The Romantic Period (1785-1830)

1. The Romantic Period(1785-1830) 第三組: 柯香如 施安琪 鄭安婷 吳艾臻 陳慧雯

2. The Romantic Period • 1789-1815 Revolutionary and Napoleonic period in France 1793 England joins the alliance against France 1793-94 The Reign of Terror under Robespierre 1804 Napoleon crowned emperor 1815 Napoleon defeated at Waterloo • 1807 British slave trade outlawed(廢除奴隸販賣法案)

3. The Romantic Period • 1811-20 The Regency-George, Prince of Wales, act as regent for George Ⅲ, who has been declared incurably insane • 1819 Peterloo Massacre • 1820 Accession of George Ⅳ

4. The Romantic Period • For much of the twentieth century, scholars singled out sixth poets－ Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Percy Shelley, Keats, and Blake－ and constructed notions of unified Romanticism on the basis of their works.

5. Revolution and Reaction We use" Romantic period" to refer to the span between the year 1785, the midpoint of the decade in which Samuel Johnson died and Blake, Burns, and Smith published their first poems, and 1830, by which time the major writers of the preceding century were either dead or no longer productive.

6. Revolution and Reaction England experienced the ordeal of change from primarily agricultural society to a modern industrial nation. And this change occurred in a context of revolution－ first American and then more radical French－and of war ,of economic cycles of inflation and depression ,and of the constant threat to the social structure from imported revolutionary ideologies to which the ruling classes responded by the repression of traditional liberties.

7. The French Revolution • The early period of the French Revolution, marked by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the storming of the Bastille, evoked enthusiastic support from English liberals and radicals alike. Jacobin extremists→September Massacres,1792 → Robespierre →Napoleon • The new French Republic’s invasion of the Rhineland and the Netherlands, which brought England into the war against France.

8. The industrial Revolution • The shift in manufacturing resulted from the invention of power-driven machinery to replace hand labor. • Enclosing open field was socially destructive, breaking up villages, creating a landless class who either migrated to the industrial towns or remained as farm laborers, subsisting on starvation wages and the little they could obtain from parish charity. Two nations－capital(rich)˙labor(poor)

9. The industrial Revolution • The theory”let alone” →the government should maintain a policy of strict noninterference and leave people to pursue, unfettered, their private interests. • Peterloo Massacre A huge but orderly assembly at St. Peter’s Fields, Manchester, was charged by saber-wielding troops, who killed nine and severely injured hundreds more.

10. Conceptions of proper femininity As in earlier English history, women in the Romantic period were provided only limited schooling, were subjected to a rigid code of sexual behavior, and were bereft of legal rights. In this period women began to deluged by books, sermons, and magzine articles that insisted vehemently on the physical and mental differences between the sexes and instructed women that, because of these differences, they should accept that their roles in life.

11. Conceptions of proper femininity • Bluestockings-educated women-remained targets of masculine scorn. This became the first era in literary history in which women writers began to compete with men in their numbers, sales, and literary reputations. • Wollstonecraft

12. The spirit of the age • Writers working in the period 1785-1830 did not think of themselves as “Romantic”. • Lake School：Wordsworth, Coleridge, Robert Southey • Cockney School：Leigh Hunt, William Hazlitt,Keats • Satanic School：Percy Shelley, Byron

13. The spirit of the age • Many writers felt that there was something distinctive about their time－not a shared doctrine or literary quality, but pervasive intellectual and imaginative climate, which some of them called ”the spirit of the age”.

14. The spirit of the age • The imagination of many Romantic-period writers was preoccupied with revolution, and from that fact and idea they derived the framework that enabled them to think of themselves as inhabiting a distinctive period in history.

15. The spirit of the age • The deep familiarity that many Englishmen and –women had with the prophetic writings of the Bible contributed from the start to their readiness to attribute a tremendous significance to the political transformations set in motion in1789.

16. The spirit of the age Another method that writers of the period took when they sought to salvage the millennial hopes that had been dashed by the bloodshed of the Terror involved granting a crucial role to the creative imagination. Some writers rethought apocalyptic trans-formation so that it no longer depended on the political action of collective humanity but depended instead on the individual consciousness.

17. Poetic theory and poetic practice • Wordsworth undertook to justify poems by means of a critical statement of poetic principles, which fist appeared in the original Lyrical Ballads and then as an extended Preface to the second edition in 1800, still the third edition of 1802. • He set himself in opposition to the literary ancient regime, those writers of the 18 century who had imposed on poetry artificial convention that distorted its free and natural expression. • Wordsworth’s Preface deserves its reputation as a turning point in literary history, for Wordsworth gathered up isolated ideas, organized them into a coherent theory, and made them the rational for his own achievements.

18. The concept of the poet and the poem • British philosophers had devoted energy to demonstrating that human nature must be everywhere the same. • Wordsworth registered in the Preface that a poem not in outer nature but in the psychology of the individual poet, and specified that the essential materials of a poem were the inner feelings of the author.

19. Spontaneity and the impulses of feeling • Wordsworth defined good poetry not merely as the overflow but as the spontaneous overflow of feelings. • Percy Shelly suggested that “A great statue or picture grows under the power of the artist as a child in the mother’s womb.”

20. Romantic “nature poetry” • The revolution in style he proposed in the Preface was meant in to undo the harmful effects of urbanization. Because he kept his distance from city life, and because natural scenes so often provide the occasions for the writing. • Romantic poetry for present-day readers has become almost synonymous with “nature poetry.” • Romantic poems habitually endow the landscape with human life, passion, and expressiveness. Many poets respond to the outer universe as a vital entity that participates in the feelings of the observer pathetic exchange between nature and humanity.

21. The glorification of the ordinary • Burns had with great success represented “the rural scenes and rural pleasures of his natal Soil”, and aim to be the rhythms of his regional dialect. • Hazlitt and Wordsworth turned for the subjects of serious poems not only to humble country folk but to the disgraced, outcast and delinquent.

22. The supernatural, the romance, and psychological extremes • Materials like these supernatural were grouped under the rubric “romance,” which some time after the fact give the “Romantic” period its name. • There were writers who resisted poetic engagements with fantasized landscapes and strange passions. They give accounts of their sex as the delusions of romantic love, which continue the Enlightenment program and promote the rational regulation of emotion.

23. Individualism and alienation • Byron’s poetry that attracted notice and censure was its insistence on his or his hero’s self-sufficiency. • In the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth had already characterized his poetic experimentation as an exercise in artistic self-sufficiency. • Many writers’ choice to portray poetry as a product of solitude and poets as loners might be understood as a means of reinforcing the individuality of their vision.

24. Writing in the marketplace and the courts • For many commentators the most revolutionary aspect of the age was the spread of literacy and the dramatic expansion of the potential audience for literature. • By the end of the period, printing presses were driven by steam engines, and the manufacture of paper had been mechanized.

25. Writing in the marketplace and the courts • By the end of the period, printing presses were driven by steam engines, and the manufacture of paper had been mechanized. • Books had become a big business, and a few writers became celebrities. • This was the case for the best-selling Byron, particularly, whose enthusiastic public could by the 1830s purchase dinner services imprinted with illustrations from his life and works.

26. Other Literary Forms

27. Prose • The Romantic period is an age of poetry, centered on works of imagination, nonfiction prose forms ---essay, reviews, political pamphlets--- flourished during the epoch. • In eighteenth-century England, prose, particularly in the urbane, accessible style , had been valued as the medium of sociable exchange that could integrate different points of view and unify the public space known as the “republic of letters.”

28. The uncertainties about republic of letters are never far from the surface in the masterpieces of Romantic prose---a category that ranges from the pamphleteering. • This was the critic, who was empowered to tell all the others what to read. • A new professionalized breed of book reviewer claimed a degree of cultural authority to which eighteenth-century critics had never aspired.

29. The continuing tension in the relations between criticism and literature and doubt about whether critical prose can be literature---whether it can have artistic value as well as social utility---are legacies from the Romantic era. • Lamb and De Quincey developed a style that harkened back to writers who flourished before the republic of letters and who had more idiosyncratic eccentricities than eighteenth-century decorum would have allowed.

30. One consequence of the essayist’s cultivation of intimate and preference for the impressionistic over the systematic is that, when we track the history of prose to the 1820s, we see it end up in a place very different from the one it occupies at the start of the Romantic period. Participants in the Revolution controversy of the 1790s had claimed to speak for all England. By the close of the period the achievement of the familiar essay was to have bought the medium of prose within the category of “the literary”.

31. Drama • England throughout this period had a vibrant theatrical culture. But there were always many restrictions limiting what could be staged in England and many calls for reform. • The link between drama and disorder was one reason that new dramas had to meet the approval of a censor before they could be performed.

32. Another restriction was that only the theaters royal had the legal right to produce “legitimate” drama, leaving the other stages limited to entertainments---pantomimes and melodramas mainly--- in which dialog was by regulation always combined with music. • Some of the poets’ plays were composed to be read rather than performed：”closet drama”. The most capable dramatist among the poets was Percy Shelley. His tragedy The Cenci , the story of a monstrous father who rapes his daughter and is murdered by her.

33. The Novel • Novels at the start of the Romantic period were immensely popular but---as far as critics and some of the form’s half-ashamed practitioners were concerned---not quite respectable. Loose in structure, they seem to require fewer skills than other literacy genre. • It attracted an undue proportion of readers who were women, and who, by consuming its escapist stories of romantic love, risked developing false ideas of life. It likewise attracted too many writers who were women.

34. In 1814, Reviews of Scott’s Waverley series of historical renaissance--- “a new style of novel”. • The last decade of the eighteenth century saw bold experiments with novels’ form and subject matter---new ways of linking fiction with philosophy and history. • Another innovation in novel-writing took shape, as a recovery of what was old. Writers whom we mow describe as the Gothic novelists revisited the romance, the genre identified as the primitive forerunner of the modern novel, looking to a medieval.

35. Possibly this “new world” was meant to supply Romantic-period readers with an escape route from the present and form what Godwin called “things as they are”. The Gothic novelist conjure up are conceived of in fanciful, freewheeling ways. • The ascendancy of the novel in the early nineteenth century is in many ways a function of fiction writers’ new self-consciousness about their relation to works of history.

36. The only novelist before Scott whom the influential Edinburgh Review too seriously, Edgeworth builds into her “nation tales”. Scott and Edgeworth establish the master theme of the early-nineteenth-century novel：the question of how the individual consciousness intermeshes with large social structure, of how far character is the product of history and how far it is not. • Jane Austen’s brilliance as a satirist of the English leisure class often prompts literary historians to compare her works to witty Restoration and eighteenth-century comedies . As with other Romantics, Austen ‘s topic in revolution- revolutions of the mind.

37. William Wordsworth

38. William Wordsworth was born in Cockermouth in West Cumberland. When his mother died, the eight-year-old boy was sent to school at Hawkshead. William and his three brothers board in the cottage of Ann Tyson. William spent his free days and occasionally “half the night” in the sports and rambles described in the first two books of The Prelude. He also found time to read voraciously in the books owned by his young headmaster, William Taylor, who encouraged him in his inclination to poetry.

39. John Wordsworth, the poet’s father, died suddenly when William was thirteen. Wordsworth was nevertheless able in 1787 to enter St. John’s college, Cambridge University, where four years later he took his degree without distinction.

40. During his year in France, Wordsworth became a fervent supporter of the French Revolution---and he fell in love with Annette Vallon. They planned to marry despite their differences in religion and political inclinations. But after their daughter, Caroline, was born, lack of money force Wordsworth to return to England. The outbreak of war made it possible for him to rejoin Annette and Caroline.

41. In 1795 he settle in a rent-free house at Racedown, Dorsetshire, with his beloved soster, Dorothy. At that time Wordsworth met Samuel Taylor Coleridge. • Coleridge hailed Wordsworth unreservedly as “the best poet of the age.” So close was their Association that we find the same phrases occurring in poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge.

42. The government convinced that Wordsworth and Coleridge were political plotters, not poets, and Wordsworth lost their lease. The short collaboration resulted in one of the most important books of the era, Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems, published in 1798.

43. The book closed with Wordsworth’s great descriptive and meditative poem in blank verse, “Tintern Abbey”. This poem inaugurated what modern critics calls Wordsworth ‘s “myth of nature”：his presentation of “growth” of his mind to maturity, a process unfolding through the interaction between the inner world of the mind and the shaping forced of external Nature.

44. Late in 1799 William and Dorothy moved back to their native lakes. In 1802,after an amicable settlement with Annette Vallon, married Mary Hutchinson. His life after that time had many sorrows：the drowning of his brother, John；the death in 1812 of two of his and Mary’s five children；a growing rift with Coleridge. • But Wordsworth became increasingly prosperous and famous. By 1843 he was poet laureate of Great Britain. He died in 1850 at the age of eighty.

45. William Wordsworth’s works

46. “We Are Seven”

47. 一個單純的小孩 輕輕的屏住呼吸 然後感受每隻小羊的生命 牠們怎麼會知道死亡是什麼 我遇到一個農村女孩 她說她八歲 有一頭厚厚的捲髮 一捲一捲的在頭上 她有一種農村、森林的氣質 從她身上穿的寬寬的衣服看出 她的眼睛非常非常的美麗 ─她的美讓我愉悅 “小女孩，你有兄弟姊妹嗎？ 妳有幾個兄弟姊妹呢？” “幾個？總共七個” 她回答 然後納悶的看著我 “那他們在哪呢？” 我希望妳告訴我 她回答”我們有七個” 有兩個住在Conway(在北威爾斯的一個海港都市) 有兩個出海去了 有兩個躺在教堂院子裡 是我的哥哥和姊姊 在農村的教堂院子哩，我 幫他們住在我的母親的旁邊 我們有七個人

48. “你說你們其中兩個住在Conway，” 兩個出外海了 但你們有七個人，我希望你告訴我 可愛的小女孩，這是怎麼一回事？” 然後小女孩回答 “我們總共有七個男孩和女孩 有兩個已經躺在教堂院子裡了 在教堂院子的樹下” 你說說看，我的小女孩 你的小羊都還活著 假如有兩個已經躺在教堂院子裡 那麼你們只有五個人 他們的墓碑已經變綠色了，他們可能看見 小女孩回答著 “十二步或更多些從我母親的門算起 他們是緊鄰著” 我的那裡長襪的通常都是我織的 我的頭巾通常是我折的 然而在上面我坐的地方 我唱歌給他們聽 常常在日落的時候，先生 當輕輕的和美美的時候 我拿起我的小碗 在那裡吃我的晚餐 我們有七個人

49. 第一個去世的是我的姊姊，Jane 她躺在床上伸吟著 直到上帝來解救她的痛苦 然後就她走了 所以當她躺在教堂院子時 然而，當草是乾的 我們一起在她的墓地那裡玩 我的哥哥和我 “當大地被雪覆蓋成白色時 當我可以奔跑和滑雪的時候 我的哥哥John被迫要走 然後他就躺在她的旁邊了” 那你們現在有幾個人呢 我說 如果有兩個人在天堂？ 小女孩很快的回答 喔，先生，我們有七個 但是他們已經去世了，有兩個已經死掉了 他們的靈魂在天堂 那只是說的話而已，永遠 那小女孩會永遠堅持她的信念 然後說 不，我們有七個 我們有七個人

50. 我心雀躍不已 • 當我看到天上的彩虹我心雀躍不已！ • 從有生命開始，我就是如此 • 長大後，我也是如此直到我老了，我亦復如此若無此種感覺，我還能算活著嗎？ • 小孩是成人的先知， • 在有生之年，但願我能永享這份純真之情！