6. 6. 6. 6. PREPREPREPRE ----

ROMATICISMROMATICISMROMATICISMROMATICISM

ANDANDANDAND

ROMANTICISMROMANTICISMROMANTICISMROMANTICISM

The Graveyard Poetry

� Macpherson’s: Ossian

� Thomas Gray: Elegy written in an English Courtyard

PRE ROMANTICISM

New features: originality and creativity; spontaneity; emphasis onIndividual genius; interest in the unknown and in the supernatural; free imagination; sensations, interest in Middle Ages, subjectivefeeling for nature; exotic time and places.

New sources of inspiration: Nordic and Celtic cultures; The Middle Ages, ancient national folk poetry (T. Percy); The Works of Ossian (J. Macpherson)

William

Blake

� Reality of contemporary world and

potentiality of the spiritual world

� Exaltation of art as a creative

vision

� Freedom and love for justice

� God as spiritual power in man

� Poet and prophet

� sources: Divina Commedia by

Dante

� Works:

� Song of Innocence and

���� Songs of Experience.

(1757 – 1827)

Mary Shelley(1797 – 1851)

� Novelist, short story writer, dramatist,

essayist, biographer, and travel writer,

� She married the poet and philosopher

Percy Bysshe Shelley.

� Her father was the political

philosopher William Godwin, and her

mother was the philosopher and feminist

Mary Wollstonecraft.

���� Frankenstein or the Modern Prometeus (1818)

• Power of science: manipulation of nature , creation of man

• The different, the alien

• The double.

Sir Walter Scott (1771 -1832 )

� Reference to the past

� England and Scotland

� Journey of young man towards adult age

� History made by masses not by great protagonists.

Works (about 90 novels) :

� Rob Roy (1818): Scottish clans

� Ivanhoe (1819-20): crusades and clash between Saxons and Normans; reference to Robin Hood.

� Waverly (1814): tradition and cultures of Scotland

� Richard I or The Talisman (1825): Crusades in the Holy Land

Jane

Austen

�She did not marry to be indipendent

(professional writer)

�Clear illustration of the society

�Ironical tone.

Works

� Sense and Sensibility (1811)

�Pride and Prejudice (1813)

�Mansfield Park (1814)

�Emma (1815)

�Northanger Abbey (1817)

�Persuasion (1817)

(1775 –1817)

The First Generation:

W. Wordsworth

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The Lyrical ballads (1798),

Romantic manifesto �Rime of the Ancient Mariner

� Emphasis on imagination and emotion

� Concern with subjective and particular

� Champion of value of individual

� Fight for freedom

� Interest in medieval and modern subjects

� Use of ordinary language and different poetic forms.

� Attraction for far away countries

W. Wordsworth(1770 – 1850)

S. T. Coleridge

(1772 –1834)

�� The Rime of the The Rime of the AncientAncient MarinerMariner

journeyjourney in a remote timein a remote time

VoyageVoyage intointo the the soulsoul

BalladBallad formform ((simplesimple and musical)and musical)

FromFrom the the superanturalsuperantural toto nature. nature.

inutilityinutility of crime of crime

ReligiousReligious mattermatter: : everyevery crime crime isis punishedpunished..

Second

Generation

Lord George Gordon Noel Byron

(1788 –1824)� leader of Italy’s The Carbonari against Austraia, and fought against the

Ottoman Empire in the greek war of Independence

� Where he died in Messuolunghi for fever. Aristocratic excesses, debts, love affairs, and self-imposed exile.

� At Polidori’s castle together with P. B. and Mary Shelley� (the night of Frankesnstein’s birth)

Works:� Poem: She Walks in Beauty (1919)

� Long Poems: Harold's Pilgrimage (1819); Don Juan (1824);

� The Corsair(1814� Giuseppe Verdi’s Il corsaro, Hector Berlioz’s ; Le Corsaire and Marius Petipa’s ballet Le Corsaire)

�More politically committed

�Struggle on the continent

�Classical, medieval,

and oriental inspiration

�Variety of forms

Second generation:

Percy Bisshe Shelley; John Keats

P. B. Shelley ( 1792-1822)

�Shelley's unconventional life and uncompromising idealism

�Mary shelley was his second wife.

Poems: Ozymandias, Ode to the West Wind, To a Skylark, and The Masque of Anarchy,

Alastor, Adonaïs, The Revolt of Islam, The Triumph of Life.

Plays: The Cenci (1819) and Prometheus Unbound (1820)

Gothic novels: Zastrozzi (1810) and St. Irvyne (1811)

short works The Assassins (1814), The Coliseum (1817) and The Mass (1817)

John Keats (1795 –1821):

Poetry �odes: sensual imagery,

Aestheticism

Ode on a Grecian Urn (1819)

Ode to Autumn (1819)

EdgarEdgarEdgarEdgar AllanAllanAllanAllan PoePoePoePoe1809 –1849

Romantic

American

writer

�Short

stories: to

keep the

reader’s

attention

alive

�Main themes: loneliness,

fear of unknown, double and

the link between life, death

and art.

�No place, no names:

universality of what he tells.

Works:

�Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840)

�Tales of Mistery and Imagination (1876 )

��1900, 2000 (detective and horror stories)

William Turner(1775-1851)

�landscape ����as important as history painting. �particolar light.

�fire, rain and storms.

Salisbury Cathedral

from the Bishop's GroundsBoat-building near Flatford Mill

JOHN CONSTABLE(1776 - 1837)

�Landscapes of his born-land. Rural England

�People of everyday life.