"

John Keats

1795-1821
British Romantic poetry
extreme emotion, mortality, human suffering, darkness
relation inner and outer world, transience
very negative reviews
early death

Idea of negative capability: capacity to go along with uncertainties and questions, accepting that there is no truth to be found, idea of vagueness, inserting of question in his poetry

"La Belle dame sans merci"
"Ode to a nightingale"

Percy Byssche Shelley

1792-1822
British Romantic Poetry
radical ideas
short, passionate, tragic life
poetry for social change, radical political ideas

Natural world = important theme in oeuvre

"to wordsworth"
"to a skylark"
"a defence of poetry"
"mutability"

Mary Shelley

1797-1851
British Romantic (the gothic)
daughter (of Mary Wollstonecraft), wife, mother (children died early age), author
lake Geneva
"the year without summer" (1816)
gothic novel = popular genre

Jane Austen

1775-1817
The romantic novel, Br

romantic novels / psychological realism / comedies of manner / sentimental realism (more realistic than contemporaries, portrayal of mind and interaction of people)

Romantic: inner lives, emotions, minds, love, rebelliousness against social constraints and trad institutions

South of England, lower gentry (rural professional middle class)

six novels published as "a Lady", never published under own name (writing considered not valuable)

juvenilia (humour, wit and sarcasm, badly behaving girls, action without inner life) (to entertain family and friends, <> adult lit, less realistic, lot of improbability (but no magic or mythical))

"love and friendship"

Novels:

• rejection of sensational plots

• Characters with profound inner lives and complex relationships

• “Pictures of domestic life in country villages”

• Landed gentry, social competition (less variety than Brontë sisters)

• Everyday life observed in great detail

• Humor, wit, satire (snobbery, greed, pride)

Charles Dickens

1812-1870
realist novel, ethical realism, Br
journalist, self-made man
magazines (Household Works, All the Year round)
literary celebrity
everyday life in London
"ordinary characters" (or caricatures?)
social problems
ethical realism, with comical and symbolic aspects

London: at the time biggest city in the world, industrial, colonial power // poverty, slums

"Hard Times"

George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)

1819-1880
Realist Novel, ethical realism, Br
George Henry Lewes, lived with man → bad reputation
journalism, translations, non-fiction
ethics and human psychology
secular perspective
rural life in province towns

"Middlemarch"

Elisabeth B. Browning

1806-1861
Victorian Poetry, Br
one of the most popular poets in the 19th century, but rejected later
country life, London, Florence
married Robert Browning → Italy
erudition, experiment (different genres) and innovation
social issues, women, abolitionism, italian risorgimento = literature = tool for social protest

“Aurora Leigh”

"the cry of the children"

Christina Rossetti

1830-1894

(Late) Victorian Poetry
Italian family in London
Pre-Raphaelites (sincerity, beauty, symbolism, revival medieval art)
formal experimentation
gender consciousness
stern religious vision
charity work (house for fallen women)

Symbolism (simple subject for complex things)

"goblin market"

Gerard Manley Hopkins

1844-1889
Victorian Poetry, Br
1st publication 29 years after death
"modern" poet: influence 20th C
Jesuit priest (Catholicism)
religious poetry, celebrating the divine & nature (wonders of God's creation)
formal experimentation (no regular rhythm)
inscape (everything in the world has its own uniqueness) and instress (connection between the thing and the perceiver)

Thought poetry should be read out loud

Expression of individuality (in natural world)

"the windhover"

Edgar Allan Poe

1809-1840
American Romanticism (early), dark romanticism
tortured genius (short, tumultous life, alcoholism, depression, death)
strong desire to be a writer -> constant financial difficulties
autonomy of literature
struggling writer, but influential

Studied in England, gained gothic interest there

Ideas ab writing (contrary to romantics):

• should be rational, analytical & short

• Unity of effect: should always keep in mind there is a reader → everything you write should have purpose for reader

Wrote first detective fiction

"the Raven"
"the fall of house Usher"

Ralph Waldo Emerson

1803-1882
American Romanticism, Am renaissance: transcendentalism
essayist, poet, philosopher, charismatic lecturer
founder of the "transcendental club"
pivotal publication: "nature"

Challenge conventional beliefs & tradition, not as important as personal experience

Henry David Thoreau

1817-1862
American Romanticism, Am renaissance: transcendentalism
writer, philosopher, naturalist
Concord, Massachusetts
enduring legacy
self-reliance, non-comformism, environmentalism, rugged individualism, naturalist

Impact on environmentalists

"civil Disobedience"
"Walden"

Herman Melville

1819-1891
American Romanticism, Am Renaissance, dark romanticism
New York - and Pittsfield, Massachusetts
left school at twelve, became sailor at fourteen
financial instability; bank clerk, teacher, sailor, cust inspector

"Bartleby, the scrivener"

Nathaniel Hawthorne

1804-1864

American romanticism, Am Renaissance

Dark romanticism
Worked at Salem Custom House
Massachusetts
tragic, dark, existential dimension
deliberate ambiguity
puritans: national history, moral and spiritual complexity, sin, guilt, moral corruption, family history: Salem, John Hathorne

"The Scarlet Letter"

Frederick Douglass

1818-1895
American Renaissance, Literature of Slavery
born into slavery, escaped in 1838
bought his freedom in Great Britain
writer, orator, politician, diplomat, publisher
African Americans "must be our own representatives and advocates"
human rights: 1848 Seneca Falls: suffragette convention

"Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass"

Walt Whitman

1819-1892
American Renaissance
poet, carpenter, newspaperman, editor, teacher
as a poet, he claims to speak for all Americans
transcendentalism (mixed with NY working class culture)(difference Emerson and Thoreau: ab connection, the masses, democracy and society as a whole), egalitarianism, individualism
subject matter: daily life, democracy, America, controversial content (he gay)
style: free verse, sensuous language, rich vocabulary, metaphors, "catalogues", grammatical experiments

"Leaves of Grass (Song of Myself)"
"Beat! Beat! Drums!"
"the wound-dresser"
"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd"

Emily Dickinson

1830-1886
American renaissance
Amherst, Massachusetts
posthumous publication of 1800 poems, with great significance for modern poetry
solitary recluse, but part of larger world
personal and artistic autonomy
style: rebellious, formal experimentation
influence: British poets, transcendentalism
subject matter: full range of human emotions and experience, religious skepticism, nature, death

Influenced by transcendentalism

"There's a certain slant of light"
"because I could not stop for Death"

Mark Twain

1835-1910
American Realism, regionalist realism
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, Missouri
travelled widely
"father of American literature"
humorist, lecturer, journalist, travel writer, popular author; critical of American values and ideals

"The Adventures of Tom Sawyer"
"The adventures of Huckleberry FInn"

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

1860-1935
American Realism
public speaker, poet, publisher, author, sociologist
short stories
non-fiction
feminist "world-server" with progressive ideas: women's economic independence, communal living, public kitchens, gender fluidity, right to die
utopian science fiction novel "herland"
female community, parthenogenesis, eugenics (racism)

"The Yellow Wallpaper"

Edmund Burke

Br

The sublime:

Terror = source of the sublime; strongest emotion the mind is capable of feeling

Opposed to revolution, people should appreciate tradition instead of looking for innovation

The big six

1st gen: William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge

2nd gen: Percy Byssche Shelley, Lord Byron, John Keats

• started doubting theories of 1st gen (Disagree: plain language ab common life, but still invested in nature and classical subjects)

• Operating under pressure to establish own identity → reaction on predecessors

• Legacy prominent, popularity less at the time (except Byron)

Both gen: emphasis on the individual experience

Brontë sisters

(Ca. 1816-1855)

Psychological realism, Br

Comparison Jane Austen: also focus on inner life, more variety in types of people

Grew up in secluded environment (father clergyman)

2 sisters and mother died very early on

Worked as governesses

Juvenilia: wrote for each other, more romantic than Austen

Published under male names (Charlotte → Currer, Emily → Ellis, Anne → Acton, Bell)

Alfred Lord Tennyson

Victorian poetry, Br

Embodiment of Victorian age

Tackles social issues and political topic by zooming in on personal tension

“The Lady of Shallot”