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UNIT 8: ROMANTIC ENGLAND
8.1. A HISTORICAL BACKGROUND TO THE ENGLISH ROMANTICISM
At the beginning of the century, England and France were locked in a mortal conflict. Napoleon had instituted the Continental System, forbidding the importation of English products or colonial raw material and proclaimed himself Emperor of France in the same year that Pitt returned as Prime Minister. After 20 years of warfare, Britain became the richest and more powerful nation in the world, but growth of great industrial cities and drastic relocation of population caused by the Industrial Revolution destroyed the family as an economic unit and converted the working individual into an impersonal labour force to be used. 1811- 1816: ‣ (^) Luddite riots, proletarian protests: British textile artisans against Industrial Revolution. 1815: ‣ (^) Corn Law to exclude foreign grain, promotes native agriculture at the expense of costly bread for workers. 1817: ‣ Suspension of the Habeas Corpus (prisioner's release from unlawful detention) and severely penalized seditious assemblies. 1829: ‣ (^) Catholic Emancipation Bill (full suffrage and eligibility for catholics in return for oath denying papal interference in English church. 1833: ‣ (^) Abolition of slavery in the british colonies ‣ (^) The Factory Act: Tired ti alleviate the horrors out of Industrial Revolution (child labour, etc). Emerging of ploretarian consciousness. During this period there were parliamentary reforms, capitulation of English landed to middle-class bourgeoisie, now enfranchised. England was entering into our contemporary world before any other region, changed the mind of the Englishmen. There were three schools of thought:
- Conservatism : They repudiated the claims of reason and revolution and based their cause upon sentiment and emotion, conscience and costume. They wished to maintain the “old England” unaltered.
- Revolutionism : They demanded the end of tradition and the creation of a truly egalitarian society.
- Utilitarianism : Accepting the middle-class society, championing the principles of practicality and usefulness, seeking necessary change and improvement without revolutionary overthrow.
8.2. THE ROMANTIC MOVEMENT IN LITERATURE
Hostile critics of early 19th century Romanticism saw it as an attempt to escape from the realities of the age; on the other hand, a neutral estimate might see Romantics as asserting the fundamentally valid position of irrational man. Common to all the Romantics was an idealism that sought for the individual and for society the fullest of freedom, and expression. The romantics ate the first contemporary men, the first architects of an ideal democratic society. The causes of this romanticism include the following:
‣ Economic:
Romanticism appears to be largely a middle-class movement.
‣ Religious:
From the 18th century on, the English middle class has been associated with religious nonconformity.
‣ Political:
During the reigns of the four Georges, the prestige on the English monarchy steadily declined, reaching a low water mark in the first third of the 19th century. Democracy and French philosophy.
‣ Social:
Period era ere entering the logical development of an “open” Society. Freedom.
‣ Psychological:
Rationalist had suggested the idea of progress. It was a reaction against the scientific dogmatism and the absolute confidence of the 18th century scientist that lead to poets to explore vast gulf of human experience.
‣ Philosophical:
The rational mind of the 18th century eventually destroyed Locke’s commonsense, materialistic explanation of the nature of man. Imagination and the poet: The poet as seer with demiurgically capacities. Feelings, the seat of the soul. Creative freedom, transforming qualities of imaginative perception. Renewal of reality.
THE SECOND GENERATION OF ROMANTIC POETS
George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)
‣ Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1812-1824) • The prissioner of Chillon (1816)
‣ Manfred, a dramatic Poem
‣ Don Juan (1821)
‣ Cain: a mysteri (1821)
‣ Byronic hero: excentric, sophisticated, mysterious, passionate, arrogant, cynic, seductive,
lonely. Jhon Keats (1795-1821)
‣ Poems by John Keats (1817)
‣ Endymion: a poetical Romance (1817-1818)
‣ Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St, Agnes and other poems (1820), includinf the five great odes:
On melacholy, to Nightingale, on a Grecian Urn, on Indolence and To Autumn.
‣ "Negative capability": Poet's impersonality, free from ego, "the state of being in
uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason". Instead, poetic truth and beauty and imaginative intensity. Percy Bysshe Shelly (1792-1822)
‣ Queen Mab (1812-1813)
‣ Alastor or the spirit of solitude (1815-1816)
‣ Ozymandias (1817-1818)
‣ Prometheus Unbound (1818-1820), "Ode to the West Wind".
‣ A defense of poetry (1820): poets as moral teachers. Reason (discriminates, enumerates) and
imagination (resting on know things to create a new synthesis, truthful and spiritually authentic reality.
‣ Adonais (1821)
‣ Hellas (1821)
‣ From skeptic communism to platonic idealism: Universal Spirit revealed as natural beauty
and human love. Poet's divine madness whereby he is inspired to spot eternal beauty and truth. THE EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY NOVEL (1800-1832) Jane Austen (1775-1817): Neoclasic continuity
‣ Sensibility drew on philosophical beliefs in the innate goodness of man (emotionally
enrichinf for men, but dangerous for women).
‣ Half-way between actual love (marriage, position) and sentimental love; highly ambivalent
position which allows heroine's maturity anf heroic sensibility.
‣ Humour, irony and "sotto voci"
‣ Awekening of female conscience and personal discovery.
‣ Landed Hampshire gentry in detail.
‣ Sense and Sensibility (1795), Pride and Perjudice (1812), Northanger abbey (1818)
Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1816), Persiasion (1818)
