The Romantic Movement

(1785-1832)

Stuff Happening: 1785-1832• 1783: Treaty of Paris

ends American Revolution

• 1788: Great Britain begins sending convicts to Australia, rather than America

• 1789: Storming of the Bastille!

• 1791: Mozart dies in Vienna

• 1799: Napoleon.• 1800: World

Population about one billion

• 1801: United Kingdom formed

• 1802: Slave rebellion in Haiti

• 1803: Louisiana Purchase, Morphine derived from opium

• 1807: UK outlaws slave trade across Atlantic

• 1811: King George III is declared insane – Regency Period

• 1815: Napoleon defeated at Waterloo

• 1829: Scotch Tape invented

• 1830: First railway station in US opens, lawn mower and sewing machine invented

Terms Explained

• romance: the actions and feelings of people who are in love, especially behavior which is very caring or affectionate.

• Romance: episodic narratives concerned with the exploits of knights, chivalry, and courtly love (generally Medieval)

• Romanticism: a literary style and philosophy focused on subjective experience, nature, imagination, and the individual (late 1700s)

The Romantic Creed

“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”– William Wordsworth, The Preface

to Lyrical Ballads

Tenets of Romanticism

• Nature is beautiful, powerful, untamable – Humanity must look to Nature to

understand itself• Emotions are important • Poetry should be about common

people!– Written in common language,

accessible– Common people are closer to

nature, less artificial

Romanticism is Reactionary!

Pre-Romanticism• Industrialization

and Urbanization

• Enlightenment: Reason over Emotion

• Enlightenment: All about the over-educated

• American and French Revolutions

Romanticism• Industry is

artificial, Nature is Real

• Emotion over Reason!

• The common people are Real, should have voice

• The commoners do have power!

Pre-Romantics

• Pre-Romantic Poetry: – Romantic tendencies

• Emotional explorations• Nature is powerful and untamed

– Neoclassic influences• Imitating traditional literary forms

Thomas GrayRobert BurnsWilliam Blake

Romantics!

First Generation

• William Wordsworth• Samuel Taylor

Coleridge

Second Generation– About twenty years

younger• Lord Byron• Percy Bysshe Shelley• John Keats

There’s Prose too!

• Gothic Novels: so Romantic--suspense, mystery, magic, the macabre, untamed nature, and Medieval settings– Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley

• Novel of Manners: satirical look at society– Jane Austen.

• Historical Romance Novels: set in a period before the life of their author (often medieval), with fictional and nonfictional characters– Sir Walter Scott