The Romantic Period

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The Romantic Period

• 1785-1830

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The House of Bourbon
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France The House of Bourbon
Bourbon Dynasty1643 - 1715   Louis XIV (the Sun
King) 1715 - 1774   Louis XV (the Beloved)1774
- 1792   Louis XVIFirst Republic 1792-1804
Louis XVIIBonaparte Dynasty First Empire
1804-1815 Napoleon Bourbon Dynasty
Restored1815-1824 Louis XVIII
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England The House of Hanover
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ROMANTIC REVOLUTIONS
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American Revolution1775-1783

• 1763 Britain began to impose taxes upon the
  colonies which were viewed as illegal
• Broad intellectual and social shifts
• republican ideals liberty and rights as central
  values, makes the people as a whole sovereign,
  rejects aristocracy and inherited political
  power, expects citizens to be independent and
  calls on them to perform civic duties, and is
  strongly opposed to corruption.
• liberal democracy representative democracy
  (with free and fair elections) along with the
  protection of minorities, the rule of law, a
  separation of powers, and protection of liberties
  (thus the name liberal) of speech, assembly,
  religion, and property.
• Colonies alliance with France
• 1776 Declaration of Independence
• 1787 Constitution and Bill of Rights

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Tom Paine1737-1809

• Quaker
• Met Ben Franklin in London who advised him to
  move to America
• 1776 Common Sense attacked British monarchy
  and argued for American independence
• 1787 Returned to Britain
• 1791 The Rights of Man proposed universal male
  suffrage, progressive taxes, family allowances,
  old age pensions, maternity grants and abolition
  of House of Lords
• 1792 Became a French citizen and elected to
  National Convention opposed execution of Louis
  XVI
• 1794 Age of Reason questioned truth of Old
  Testament and Christianity
• 1802 returned to America

Auguste Milliere, Thomas Paine National Portrait
Gallery, London
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French Revolution and Napoleon1789-1815

• 1789 Fall of Bastille and Declaration of the
  Rights of Man
• 1792 September Massacres of imprisoned nobility
• 1793 The Reign of Terror
• Execution of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette
• France declared war against Britain
• 1794 Fall of Robespierre
• 1804 Napoleon crowned Emperor of France
• 1815 Napoleons defeat at Waterloo

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Jean-Pierre Louis Laurent Houel (1735-1813),
Prise de la Bastille ("The storm of the
Bastille").
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1812 Napoleon in his study
1797The Young General
Images of Napoleon By Jacques Louis David
1800 Napoleon at St. Bernard
1804 The coronation
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Jacques Louis David, 1805-07 The coronation of
the Emperor Napoleon I
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Edmund Burke1729-97

• Anglo-Irish statesman and philosopher
• 1756 A Vindication of Natural Society A View
  of the Miseries and Evils Arising to Mankind
  treatise on anarchy
• 1757 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of
  Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful treatise
  on aesthetics
• 1765-94 Whig member of House of Commons
• Opposed absolute monarchy and supported American
  colonies against the king
• 1790 Reflections on the Revolution in France
  saw French Revolution as a violent rebellion
  against tradition which would end in disaster.

Joshua Reynolds, Edmund Burke Scottish National
Portrait Gallery
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Mary Wollstonecraft1759-97

• Professional writer, philosopher and feminist
• 1790 Vindication of the Rights of Men response
  to Burke in defense of the ideals of the French
  Revolution
• 1792 A Vindication of the Rights of Women
• 1794 An Historical and Moral View of the French
  Revolution
• 1796 Letters Written During a Short Residence
  in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark
• 1797 married William Godwin
• Died of childbirth fever
• 1798 William Godwin published Memoirs of the
  Author of a Vindication of the Rights of Woman

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William Godwin1756-1836

• Journalist, political philosopher and novelist
• Founder of philosophical anarchism
• 1793 An Enquiry Concerning Political Justice
• 1794 Things as They Are or the Adventures of
  Caleb Williams first mystery novel
• 1799 Fleetwood. or The New Man of Feeling
• 1817 Mandeville
• 1797 married Mary Wollstonecraft
• 1801 married Mary Jane Clairmont
• Championed individual against coercive
  government

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Eugene Delacroix Liberty Leading the People
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Official British Reaction to the French
Revolution

• Curtailment of civil liberties and harsh
  repression
• suspension of the writ of habeus corpus
• advocates of political change charged with
  treason
• 1791 Rejection of a bill to abolish the slave
  trade
• 1793 declaration of war against France

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Napoleonic Wars1805-1815
William Sadler, The Battle of Waterloo
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Industrial Revolution

• Power-driven machinery replaced hand labor
• 1765 James Watt the steam engine
• Industry moved from homes and workshops to
  factories
• Population moved from agricultural countryside
  to industrial cities
• Enclosure of commons into privately owned
  estates
• Laissez faire economic policy free operation
  of economic laws governmental non-interference
• 1776 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

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CLASSICISM vs. ROMANTICISM
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Neo-Classicism vs Romanticism

• Greek/Roman influence
• Emphasis on Society
• Age of Reason
• Rationality
• Philosophy
• Deism
• Euro-centric
• Cities
• Enlightenment
• Science

• Medieval/Oriental influence
• Emphasis on Individual
• Age of Passion
• Emotion
• Imagination
• Spirituality
• Interest in the Exotic
• Nature pastoral and wild
• Revolution
• Social Justice

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NATURENeo-Classical Romantic

• Universal
• Subject to human control
• Gardens
• Source of peace and tranquillity
• Untamed nature dangerous/evil

• Particular
• Beyond human control
• Mountains, oceans, forests
• Source of inspiration and spirituality
• Untamed nature exhilarating/sublime

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Gainsborough, St James Park
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Friedrich, Solitary Tree
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LOVENeo-Classical Romantic

• Universal
• Subject to human control
• Marriage
• Social Contract
• Economic Contract
• Attraction between social and intellectual equals
• Source of peace and tranquillity

• Particular
• Beyond human control
• Passion
• Individual choice
• Search for soul-mate
• Forbidden attractions social, exotic, incestual
• Source of inspiration, exhilaration and despair

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Gaspar Netscher A Musical Evening
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John Smibert, Dean George Berkeley and His Family
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Caspar David Friedrich, Woman at Sunrise
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William Blake The Enslavement of Experience

The Transcendance of Imagination
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Neo-Classical Artist

• Social
• Arbiter of Taste
• Elitist
• Moral
• Intellectual
• Critic

Louis Michel van Loo Portrait of Diderot
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Romantic Artist

• Loner
• Unconventional
• Amoral
• Genius
• Prophet

George Gordon Lord Byron
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Romantic Drama
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Influences

• 17th c. French Neo-Classical and English
  Restoration drama of wit and manners became 18th
  theatre of sensibility
• 18th 19th c. German Romantic Theatre
• Revival of Shakespeare
• Rise of star system actor-managers
• Technical advances in staging and lighting

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German Romantic Theater

• Stürm und Drang
• Looked to Shakespeare for models
• Sweeping historical and tragic dramas
• Began to emphasize historical accuracy in
  costumes and settings
• Improved theatrical effects -- footlights,
  revolving stages, theatrical machinery

Schiller and Goethe
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French Romantic Drama

• Revolt against Neo-Classicism fueled by French
  Revolution
• Action Passion Human Nature
• Alexander Dumas, pere, 1802-1870
• Henri III et sa cour (Henry III and His Court,
  1829)
• For Antony (1831)
• La Tour de Nesle (1832)
• Novelist Three Musketeers, Count of Monte
  Cristo
• Alfred de Vigny, 1797-1863
• 1820s Alexandrine verse adaptations of Romeo
  and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice and Othello
• La Marechale dAncre (1831)
• Quitte pour la Peur (1833
• Chatterton (1835)

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Victor Hugo, 1802-85
Poet, Novelist, Dramatist -- best known for his
novels, The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) and
Les Miserables (1862)

• 1827 Cromwell
• 1829 Marion de Lorme banned by the censors
• 1830 Hernani caused a riot at Theatre Francais
• 1832 The King Takes his Amusement banned by
  the censors -- Verdis Rigoletto
• 1833 Lucrece Borgia and Maria Tudor
• 1835 Angelo
• 1838 Ruy Blas
• 1843 Les Burgraves

Scene from Hernani painted by L. Ceosio
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English Closet Drama
Manfred on the JungfrauFord Madox Brown 1842

• Closet drama drama meant more to be read than
  performed
• Prominent in the early 19th c. when melodrama
  and burlesque dominated the theater, and poets
  attempted to raise dramatic standards
• Joanna Baillie Plays on the Passions, 1798-1812
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge Remorse, 1813
• George Gordon Lord Byron Manfred, 1817
• Percy Bysshe Shelleys The Cenci and Prometheus
  Unbound, 1819
• Robert Brownings Strafford (1837) and Pippa
  Passes (1841)

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Melodrama

• Comes from "music drama" music was used to
  increase emotions or to signify characters
  (signature music).
• Theatre of sentimentality -- emotional appeal
• Simplified moral universe good and evil
  embodied in stock characters
• Heroes and villains -- and lily-pure heroines
• Sensationalistic fires, explosions, drownings,
  etc.
• Wide popular appeal

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Uncle Toms Cabindramatizations based on novel
by Harriet Beecher Stowe

• George L. Aikens was the most popular--1853. Six
  acts, done without an afterpiece established
  the single-play format. 325 performances in New
  York.
• In the 1870s, at least 50 companies doing it in
  the U.S.
• In 1899 500 companies.
• In 1927 12 still doing it.
• 12 movie versions since 1900.
• The most popular melodrama in the world until the
  First World War.

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Romantic Prose Genres

• Literary criticism
• Autobiography
• The Novel
• Historical novels
• Novels of manners
• Novels of sensibility
• Gothic novels

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Literary Criticism

• Literary critics became the arbiters of taste
• Debate over the artistic value as well as the
  utilitarian value of critical literature
• 1802 Edinburgh Review
• 1809 Quarterly Review

Thomas DeQuincy
William Hazlitt
Charles Lamb
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
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Autobiography

• The term was first used by the poet Robert
  Southey in 1809 in the English periodical
  Quarterly Review
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions (1781-88)
• Dorothy Wordsworth, The Grasmere Journals
  (1799)
• Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an Opium Eater,
  1822
• Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of
  Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, (1845)

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Historical Novels

• Novels that reconstruct a past age, often when
  two cultures are in conflict
• Fictional characters interact with with
  historical figures in actual events
• Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) is considered the
  father of the historical novel The Waverly
  Novels (1814-1819) and Ivanhoe (1819)

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Jane Austen and the Novel of Manners

• Novels dominated by the customs, manners,
  conventional behavior and habits of a particular
  social class
• Often concerned with courtship and marriage
• Realistic and sometimes satiric
• Focus on domestic society rather than the larger
  world
• Other novelists of manners Anthony Trollope,
  Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Margaret
  Drabble

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Novels of Sentiment

• Novels in which the characters, and thus the
  readers, have a heightened emotional response to
  events
• Connected to emerging Romantic movement
• Laurence Sterne (1713-1768) Tristam Shandy
  (1760-67)
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) The
  Sorrows of Young Werther (1774)
• Francois Rene de Chateaubriand (1768-1848)
  Atala (1801) and Rene (1802)
• The Brontës Anne Brontë Agnes Grey (1847)
  Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights (1847), Charlotte
  Brontë, Jane Eyre (1847)

Laurence Sterne bySir Joshua Reynolds
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The BrontësCharlotte (1816-55), Emily (1818-48),
Anne (1820-49)

• Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre transcend
  sentiment into myth-making
• Wuthering Heights plumbs the psychic unconscious
  in a search for wholeness, while Jane Eyre
  narrates the female quest for individuation
• Brontë.info website of Brontë Society and
  Haworth Parsonage
• The Victorian Web

portrait by Branwell Brontë of his sisters,
Anne, Emily, and Charlotte (c. 1834)
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Gothic Novels

• Novels characterized by magic, mystery and
  horror
• Exotic settings medieval, Oriental, etc.
• Originated with Horace Walpoles Castle of
  Otranto (1764)
• William Beckford Vathek, An Arabian Tale (1786)
• Anne Radcliffe 5 novels (1789-97) including The
  Mysteries of Udolpho
• Widely popular genre throughout Europe and
  America Charles Brockden Browns Wieland (1798)
  
• Contemporary Gothic novelists include Anne Rice
  and Stephen King

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Frankenstein Mary Wollstonecraft
Shelley1797-1851

• Inspired by a dream in reaction to a challenge
  to write a ghost story
• Published in 1817 (rev. ed. 1831)
• A Gothic novel influenced by Promethean myth
• The first science fiction novel

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Lyric Poetry

• Search for an authentic language of feeling
  rather than artifice
• Wordsworth the spontaneous overflow of
  powerful feelings recollected in tranquility
• 1st person voice of the poem during this
  period usually associated with the poet
  sometimes biographical and confessional
• Revived older poetic forms
• blank verse unrhymed iambic pentameter
• the sonnet
• the ballad
• the ode

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The Poet as Rock Star
Keats
Coleridge
Shelley
Byron
Wordsworth
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The Poet as Rock Star
Leopardi
Heine
Pushkin
Novalis