What Events In American History Lead To The Change To Romanticism?
ORIGIN OF THE TERM ROMANTIC
The term Romantic referring to the poets and novelists who wrote between 1770-1830 appeared after 1880 and was used past some literary critics in opposition to the term neo-classical.
The word Romantic comes from the French-Provençal discussion Romanz or Romance referring to a book written in a Provençal linguistic communication and not in Latin. It indicated a story of adventure, marvellous and supernatural, in which the plot and the situations were often unreal and remote from everyday life.
In the middle of the 17th century, at the time of the English civil state of war, information technology was used to refer to something which was strange, wild and extravagant or fifty-fifty absurd.
During the 18th century it continued to accept a negative connotation and it was associated with all that was Gothic, medieval and sentimental. At the stop of the 18th century it had come up to mean something that was liberating and attractive to the imagination.
HISTORICAL AND SOCIAL Groundwork
The historical events which greatly influenced Romanticism were: The American Revolution (1775-1783), The French Revolution (1789-1799) and The Napoleonic Wars. The ii revolutions affected the way of thinking bringing into Europe the ideals summoned upwards in the French slogan " Liberté , Egalité , Fraternité " while the Napoleonic wars afflicted the economy and the way of living making business uncertain and closely continued with the ups and downs of the wars: periods of overproduction and employment were followed by periods of depression and unemployment.
The working class also suffered because the Country followed the economic theory of the Scottish economist Adam Smith, that is: the Governments could non interfere with the private economical activities if they wanted to meliorate the economy of their country; every interference on the free economic contest could be negative. To explain this theory he used the metaphor of the "invisible manus": each private who tries to reach a personal economic advantage is pushed by an invisible hand to work for the good of the whole society. In working out this theory, Smith was influenced by the French Fisiocrats (the label laissez- faire was attributed to the French fisiocrat economist Jean-Claude-Marie-Vincent de Gournay)
As a consequence of this policy there were no precise regulations about wages and hours of work. The workers lived in the Slums ; unhealthy quarters in the suburbs of overpopulated industrial towns, without sanitation and forced to work from 12 to 19 hours a twenty-four hours in turn of a small-scale salary. To increment their domicile income, women and children of the lower classes worked in factories, besides. They were more exploited than men considering they worked as men but received a smaller salary. The to a higher place mentioned conditions brought to the development of the commencement spontaneous Associations of workers, later known as Trade Unions, which tried to defend them and to meliorate their life. Both the Government and the manufacturers looked at these organizations with increasing alarm and in 1799 Parliament passed the Combination Acts which fabricated them illegal. The workers living in the most industrialized towns in the North opposed these laws attacking factories and destroying mechanism. To control the Mob and to protect machinery, the Government decided to use the war machine force, in 1819, in the so-chosen Peterloo Massacre, the soldiers killed xi workers. There was a reaction in the public opinion and the Authorities was forced to repeal the Combination Acts and to recognize the organizations of workers.
The situation gradually improved, unemployment decreased, communications and trade increased as well, and Parliament passed a serial of Reforms. The most important were: The Bill for Catholic Emancipation (1829), The First Reform Bill (1832), The Mill Act (1833). The Catholics obtained the same rights as the Protestants, except the 1 of becoming Sovereign of Neat Britain because the Deed of Settlement was not repealed. The Manufacturing plant Act provided that no children under 9 years of historic period could piece of work in a factory and that people nether 18 could not work for more than 12 hours a solar day. The Reform Bill redistributed seats in Parliament and about of the heart-class received the right to vote; even so only 5% of people could vote because the Bill ignored the working form being based on census.
Little of that, however, is reflected directly in the works of the Romantics; most of their works is characterized by the try to escape the slap-up social problems of the day and to find a personal solution to the meaning of life.
LITERAY Background
Romanticism was a great motility of ideas that developed in the European countries between the early on 1770s and the early 1830s. It influenced all the forms of Fine art. It developed as a reaction against Enlightenment and its emphasis on rationality, gild, grade, clarity, rules and conventions.
The Age had become tired of all that and began to encounter the need to pay a little attention to the individual, his feelings, his emotions and thoughts and the demand to limited them without the restrictions of rules but giving more freedom to imagination and fantasy. In that location was also a thirst for sensation, Gothicism and exoticism together with an involvement in by ages and a new concern with Nature and its beauty.
The Romantics questioned almost every thing of the previous Age of Neo-classicism: they opposed feelings to reason, imagination to realism, inventiveness to imitation, search for the sensation to the domestic pleasure, the unknown to the known, the supernatural to the conventional, country to town, children and humble people to aristocracy, Celtic Age and Center-Age to classical Greece and Rome, the earth of the spirit to the world of things.
They were much more interested in the world of the spirit because they believed it was the identify where man could find the truthful reality and his true-cocky.(https://rosariomariocapalbo.wordpress.com/2011/03/13/romanticismneoclassicismdifferences/
NATURE: The Romantic poets were very much interested in Nature. They believed that Human being's only conservancy was the rediscovery of nature and country life and devoted themselves to a recovery of its dazzler. They saw in Nature the same divine Force which they institute in the Spirit of Man. When they needed inspiration or wanted to elevate their feelings and communicate with the World of the Spirit they went into the country because it was incommunicable to achieve it in towns that had lost their original identity. Afterwards the industrial revolution, conditions in towns were normally terrible: fume from the factories, bad housing, no sanitation and and so on.
The commencement to suggest that human being could detect his true-self in communion with nature was Jean Jack ROUSSEAU . He condemned the evils of civilization and industrialism which had corrupted " The Noble Savage". He maintained that man is born with a expert nature and that his instinctive sympathies guide him in the right management but when he comes in bear on with social, political, religious institutions and with progress and civilization, he is enslaved and corrupted past them. Rousseau considered primitive society equally a society of equals. Man had become unequal and divided considering of the growth of prosperity, itself a product of civilization.
The Romantics liked these revolutionary ideas of men with equal rights, so they asked a return of man to his primitive natural role; removing the bad effects of civilization he could be virtuous once more.
The romantic conception of nature was influenced by 3 great philosophical theories: Neo-Platonism, Pantheism and German Idealism.
Neo-Platonism, with its conception of the Globe as a project of the World of Ideas, stressed the importance to endeavor to get in impact with the World of the Spirit.
According to Pantheism Nature was moved past a Gight Power , an immanent God, whose presence was manifest in every rock and tree thus giving them a soul of their ain.
High german idealism and Schelling in detail considered Nature as something alive that shares man'southward own feelings considering they both are driven past the same animative principle.
The Romantics were interested in everything related with the Globe of the Spirit: ruined castles, churches, graveyards, ghosts, natural phenomena such equally fierce storms, torrential rivers and high mountains.
English ROMANTICISM
Romanticism took specific features in each European state: it was philosophical in Germany, revolutionary inFrance, literary in England and patriotic in Italian republic. In England information technology developed later than in France and Germany.
It is hard to find out an verbal date of birth considering when we talk of dandy literary movements the one-time and the new learning mix and coexist together for onetime. We take to fix then a conventional appointment and nosotros may choose the year 1798 when The Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge was published.
The English Romantic Age was mainly an Age of poets, fifty-fifty if some prose was produced. As far equally poesy, it is traditionally divided into two periods respective to The Get-go Generation of Poets (1798-1806) and The 2d Generation of Poets (1818-1830). To the start generation vest Wordsworth and Coleridge, while Blake is considered by many critics an early romantic poet. To the second generation belong Byron, Shelley and Keats. The two generations were bound together past the common faith in poetry, the same love for Nature and the same belief in the power of the imagination. They too shared the aforementioned pain of living in a world they disliked and they all sought refuge from existent life refusing the real world which they considered corrupt. Each of them found personal solutions: Wordsworth and Keats sought refuge in the sublime globe of Nature, Coleridge in the earth of dreams, in the supernatural and in his utopian pantisocracy, Byron and Shelley in political and social interest.
The poets of the 1st generation were mainly influenced by the French and American Revolutions which had shown that freedom could be accomplished breaking free from old and inadequate institutions and ideas. Wordsworth and Coleridge applied the same conception to poetry and made almost a revolution.
The poets of the 2nd generation were influenced by the problems coming from the Napoleonic Wars and were more socially and politically committed. Except Keats, they were involved in movements to promote the cause of independence and liberty. Byron joined the Italian Carbonari and supported the cause of the Greek confronting the Turkish while Shelley supported the Irish Catholics in their struggle for the emancipation. They did non like Wordsworth and Coleridge because these latter had revised their poems adopting them to the orthodox Christianity of the fourth dimension. They considered Wordsworth unproblematic and dull and distrusted his role as a patriotic public figure. All the poets of the 2nd generation lived very romantic lives and all died abroad, Byron inGreece, Shelley and Keats inItaly.
The romantic poetry was different from before both as to form and equally to contents. The new ideas of simplicity and democratization afflicted the Linguistic communication, also. The poetic diction of the previous Age, a very artificial language with the presence of uncommon and learned words, Latinate and frequent use of periphrasis and apostrophe, was replaced by " a selection of language really spoken by men and closer to the masses " . Information technology was the real language of people and not but a tool to embellish their works.
The HEROIC COUPLET , which had been the favourite poetic form of the eighteenth century, gave manner to a return to earlier verse forms such equally Blank Poesy (Wordsworth, Shelley), The Sonnet (Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats), the Italian Terza Rima (Shelley), the Italian Ottava Rima (Byron) and the Folk- Ballad Stanza (Coleridge, Keats).
As to the contents, rejecting the neo-classical idea of man in society, seen as a peace of a perfect whole, English Romantics focused on the individual seen at the centre of Art and Life. Post-obit the High german postal service-Kantian philosophy, they reversed the old idea of seeing the human listen as the Mirror of the Universe and considered information technology equally being itself the Creator of that Universe.
The IMAGINATION was seen as the Key to penetrate the secrets of the Universe; it was a God-like faculty, the highest and noblest gift of the poet who, through it, was able to modify or even to re-create the world around him. To do that, the imagination had to work freely and the limerick had to come spontaneously, almost unconsciously:" if poesy comes not equally naturally as the leaves to a tree, it had better not come at all" (Keats).
The POET was seen as a prophet divinely inspired, enjoying the same liberty as God Himself in the sense that in writing his verses he was free from external rules except the ones he himself imposed on his creative mind. He played an of import role every bit an intermediary betwixt man and the world of the Spirit, which he discovered and interpreted through his imagination and and so recreated and communicated it to common people.
Besides Nature and Imagination there was another important concern in the romantic menstruum: the SUBLIME , that is the search for deep feelings, exist they of hurting or pleasure. Edmund Burke fabricated a distinction between Beauty and Sublime : beauty was associated with lightness, delicacy and smoothness while the sublime with power, obscurity, fright, confinement, greatness and intense emotion (the statue of Laocoonte, for case, with the snakes that eat Laocoonte's sons).
Some other characteristic of the Romantic Age was the want to create MYTHS drawing on personal feel; information technology was what Goethe described as 'a striving for the infinite' or as Blake stated 'less than everything cannot satisfy man'. So, what was not unacceptable before for a poet, that is the want to exceed human limitation, now becomes glorious. The Romantics, however, were well enlightened that the search for the infinity was destined to fail. It was as Shelley wrote 'the desire of the moth for the star'.
ROMANTIC PROSE
Even if the English Romantic period was mainly a period of poetry, even so some prose was produced.
We may divide Romantic Prose into ii branches: fiction and not-fiction. In the not-fictional prose the ESSAY of Charles Lamb and Thomas De Quincey connected the tradition of literary journalism. The novelty was the development of a new type of Essay: the literary criticism. The greatest critic was William Hazlitt. In His Spirit of the Age, he gave us a series of portraits of his contemporaries he was a friend of: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Scott and Lamb.
In the fictional field the two great novelists of the Age were Walter Scott and Jane Austen.
SCOTT created the historical novel, a new type of novel which dealt with a series of chivalrous and fantastic adventures of the afar by, fix in a romantic atmosphere and made up of heroism, honor, loyalty, full of heroes and heroines living fantastic adventures. Scott's formula for the celebrated novel was a combination of fictional and historical elements and the union of historical events and imaginary heroes.
JANE AUSTEN, instead, declared herself an anti-romantic. She wrote Novels of Manners or Domestic novels, a kind of fiction quite conventional as to plots and characters, without any romantic heroes or heroines and adventures. They dealt with mutual characters and events taken from everyday routine life.
LOVE FOR Italia
The poets of the 2d generation had a smashing dearest for Italy. This honey originated from their refusal of the industrial society and Italia was seen every bit a state of refuge as yet untouched by industrialization. The Italian towns, above all Venice, Florence and Rome, still uncontaminated past factories, became the symbol of beauty with their harmony of natural environment and architecture. A second but not less important reason was that the Italy of the start movements for national unity and freedom represented for the English poets of the 2nd generation the achievement of their utopia, that is a society going towards liberty and justice, a social club in which the liberation of the individual was seen in relation to a community united in egalitarian, civil brotherhood.
The English language romanticism was, still, different from the Italian 1 considering the historical context was different, likewise. The Italian one was patriotic while the English grew every bit an attitude of protest and of criticism of the national context of the fourth dimension.
SOURCES OF ROMANTIC THEMES
Some of the romantic themes were already present in the 18th cent. literature in the and then called Transition Age .
Many poets had explored the theme of Nature, the thought of freedom and the oppression of city life; we may mention Pope'south pastoral Ode to the solitude or Gray'south Elegy written in a country churchyard.
The interest in the horrid and in the supernatural was present in the Graveyard Schoolhouse' of Collins and Young and in the Gothic Novel.
Social commitment and concern with homo problems tin can be establish in the works of Blake and Burns.
Blake, considered past many critics a pre-romantic, was also the first poet to innovate the thought of imagination and to bargain with babyhood linked to innocence.
Source: https://rosariomariocapalbo.wordpress.com/2011/08/02/the-romantic-age/
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