Session 6: British Romanticism / Victorian Literature I

How came British Romanticism to be?

• 19th century: critics in England began to relate the notion of “romantisch” (romantic) to English poets who had written from the end of the 18th century to about the 1830s

British Romanticism

• counter-movement to Enlightenment

• against neo-classical tradition / 18th-century poetry

• political context: French Revolution

• relationship between individual and nature

• sublime nature

• metaphor for human nature

• individual striving for new knowledge, insights

about the self and the essence of being (coming

to these insights by writing poetry)

The Big Six

1st generation:

William Blake

William Wordsworth

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

2nd generation:

George Gordon Lord Byron

Percy Bysshe Shelley

John Keats

William Wordsworth

• 1770-1850

• 1798: Lyrical Ballads with S.T. Coleridge (Preface)

• lived in the Lake District close to Coleridge and

Robert Southey (‘Lake Poets’)

• was made Poet Laureate in 1843

Characteristics of ‘good’ poetry

• subjects: situations from real life

• portrayal of humble, rustic life (connection to nature)

• use of simple language

• use of the imagination: ordinary things presented as special

• emotional link to subjects portrayed

→ intense feelings “recollected in tranquility”

“For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”

importance and function of nature in I wandered lonely as a cloud

• nature as teacher (moral force)

• nature as spiritual force and source of inspiration

➢ can have an uplifting effect when the individual is depressed

➢ can help the individual come to terms with metaphysical questions

➢ can inspire poetic creativity (metapoetical elements of the poem, prominence of the lyrical I)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• 1772-1834

• wrote Lyrical Ballads together with Wordsworth

• most well-known poems: “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, “Kubla Khan”, “Christabel”

• interested in psychology (extreme states of mind,

e.g. in nightmares)

the dark side of romanticism: the gothic

• situations which evoke extreme emotions (terror, horror)

• loss of control (reign of the physical, instinctive instead of the rational)

and the crossing of established boundaries

• (taboo) subjects: death, decay, fear, sexuality, power …

➢ typical features: sublime nature, darkness, night, castles/monasteries,

dungeons, supernatural occurrences, fainting heroines, femmes fatale

William Blake

• 1757-1827

• painter and poet

• symbolist poems (“The Tyger”)

• political implications (“London”)

• Songs of Innocence (1789)

• Songs of Experience (1794)

Differences from Wordsworth and Coleridge

“London”

• focus of the observing individual but in a very different environment

• images draw attention to social problems and negative aspects of human

nature

• political ‘message’

John Keats

• 1795-1821

• trained as apothecary and surgeon

• well-known poems: the great odes (“Ode to a

Nightingale”, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, “To Autumn”)

• not well reviewed during his life-time (“Cockney poet”)

• died of consumption in Rome

View on poetry/the poet:

• poetry should not try to find explanations, solutions for everything(Negative Capability), being able to be within uncertainty, doubt, and mystery

• the poet should have no self: i.e. he should be able to absorb everything around him, be it good or evil, light or dark, foul or fair; he should be able to feel into the essence of other persons, and things in nature (→ the camelion poet)

Features of second generation romantic poetry “To Autumn”

• effacement of the individual (‘you’ / apostrophe instead of focus on lyrical I)

• direct recreation of sensory impressions from nature for the reader (use of sound-effects like alliteration)

• no apparent mediation, explanation or interpretation in the poem

summary of first generation British Romanticism

• focus on the individual, their subjective perception and emotional development

• importance of nature as spiritual, moral and creative force affecting the individual

summary of second generation British Romanticism

• effacement of the self in poetry / focus on seemingly unmediated impressions

• wider range of topics

The Victorian Age

Queen Victoria's reign 1837 – 1901

key issues of the Victorian Age

• the role of women (from the ‘angel in the house’ to the ‘New Woman’)

• industrialisation, growing class divisions and struggles for political participation

• growth of the British Empire

• new technologies and changing perception of the world (e.g. railway,

photography, telegraph)

• fear of ‘degeneration’ especially towards the end of the 19th century

Victorian Literature

• main genre: the novel
− reading audience: predominantly middle-class
• theatre often rejected as ‘popular entertainment’
− cf. also the Romantics’ ‘anti-theatrical prejudice’

Wuthering Heights as a Victorian Novel

• complex plot structure: diametrical opposition of the two houses Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange and the families associated

with them

• plot spans two generations of these families

− readers are encouraged to look for correspondences between the different characters

− encourages active reader involvement

Realism in Wuthering Heights

• use of regional dialect for local colour (Joseph)

• highly complex narrative structure:

− first-person narrator Mr Lockwood reports the first-person narrative of the servant Mrs Dean (he is an outsider, she knows the other characters personally)

− additional ‘quotation’ of embedded texts like Catherine’s diary

• creates authenticity, sometimes play with narrative unreliability (narrator has nightmares)

How is realism connected to neo-gothic elements`?

• traditional Gothic devices (like ghosts, remote castles as setting, complex villains, sublime nature) are modified and/or given new meanings

• can be used to reflect cultural anxieties of

the time: Heathcliff