04-30-THE-ROMANTIC-SPIRIT.ppt

1798, publication of the Lyrical Ballads.
The Romantic spirit
Performer Heritage
Marina Spiazzi, Marina Tavella,
Margaret Layton © 2016
The Romantic spirit
1. A new sensibility
The Romantic Age
the period in which new
ideas and attitudes arose
in reaction to the dominant
18th-century ideals of order,
calm, harmony, balance,
and rationality.
Caspar David Friedrich,
Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, 1818.
Performer Heritage
The Romantic spirit
2. Romanticism vs
Enlightenment
Enlightened trends
• emphasised reason and judgement;
• focused on impersonal material;
• elevated subjects;
• interested in science and technology.
Romantic trends
• emphasised imagination and emotion;
• valued subjective, autobiographical material;
• looked for freedom;
• represented common people;
• interested in the supernatural.
Performer Heritage
The Romantic spirit
3. English Romanticism
English
Romanticism
a revolt of imagination against
enlightened reason.
influenced by the French Revolution
and the English Industrial Revolution.
The Romantics
•expressed a negative attitude towards the existing social
or political conditions;
• placed the individual at the centre of art;
• argued that poetry should be free from all rules.
Performer Heritage
The Romantic spirit
4. The Romantics’ key ideas
• interest in humble and everyday life;
• focus on melancholy, often associated with meditation,
on the suffering of the poor and on death;
• use of creative imagination;
• exaltation of emotion over reason and senses over
intellect;
• a new view of the artist as an individual creator;
• fascination with the irrational, the past, the mysterious,
the exotic.
John Constable, The white horse, 1819, New York, Frick Collection.
Performer Heritage
The Romantic spirit
5. A new concept of nature
• opposed to reason;
• a real and living being;
• a vehicle for
self-consciousness;
• a source of sensations;
• an expressive
language: natural
images provide the poet
with a way of thinking
about human feelings
and the self.
Performer Heritage
J.M.W. Turner, Landscape with Distant River and Bay,
c. 1840-50; Musée du Louvre, Paris.
The Romantic spirit
6. The sublime
Edmund Burke
A Philosophical Enquiry into the
Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime
and Beautiful (1757)
the sublime
the beautiful and the sublime as
opposed
Performer Heritage
The Romantic spirit
6. The sublime
• No emotion is stronger than fear, not even pleasure.
• Fear is the true source of the sublime.
•The sublime is always founded on terror (the ‘ruling principle of
the sublime’).
•Whatever is visibly terrible is always sublime because
it arouses a sense of danger and terror.
•To make things even more terrible, two conditions are essential,
obscurity and mystery.
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The Romantic spirit
6. The sublime in nature
Performer Heritage
The Romantic spirit
7. The Gothic novel
It came to popularity at the end of the 18th century
The adjective ‘Gothic’ 🡪
three connotations
Medieval, linked to the
architecture of the
12th-14th centuries
Performer Heritage
Irregular, barbarous,
opposed to
Classicism
Wild, supernatural,
in the sense of
mysterious
The Romantic spirit
7. The Gothic novel:
the setting
• Great importance given to terror, characterised by obscurity
and uncertainty, and horror, caused by evil and atrocity.
• Darkness necessary ingredient for the mysterious, gloomy
atmosphere.
Performer Heritage
The Romantic spirit
7. The Gothic novel:
the setting
• Ancient settings 🡪 isolated castles and mysterious abbeys
with hidden passages, underground cellars, secret rooms.
• Catholic countries as the setting for the most terrible
crimes, due to Protestant prejudices against Catholicism.
Performer Heritage
The Romantic spirit
7. The Gothic novel:
the characters
• Characters 🡪 dominated by
exaggerated reactions in front
of mysterious situations or
events.
• Supernatural beings 🡪
vampires, monsters and ghosts.
Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1781,
Goethe Museum, Frankfurt.
Performer Heritage
The Romantic spirit
7. The Gothic novel:
the characters
• Sensitive heroes 🡪 they save
heroines.
• Heroines 🡪 stricken by unreal
terrors and persecuted by the
villains.
• Satanic, terrifying male
characters, victims of their
negative impulses.
Performer Heritage
Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare, 1781,
Goethe Museum, Frankfurt.
The Romantic spirit
8. The Romantic imagination
• A creative power superior
to reason.
• Shaped the poets’ fleeting
visions into concrete forms.
• A dynamic, active, rather than
passive power.
• Allows human beings to ‘read’
nature as a system of
symbols.
Performer Heritage
J.M.W. Turner, Rain, Steam, and Speed –
The Great Western Railway, 1844, London, The National Gallery.
The Romantic spirit
9. The Lake poets
Wordsworth and Coleridge were known as Lake Poets
because they lived together in the last few years of the
18th century in the district of the Great Lakes in
Northwestern England.
In 1798 they published the Lyrical Ballads, the manifesto
of English Romanticism.
Performer Heritage
The Romantic spirit
10. The manifesto of
English Romanticism
The ‘Preface’ to the Lyrical Ballads
The poet
Linked to
nature,
emotions,
feelings
Performer Heritage
Interested
in the lives
of the humble
1800
Themes
Language
Nature,
memory,
children
Simple,
common
used to liberate
imagination
The Romantic spirit
11. The second generation
of Romantic poets
Percy B. Shelley, George Byron and John Keats
• died very young and away from home;
• experienced political disillusionment reflected in their
poetry;
• were linked to individualism, escapism.
Performer Heritage
The Romantic spirit
12. The Romantics on nature
NATURE
Wordsworth
Coleridge
a source of
a universal
joy, inspiration force
and
knowledge
the
representation
a mother and of God’s will
a moral guide and love
Performer Heritage
Byron
Shelley
Keats
the
companion
of his
loneliness
a source of
enjoyment
and
inspiration
the
counterpart
of his stormy
feelings
when it was
violently
upset
the creative
mind benefits
from the
beauty of the
natural
landscape
pervaded by
a guiding
power leading a kind of
man to love
muse to the
poet’s artistic
quest