What is Romanticism?
Romanticism:
- The main literary movement in the late 17th and 18 century
- Friedrich Schlegel’s defined literature as “depicting emotional matter in an imaginative
form” & Victor Hugo’s phrase “liberalism in literature”
- Imagination, emotion and freedom focal points
● Characteristics
Neoclassicism:
Romantic Period
Romanticism
- It covers a range of developments in art, literature, music and philosophy, spanning the
late 18th and early 19th centuries. The ‘Romantics’ would not have used the term
themselves: the label was applied retrospectively, from around the middle of the 19th
century.
- For the world to be regenerated, the Romantics said that it was necessary to start all over
again with a childlike perspective. They believed that children were special because they
were innocent and uncorrupted, enjoying a precious affinity with nature. Romantic verse
was suffused with reverence for the natural world.
- The Romantics were inspired by the environment, and encouraged people to venture into
new territories – both literally and metaphorically. In their writings they made the world
seem a place with infinite, unlimited potential.
Romanticism is an international artistic and philosophical movement → redfined the
thoughts of people in western culture about themselves and their world (sublime)
The early romantic period is often referred to as the ‘age of revolutions’, involving the
American (1776) and French (1789) revolution - a time of upheavals in political,
economic and social traditions. Also witnessed the initial transformations of the
industrial. This revolutional energy was at the core of romanticism - set out to transform
theory, practice of poetry (and all forms of art) and the way we perceive the world. →
Key influence of twentieth century and contemporary period.
- Imagination was elevated to a supreme faculty of the mind which contrasted
distinctly with the traditional arguments for the supremacy of reason
-
Romanticism
- Advocating freedom and independence, many artists and philosophers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries challenged the way people looked at the world, emphasizing the integrity of the individual and refusing to
bow to convention.
- Blake, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Keats and Shelley were pre-eminent among the Romantic poets.
-
Female Gothic xx
●
● Often women are binarily categorised into innocent virgins and damsels in distress
● Anne Radcliffe, Mary Shelley and the Brontes.
● Explores female sexuality
● Exploring female main characters transcending the boundaries set by John Ruskin’s 2
SPhere model
● Women’s confinement explored.
.
Female Gothic xx
Rebecca presents an intrusion into a space which has been the scene of a desiring and/or
murderous action in the past.
Female Goth Goth
Female authors of female gothic novels use their trapped heroines as a tool, exploring
anxieties concerning marriage, childbirth, and independence or lack thereof through the
seemingly supernatural. The female gothic imparted lessons for domestic life.
Virgins in distress and demons in disguise
The very words "Gothic heroine" immediately conjure up a wealth of images for the
modern reader: a young, attractive woman (virginity required) running in terror through an
old, dark, crumbling mansion in the middle of nowhere, from either a psychotic man or a
supernatural demon. She is always terminally helpless and more than a bit screechy, but
is inevitably "saved" by the good guy/future husband in the nick of time.
