British Literature Unit V The Romantics 1780 1830

British Literature Unit V The Romantics 1780 - 1830

Romantic Era • Describes life and literature in England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century • Rejection of the values and ideas of the Age of Reason • Seen as more daring, individual, and imaginative • Attempt to discover mystery and wonder of world

Romantics • • Focus on individual rather than society Optimistic rather than pessimistic Believe in possibility of human progress Espoused democratic values

Rebellion • Rebellion against reason and tradition • Focus on real world creates an inability to transcend to glimpse ideal William Wordsworth, John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley

Revolution • New values closely linked to French Revolution • Began in 1789 • Fight for “liberty, equality, fraternity” Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix

Human Nature • Saw humanity as good but corrupted by social institutions (religion, education, government) • Saw French Revolution as hope for liberty and equality for all

Slow Rise of Democracy • • • England was parliamentary state Monarchy was a figurehead Parliament not truly representative until 1832 Extended right to vote to the middle class Working class and women were still were not enfranchised

Industrial Revolution • Changed England from an agricultural to an industrial society • Shift from home manufacturing to factory production • Made England prosperous and powerful • Yet exploited workers in deplorable conditions

Urban Life • Towns grew to cities • Villagers left home to seek work in the factories • Lived in filthy slums • Labor from sunrise to sunset for meager wages • Even children worked in coal mines and textile factories • No religious training, medical care or education for poor children

Serving the Poor • Gradually England awakened to social responsibility • Sunday schools organized • Hospitals built • Movements to reform prisons • Regulation of child labor • Reflection of new spirit of age

English Literature • • Robert Burns Thomas Gray Blake Wordsworth Shelley Keats Believed in intuition, emphasis on individual emotion, interest in humble life, belief in healing power of the natural world

Looking Backward • • • Looked back on older English literature Relished sense of medieval atmosphere Sense of mystery Sense of supernatural Themes of courage, hatred, death and love

The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich