Romanticism

1. Romanticism 1785-1830

2. Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 38.58 × 29.13 inches, 1818, Oil on canvas, Kunsthalle Hamburg

3. Romanticism is a literary, artistic, and intellectual movement beginning in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, reaching a strong point in reaction to the Industrial Revolution • The early Romantic period coincides with the "age of revolutions“ • American (1776) and the French (1789) revolutions • As an artistic discipline, it was a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and the scientific rationalization of nature.

4. Earlier poets saw poetry as something which is intended to give artistic pleasure to the reader. • External • Romantic poets saw strong inner emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, and the only way to write poetry. Aesthetics • Concern with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty

5. Some Romantics: • William Wordsworth • Samuel Taylor Coleridge • Lord Byron • Percy Shelley • Keats • William Blake • Mary Wollstonecraft • Jane Austen • Edgar Allan Poe

6. Characteristics • Spontaneity and freedom • Imagination • Symbolism, religion, myth • The natural • Individualism, infinite striving, non conformity • Heroic isolation (Byronic hero) • revived medievalism • “Sensibility” • Emphasis on women and children • Supernatural, occult • Human psychology

7. Karl Friedrich Schinkel. Medieval Town by Water

8. Titania and Bottom, Henry Fuseli (1790). Based on Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream.

9. Byronic Hero • Qualities associated with the Byronic Hero: • dark, handsome appearance; brilliant but cynical and self-destructive • "wandering," searching behavior • haunted by some secret sin or crime, sometimes hints of forbidden love • modern culture hero: appeals to society by standing apart from society, superior yet wounded or unrewarded • fictional examples in American literature: Magua in Last of the Mohicans, Claggart in Billy Budd • Byronic authors in American literature: Poe, Hawthorne

10. Contemporary Portraits of Byron

11. Literary Development and Gender Variations: • As with the "fair lady-dark lady" tradition of literature, the dark Byronic hero is sometimes paired a more innocent, unmarked, even angelic figure. • For instance, the "dangerous" Byron was friends with the poet Shelley, who is often pictured as an angelic "Arial." • In Last of the Mohicans, the Byronic Magua opposes the princely Uncas. • In Jane Eyre (1847) by Charlotte Bronte, Jane must choose between the Byronic Rochester and the saintly St.-John Rivers. • In Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Bronte, Cathy chooses between the Byronic Heathcliff and the pleasant Edgar Linton.

12. Hawthorne 1809-1864 Poe 1809-1849

13. Victor- A Byronic hero? Sometimes I could cope with the sullen despair that overwhelmed me, but sometimes the whirlwind passions of my soul drove me to seek, by bodily exercise and by change of place, some relief from my intolerable sensations. It was during an access of this kind that I suddenly left my home, and bending my steps towards the near Alpine valleys, sought in the magnificence, the eternity of such scenes, to forget myself, and my ephemeral, because human, sorrows. My wanderings were directed towards the valley of Chamounix. I had visited it frequently during my boyhood. Six years had passed since then: I was a wreck, but nought had changed in those savage and enduring scenes. (pp.75-76)