Download Romanticism and Revolutionary Spirit

Marcela Tichá
Romanticism and Revolutionary Spirit
At first I would like to tell you something about the real political situation during the late 18th
and 19 century.
The situation in Ireland in the 18th century was very bad after many centuries of fighting between
England and the Irish. The whole government of the country mainly Catholics was in the hands
of the Episcopalian aristocracy. Most of the great officials were Englishmen who knew almost
nothing about Ireland.Economic conditions were shocking .The bad conditions led to mass
emigrations.The American War of Independence and the French Revolution had effects on Irish
resistance.Several rebellions led to promises by the British Prime Minister William Pitt the
younger to emancipate the Irish. The result of it was the Act of Union in 1800 according to
which the Parliament of Great Britain and Ireland were united the next year.But Pittś promises of
emancipation did not happen.
George III reigned form 1760 to 1820.He was a native of England and was more interested in
domestic affairs in contrast with George I and George II.He did all he could to increase the royal
power.He tried to breake up existing parties and cabinets.But he was not completely successful.
At the end of the 18th century England became the richest country in the world and fully
recovered from the loss of the American colonies.It was transformed from an agricultural to a
manufacturing country.Factories replaced home production.There was the struggle between
capital and labour. The growth of population enabled the British to people the empire.The
population of england doubled during this century.
There were also war contflicts.The Napoleonic War 1803-1815 meant a new struggle between
the two traditional rivals,Britain and France.Napoleonś plan to invade england failed when
Admiral Nelson defeated the French at Trafalgar.In 1815 the French were definitely defeated at
the Battle of Waterloo. After two treaties of Paris Britain emerged the victory in the
Anglo-French struggle for colonial and commercial supremacy.
In the 19th century there were continuing riots of the Luddites, led by Ned Ludd, who destroyed
factory machinery. The second important thing was the great Reform Act in 1832 which
excluded the votes of rotten boroughs and gave votes to real electors for example towns like
Manchester and Birmingham. The aristocracy lost some of their previous power, while more
power went into the hands of the upper middle classes.
19th century was marked by the growth of the Brisish Empire. reason for british activities in the
Crimean War 1854-1856 was Britainś fear of Russianś designs on India. Gradually Britain
controlled a great deal of Africa, all of Australia and New Zealand and the British government
became directly responsible for law and order. In 1877 Queen Victoria who ruled from 1837 to
1901 became Empress of India. The Second Afghan War 1878-1880 caused that Russia agreed
to leave Afghanistan alone and the british agreed to leave Tibet alone.
Marcela Tichá
Introduction to Romanticism
English Romanticism started in the 1740s.The word Romanticism derives from the
French word "Romance", which referred to the languages derived from Latin and
to the works written in those languages. Even in England there were cycles of
"romances" dealing with the adventures of knights and elements.
Romanticism
English Romanticism can be seen as a creative period in which, owing to the radical
changes taking place in the historical and social spheres, the cultural view of the world
had to be reconstructed The attitudes of many Romantic writers were responses to the
French and the Industrial Revolution The remarkable expansion of industry and
economy made its effects felt in the field of economic theory which greatly flourished in
the period. Adam Smith's The wealth of Nations (1776) was a seminal book in the
development of the theory of laissez faire policies.
Spread of the Romantic Spirit
Finally, it should be noted that the revolutionary energy underlying the Romantic
Movement affected not just literature, but all of the arts--from music (consider the rise of
Romantic opera) to painting, from sculpture to architecture. Its reach was also
geographically significant, spreading as it did eastward to Russia, and westward to
America. For example, in America, the great landscape painters, particularly those of the
"Hudson River School," and the Utopian social colonies that thrived in the 19th century,
are manifestations of the Romantic spirit on this side of the Atlantic.
Spread of the Romantic Spirit
it should be noted that the revolutionary energy underlying the Romantic Movement
affected not just literature, but all of the arts--from music (consider the rise of Romantic
opera) to painting, from sculpture to architecture. Its reach was also geographically
significant, spreading as it did eastward to Russia, and westward to America.
Romanticism has very little to do with things popularly thought of as "romantic,"
although love may occasionally be the subject of Romantic art. Rather, it is an
international artistic and philosophical movement that redefined the fundamental ways in
which people in Western cultures thought about themselves and about their world.
Historical Considerations
It is one of the curiosities of literary history that the strongholds of the Romantic
Movement were England and Germany, not the countries of the romance languages
themselves.
Romanticism begins at least in the 1770's and continues into the second half of the
nineteenth century, later for American literature than for European, and later in some of
the arts, like music and painting, than in literature.
The early Romantic period is often called the "age of revolutions"--including, of course,
the American (1776) and the French (1789) revolutions--an age of upheavals in political,
economic, and social traditions, the age which witnessed the initial transformations of
the Industrial Revolution. A revolutionary energy was also at the core of Romanticism.
Some of its major aspects have survived into the twentieth century and still affect our
contemporary period.
Imagination
The imagination was elevated to a position as the supreme faculty of the mind..
Marcela Tichá
Imagination is the primary faculty for creating all art.. The symbol of opposites is a
central ideal for the Romantics. Finally, Romantics "read" nature as a system of
symbols.
Nature
"Nature" meant many things to the Romantics. Romantics gave greater attention to
describing natural phenomena. this is true of Romantic landscape painting as well as
Romantic nature poetry. Romantic nature poetry is essentially a poetry of meditation.
Symbolism and Myth
Symbolism and myth were given great importance in the Romantic art.
Other Concepts: Emotion, Lyric Poetry, and the Self
There were other three aspects of Romanticism. Beside imagination they very
ephasised intuition, instincts, and feelings, and Romantics generally called for greater
attention to the emotions. The "poetic speaker" became less a persona and more the
direct person of the poet. The artist-as-hero is a specifically Romantic type.
Individualism: The Romantic Hero
The Romantics asserted the importance of the individual, the unique, even the
eccentric. Consequently they opposed the character typology of neoclassical drama.
In another way, of course, Romanticism created its own literary types.
I in both Germany and England there was continued interest in the ancient classics,
the Middle Ages and the Baroque, and they embraced the writer whom Voltaire had
called a barbarian, Shakespeare. Although interest in religion and in the powers of
faith were prominent during the Romantic period, the Romantics generally rejected
absolute systems, whether of philosophy or religion, in favor of the idea that each
person must create the system by which to live.
The Everyday and the Exotic
The attitude of many of the Romantics to the everyday, social world around them was
complex. It is true that they advanced certain realistic techniques, such as the use of
"local color" (through down-to-earth characters.
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The Romantic Artist in Society
The Romantics had various opinions toward the "real" social world around them.
They were often politically and socially involved, but at the same time they began to
distance themselves from the public. As noted earlier, high Romantic artists
interpreted things through their own emotions, and these emotions included social
and political things.--. So artists sometimes took public stands, or wrote works with
socially or politically oriented subject matter. the gulf between "odd" artists and their
sometimes shocked audience began to widen. Unfortunately, in many ways, this
distance between artist and public remains with us today.
ENGLISH ROMANTICISM
English Romanticism is best represented by poetry. The great English Romantic poets are
usually grouped into two generations: the first, represented by William Blake, William
Wordsworth and S. Taylor Coleridge; while the poets of the second generation were John Keats,
P. Bysshe Shelley and G. Gordon Byron. The poets of the 1st generation were characterized by
the attempt to theorize about poetry, they fervently supported the French Rev. with its ideals of
freedom being disappointed by the terror and the Napoleonic wars and by the results of the
Industrial Rev.
The poets of the second generation instead all died very young and away from home, in
Mediterranean countries, especially Italy; they also experienced political disillusionment, which
results in the clash between the ideal and reality in their poetry. Poetry thus became a means to
challenge the cosmos, nature, political and social life, or to escape from all this. There are three
different attitudes of the three poets: the anti-conformist, rebellious and cynical attitude of the
"Byronic hero", the revolutionary spirit of Shelley’s "Prometheus" and Keats’s escape into the
world of the past or of classical beauty. .
Recent Developments
And what about the recent development?it is clear that Romanticism transformed
Western culture in many ways that survive into our own times. Today a number of
literary theorists emphasize two major Romantic perceptions: that the literary text is a
separate, individuated, living "organism"; and that the artist is a independent genius
who creates original works of art .