LITERATURA INGLESA II

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Class content:

•Europe and England during the

Industrial Revolution.
•The reaction of the artists of the time to
the new social order.
•Romanticism as a response.
•Romanticism - Theoretical and aesthetic
aspects.

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HISTORY AND LITERATURE

The relationship between

literature and history is as
old as the written word. Early
writings influenced the
formation of society and how
people viewed their
communities, if not their very
reality. Literature continues
to reflect history, as history
looks in the mirror that works
of literature provide.
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The main connection between literature and

history is that literature is used to report and
represent history. The two are, therefore,
intertwined with one another. The biggest
difference between literature and history is that
the latter posits itself as fact, while the former is
taken to be an artistic form. The twin ideas of
fact and entertainment intertwine often within
literature and history to produce
historical fiction and narrative non-fiction.

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THE FRENCH REVOLUTION

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A watershed event in modern European history, the
French Revolution began in 1789 and ended in the late
1790s with the ascent of Napoleon Bonaparte. During
this period, French citizens razed and redesigned their
country’s political landscape, uprooting centuries-old
institutions such as absolute monarchy and the feudal
system. Like the American Revolution before it, the
French Revolution was influenced by Enlightenment
ideals, particularly the concepts of popular sovereignty
and inalienable rights. Although it failed to achieve all of
its goals and at times degenerated into a chaotic
bloodbath, the movement played a critical role in
shaping modern nations by showing the world the power
inherent in the will of the people.
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THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Lesson1:Romanticism in England – First impressions

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The era known as the Industrial Revolution was a

period in which fundamental changes occurred in
agriculture, textile and metal manufacture,
transportation, economic policies and the social
structure in England. This period is appropriately
labeled revolution, for it thoroughly destroyed the
old manner of doing things; yet the term is
simultaneously inappropriate, for it connotes abrupt
change. The changes that occurred during this period
(1760-1850), in fact, occurred gradually. The year
1760 is generally accepted as the eve of the
Industrial Revolution. In reality, this eve began more
than two centuries before this date.
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ROMANTICISM
Romanticism was a
literary movement that
swept through virtually
every country of
Europe, the United
States, and Latin
America that lasted
from about 1750 to
1870.

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By the late 18th century in France and Germany,

literary taste began to turn from classical and
neoclassical conventions. The generation of
revolution and wars, of stress and upheaval had
produced doubts on the security of the age of reason.
Doubts and pessimism now challenged the hope and
optimism of the 18th century. Men felt a deepened
concern for the metaphysical problems of existence,
death, and eternity. It was in this setting that
Romanticism was born.

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The literary period and movement known as
"Romanticism" (c. 1785/1789 - 1830) emerged in an
Age of Revolutions and instituted revolutions in
literature marked by sharp and conscious departures
from past literary philosophies and practices.
However, literary movements do NOT emerge out of
nowhere and the roots of Romanticism can be traced
back to earlier 18th century developments.
Romanticism began in the late eighteenth century
as a broad movement of protest against the
aristocratic culture of the Ancien regime and against
the neo-classical aesthetic upon which that culture
was based.
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England
Although in literature romantic elements were known
much earlier, as in the Elizabethan dramas, many
critics now date English literary romanticism from the
publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical
Ballads (1798). In the preface to the second edition
of that influential work (1800), Wordsworth stated his
belief that poetry results from "the spontaneous
overflow of powerful feelings," and pressed for the
use of natural everyday diction in literary works.
Coleridge emphasized the importance of the poet's
imagination and discounted adherence to arbitrary
literary rules.
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Germany - The Sturm und Drang school, with its obsessive
interest in medievalism, prepared the way for romanticism.
Friedrich Schlegel first used the term romantic to designate a
school of literature opposed to classicism, and he also applied
the philosophical ideas of Immanuel Kant and J. G. Fichte to
the "romantic ideal." Major German writers associated with
romanticism include G. E.Lessing, J. G. Herder,
Friedrich Hölderlin, Schiller, and particularly Goethe, who had
a mystic feeling for nature and for Germany's medieval past.

France and Other European CountriesThe credo of French

romanticism was set forth by Victor Hugo in the preface to his
drama Cromwell (1828) and in his play Hernani (1830). Hugo
proclaimed the freedom of the artist in both choice and
treatment of a subject.
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Resulting in part from the libertarian and egalitarian

ideals of the French Revolution, the romantic
movements had in common only a revolt against the
prescribed rules of classicism. The basic aims of
romanticism were various: a return to nature and to
belief in the goodness of humanity; the rediscovery
of the artist as a supremely individual creator; the
development of nationalistic pride; and the
exaltation of the senses and emotions over reason
and intellect. In addition, romanticism was a
philosophical revolt against rationalism.

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Kant advocated the philosophy of Individualism: that

authority could be located in the self (rather than in
society, tradition, and received knowledge), yet he
did not believe that individuals should look only to
the "light of reason" for guidance. In 1781, Kant also
published his Critique of Pure Reason, in which he
questioned the power of Reason to provide the most
significant forms of knowledge, and asserted that
Feeling or Sensibility also offered a powerful guide to
individuals engaged in ethical struggles to locate,
experience, and represent the good.

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Characteristics of Romantic Literature

Romanticism saw a shift from faith in reason to faith in the
senses, feelings, and imagination; a shift from interest in
urban society to an interest in the rural and natural;
a shift from public, impersonal poetry to subjective poetry;
and from concern with the
scientific and mundane to interest in the mysterious and
infinite. Mainly they cared
about the individual, intuition, and imagination.

1. Imagination and emotion are more important than reason

and formal rules;
imagination is a gateway to transcendent experience and
truth.

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2. Along the same lines, intuition and a reliance on “natural”

feelings as a guide to
conduct are valued over controlled, rationality.
3. Romantic literature tends to emphasize a love of nature, a
respect for
primitivism, and a valuing of the common, "natural" man;
Romantics idealize
country life and believe that many of the ills of society are a
result of
urbanization.
a. Nature for the Romantics becomes a means for divine
revelation
(Wordsworth)
b. It is also a metaphor for the creative process—(the river in
“Kubla Khan).
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4. Romantics were interested in the Medieval past, the

supernatural, the mystical, the “gothic,” and the exotic;
5. Romantics were attracted to rebellion and revolution,
especially concerned with human rights, individualism,
freedom from oppression;
6. There was emphasis on introspection, psychology,
melancholy, and sadness. The
art often dealt with death, transience and mankind’s feelings
about these things.
The artist was an extremely individualistic creator whose
creative spirit was
more important than strict adherence to formal rules and
traditional procedures.
a. The Byronic hero
b. Emphasis on the individual and subjectivity.
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It praised imagination over reason, emotions over

logic, and intuition over science-making way for a
vast body of literature of great sensibility and
passion. In their choice of heroes, also, the romantic
writers replaced the static universal types of
classical 18th-century literature with more complex,
idiosyncratic characters. They became preoccupied
with the genius, the hero, and the exceptional figure
in general, and a focus on his passions and inner
struggles and there was an emphasis on the
examination of human personality and its moods and
mental potentialities.

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Literature of "SENSIBILITY": Influenced by these

mid- and later 18th-century philosophies asserting
the innate human capacity for "benevolence,"
"exaggerated forms of sympathy and benevolence
became a prominent aspect of eighteenth-century
culture and literature. It was a commonplace in
popular morality that readiness to shed a
sympathetic tear is the sign of both polite breeding
and a virtuous heart, and such a view was often
accompanied by the observation that sympathy with
another's grief, unlike personal grief, is a pleasurable
emotion, hence to be sought as a value in itself . . ."
(Abrams 190).
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The idea of a vanished "golden age," variously

identified as a "lost Garden of Eden" or the "era of
classical Greece" located in humanity's distant past
when people "lived naturally, simply, and freely" in a
happy, innocent "state of nature" "before society and
civilization had even begun," while certainly not a
new idea, gained prominence in the 18th century
(Abrams, 171, 170; emphasis added). Human history
was viewed as a long, steady decline and fall from
that ideal state, to the so-called highly "civilized"
present with its "increasing degree of artifice,
complexity, inhibitions, prohibitions, . . . anxieties
and discontents" (Abrams 170, 171).
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LITERATURA INGLESA I

It praised imagination over reason, emotions over

logic, and intuition over science-making way for a
vast body of literature of great sensibility and
passion. In their choice of heroes, also, the romantic
writers replaced the static universal types of classical
18th-century literature with more complex,
idiosyncratic characters. They became preoccupied
with the genius, the hero, and the exceptional figure
in general, and a focus on his passions and inner
struggles and there was an emphasis on the
examination of human personality and its moods and
mental potentialities.

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Romantic style:
- Libertarianism
- Nature
- The Lure of the Exotic

Lesson1:Romanticism in England – First impressions

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Lesson1:Romanticism in England – First impressions