The Romantic Era - PowerPoint Presentation

Slide1

The Romantic Era

1798-1832Slide2

The Romantic Era 1798-1832

Begins—publication

of

Lyrical Ballads

by Wordsworth and Coleridge, 1798Ends—coronation of Queen Victoria, 1832Move from agricultural to industrial societyFollows the Age of Reason, rejection of and rebellion from their ideasTwo generations of poets:Wordsworth, Coleridge, and BlakeShelley, Keats, and ByronSlide3

Revolutions

The American Revolution (1776)

Loss of money and prestige for Britain

The French Revolution (1789)

Noble ideas: liberty, equality, and fraternityBrutal reality: executions of nobility and those who disagreed with current governmentEnglish aristocracy feared similar uprisingNapoleon took military charge then became Emperor—traded king for an emperorEngland began a series of wars against Napoleon 1803 Battle of Trafalgar

1815 Battle of Waterloo)Slide4

The Industrial Revolution

Shift from hand craft to machined goods

Rich becoming richer, poor becoming poorer

Laissez faire

—a “hands off” approach to economics from gov’tBrutal child laborSlide5

Characteristics

Imagination over reason

Feeling over “realism”

Art is personal, emotional, and simple in language instead of public, witty, and complex.

Democratic idea—art is for all peopleExotic locales—the past or imaginative worlds instead of the ugly industrial world around themSlide6

Characteristics

Individual liberties and feelings

Nature viewed as transforming and echoing human nature; we learn from nature

Retreats into nature provide the soul with a refreshing, a renewal, providing the mind with the peaceful environment in which to think more clearly.Slide7

Characteristics

Imaginative worlds

“Willing suspicion of disbelief”—accept the imaginative world of the artist

Verisimilitude: The sense that what one reads is "real," or at least realistic and believable.

For instance, the reader possesses a sense of verisimilitude when reading a story in which a character cuts his finger, and the finger bleeds. If the character's cut finger had produced sparks of fire rather than blood, the story would not possess verisimilitude. Note that even fantasy novels and science fiction stories that discuss impossible events can have verisimilitude if the reader is able to read them with suspended disbelief. Slide8

The Gothic

Gloomy castles, monsters, ghosts

The surreal or dream-like is explored

“…Ability to let readers…share their fears about the age’s suffering, injustice, and other unseen ‘evils’.”Slide9

“What is a poet?”

“He is a man speaking to men.”

An ordinary person speaking to ordinary people—a democratic ideal

For some, an “inspired revealer and teacher,” for others, a “physician” to all humanity that “pours out a balm upon the world”

“Prophet, priest and king”Outsider commenting on societySlide10

Byron and the “bad boy”

Devastatingly attractive but fatally flawed

Passionate

Outsider

Questioning, searching, but uncompromisingBrooding on past sinRash rebels who reacted against an overly complex societySlide11

Wreck of technologySlide12

"If you're not worried

about the incursion of technology into

the human self,

you're mad." Slide13

“

Ozymandias

”

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller

from an antique land

Who said: "Two vast and

trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear:

`My name is

Ozymandias

, King of Kings:

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away".