British Literature

1
British Literature

• Unit V
• The Romantics 1780- 1830

2
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

3
Romantics

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

4
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
5
Revolution

• New values closely linked to French Revolution
• Began in 1789
• Fight for liberty, equality, fraternity

Liberty Leading the People by Eugene Delacroix
6
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

7
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

8
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

9
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

10
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

11
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

12
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

13

• The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Caspar
  David Friedrich