THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT

(1620/1648-1781/1789)ROMANTICISM(1798-1832)

1620: publication of Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum.

1648: end of Thirty Years’ War.

1781: publication of Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

1789: French Revolution

1798: publication of The Lyrical Ballads, by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

1832: Sir Walter Scott dies.

THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT ROMANTICISM

Industrial Revolution French Revolution

o working hourso social inequality o employers vs. employees

o freedomo equality o brotherhood

THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT ROMANTICISM

Rules in art National traditions

Reason

Reality

Science

Individual

Freedom

Universal myths Feelings, passions

Imagination, creativity

Nature

Society, civilization

BRITISH WRITERS OF THE AGE OF

ENLIGHTENMENT

DANIEL DEFOE (1660-1731)

English businessman, journalist, pamphleteer and prolific author wrote Robinson Crusoe (1719).

First published when he was almost sixty years old, Defoe is considered by many to have written the first English novel.

He wrote Crusoe in the style of social realism in which he is the observant reporter, historian, humorist, and grand story teller.

JONATHAN SWIFT (1667-1745) Irish cleric, political pamphleteer,

satirist, and author wrote Gulliver's Travels (1726).

First published under the pseudonym Lemuel Gulliver Gulliver's Travels is considered Swift's masterpiece, a culmination of his active years in politics with the Whigs then Tories.

Gulliver's Travels is a timeless illustration of the pettiness of politics, people, and the games they play.

BRITISH ROMANTIC WRITERS

WILLIAM BLAKE (1757-1827) From a young age, William Blake claimed to

have seen visions. He always was a radical mystic.

Poet, intellectual, craftsman, W. Blake was a publisher, printer, bookseller, art exhibitor, so that he printed, sold and exhibited his own works.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834)

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH 1770-1850)

o stayed in France for a while and supported the French Revolution.

o was forced to return to Britain by his family, who refused to give him money.

o planned to establish a “communist” settlement in America with two other young intellectuals.

o could not carry out his project because of lack of money.

Wordsworth and Coleridge became friends and wrote the British Romantic Manifesto, which was The Preface

to the 1800 edition of a verse book titled Lyrical Ballads, first published in 1798.

W. Wordsworth always sang of nature and trascended everyday reality.

S.T. Coleridge conjured up eerie and mysterious facts and people through bright images. Poems: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Christabel, Kubla Khan.

SIR WALTER SCOTT (1771-1832)

• Walter Scott became enormously successful writing historical novels, many of which were set in 17th and 18th century Scotland.

• Rob Roy (the story takes place in Britain just before the 1715 Jacobite Rising, with much of Scotland in turmoil, published in 1817)

• Ivanhoe (set in 12th-century England, published in 1820)

LORD BYRON (1788-1824) Byron was celebrated in life for

aristocratic excesses, including huge debts, numerous love affairs, rumours of a scandalous incestuous liaison with his half sister Augusta, and self-imposed exile.

Some Byron’s poems were dedicated to his half-sister after he left England on April 25, 1816 at the age of twenty-eight.

Byron never saw Augusta again.   He died eight years later in Greece on April 19, 1824 at the age of thirty-six.

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY (1792-1822)

He completed Prometheus Unbound, wrote "The Mask of Anarchy", "Ode to the West Wind", the satirical "Peter Bell The Third", his long political odes, "To Liberty" and "To Naples", the "Letter to Maria Gisbourne" and "The Witch of Atlas". Much of this work was inspired by news of political events, which also produced a number of short, angry, propaganda poems, including "Song to the Men of England“ and "England 1819". He also wrote several pure lyric pieces including "To a Skylark" and "The Cloud".

SHELLEY AND BYRON Byron did not meet Percy B. Shelley (1792-1822) in Britain,

but in Geneva. They became friends. In the summer of 1816, Percy Shelley, his mistress Mary

Shelley, and her stepsister Claire visit Lord Byron at Lake Geneva.

Byron challenges each to write a horror story, and Mary Shelley begins her novel, Frankenstein, first published in 1818.

MARY SHELLEY (1797-1851) Mary’s greatest work is

Frankenstein (1818), which she began when she was nineteen years old, after having spent the summer at Byron’s house in Geneva with her husband. As the group sat around the fire one rainy evening, Byron suggested that each should write their own ghost story, and from this competition Frankenstein was born.

The novel has never, since its first publication, gone out of print.

She also wrote five other major novels, including Valperga and The Last Man, biographies, essays and short stories.

JOHN KEATS (1795-1821)

Keats’ poetry was characterized by elaborate word choice and sensual imagery.

His odes, including Ode on a Grecian Urn and Ode to a Nightingale, which many consider to be his most distinctive poetical achievements, were all composed in 1819.