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Romanticism (Global contexts (Blake (The Little Black Boy
'I am…
Romanticism
Global contexts
Blake
The Little Black Boy
- 'I am black, but O! my soul is white'
- Rays of sun 'beams of love' - and 'when our souls have learn'd the heat to bear, / The cloud will vanish' - cloud and shade = the black skin. Black skin will be lost when God accepted, a missionary idea kinda.
- 'I'll shade him [...] / And be like him, and then he will love me'
Idea of it being unjust treatment, racism making him feel like he's unequal:
- 'black as if bereaved of light'
- 'I'll shade him [...] / And be like him, and then he will love me
- The Songs of Innocence do present naievity; maybe it's naievity that white people are better and that assimilation will get 'love' whereas the reality is literally torture.
The Tyger
- 'distant deeps or skies'
- The unknown: 'what could frame thy fearful symmetry?'
- Just a lot of 'What [...]?'
- General fearful nature, dark imagery, fear of the unknown
CRITICS
Mellor. "Sex, Violence and Slavery: Blake and Wollstonecraft"
- All abolitionist writers, including Equiano and Cuguano, expressed the belief that to be civilised was to be white and Christian, not black and with African spirituality.
- She accuses Blake of various sorts of erasure: cultural erasure in engravings, also the erasure of true extent of torture in engravings (both with Stedman), erasure of the specific horror of enslavement of Africans in representing the sexual enslavement of the 'daughters of albion', aka English women.
- Little Black Boy: ‘Blake here affirms the ideological construction of the African as one who finally benefits from Christianity.’
- Blake 'equates freedom with the gratification of the desires of the white European male.'
Cumming, in the Guardian, observes of the Little Black Boy that 'it is entirely possible that he was, in fact, satirising the abolitionists' absurd idea that freed slaves would continue labouring for their bosses out of gratitude.
Barbauld: "Epistle to William Wilberforce"
Byron
Representation of Albania. Although he's sometimes sympathetic, he doesn't only use the orient as an opposition to Britain as in a common trope in literature of the time, he does present negative stereotypes
- 'Albania [...] thou rugged work of savage men!
- 'primal city' of Albania, whose chief's command is 'lawless law'
- Calls groups in the minaret variations on 'the x' like 'the Turk' and 'the Delhi' - assuming that people have a mental picture of these prototypes.
- compliments Albanians, on endurance, fierceness, ‘Their wrath how deadly! But their friendship sure’. They welcome and help Harold.
Links to Greece
- Albania has landscapes more beautiful than those is 'Attica', the area encompassing and surrounding Athens. It's a temptation, there's hits to be discovered.
- Despairs of Greece's bondage to the Ottoman empire and that its people don't rise up.
CONTEXT
- Increased movement of people across Europe meant travel literature was becoming more popular
- In many places, he's known as the prototype of British Romanticism.
CRITICS
Arber, "Specific Orientalism of Lord Byron's Poetry"
- Steretypes of the East may 'have their roots in the obsever's desires or fears'
- West can either be good or bad (Hellenism / British imperialism) but East is only bad.
- Giaour: compares Hassan and the Giaour - poetry often draws comparison between despostism in the East the atrocities of the West.
- Although representing imperialism as bad, the exoticisation and stereotyping of the East still reinforces hierarchies.
Romance of the Forest
- Marquis talking about the temperaments and methods of justice in different nations: ‘it is the first proof of a superior mind to liberate itself from the the prejudices of country, or education’.
- They act more primitively. Draws on otherness to present binary, and links the Marquis to the wrongs of the other.
- It’s much more likely this than a subtle satire on people’s skewed views of other countries, but could demonstrate how people take whatever evidence they can to support their own corrupt doings.
- The setting of the past, and the European Catholic states
CONTEXT
- Goths: Germanic tribe who sacked Rome
- In the Gothic, death clears the way for ascendency of bourgeois/protestant values through the protagonist.
- Ideological ambiguity
- Usually foreign, Roman Catholic countries.
- Never visited the countries where her novels are set, had a fairly secluded life
CRITICS
Kitson, "Gothic Orientalism"
- Both Oriental and Gothic writing can both be an exploration of the 'dark, irrational and monstrous at the heart of British society'
- Can be seen as a Protestant, middle class genre, emerging alongside British Imperialism.
CONTEXT
- Late 18C Britons prided themselves on how the constitution upheld individual liberty, but MPs and even priests owned Caribbean plantations
- Power of writing: almost every major Romantic poet wrote for the abolition cause. Writing and reading changed the public’s perception.
Orientalism:
- Byron in 1818 Beppo mentions the East’s saleability – ‘sell you, mix’d with Western sentimentalism / Some samples of the finest Orientalism
- William Jones wants us to learn from the East, but increasingly it's used to enforce European dominance and superiority - writers suggesting that there was something ‘inherently Asiatic’ about tyranny. Esp Montesqieu.
- The Orient could also be an escape from reality and geo-political interest..
Nature/artifice
Nature AND politics
Blake
Earth's Answer:
- Earth's light symbolises man's fall, meaning inextricable connection of man and nature.
- 'Prison'd on a watry shore'
- 'Selfish! Vain! / Eternal bane! / That free Love with bondage bound'
- I think he's suggesting, don't fuck with nature, let people do what's natural. Earth shouldn't be imprisoned, neither should people's sexuality.
The Garden of Love:
- 'And the gates of this Chapel were shut, / And Thou shalt not writ on the door'
- 'it was filled with graves, / And tomb-stones where flowers should be'
- 'Priests in black gowns [...] / binding with briars my joys and desires'
- Same sentiment as Earth's Answer, really
Tyger
- 'What the hand dare seize the fire?'
- Language of immense danger - 'deadly', 'fearful', 'dread', 'furnace'.
- 'Did he who make the lamb make thee?' - perhaps undermining God's abilities, perhaps suggesting he went too far with the tiger.
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CONTEXT
De Luca, "Blake and the Poetics of the Sublime"
- Blake as a 'radical humanist'
- Use of the sublime was to sharpen the senses rather than to go beyond them.
- Always for human understanding, and hopeful for a better world.
Romance of the Forest
- Settings represent the morality of the people that inhabit them, as a general rule.
- Open mountains and lakes are scenes of goodness.
- Gothic scenes, densely populated areas, gothic, are bad
- Abbey/forest setting: reached in darkness, gate 'richly ornamented', forest ‘wild and solitary’, ‘sometimes overrun by luxuriant vegetation’
- Forest somewhat a refuge, but fails to save her
- Clara's garden: 'flowering shrubs [...] marked the boundary' and it was Clara's care in the spring to 'nurse the budding flowers' - though it does also speak of the sublimity to Clara and all of the surrounding nature, uncultivated by humans.
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CONTEXT
- Known as working class, female, and was extremely popular – the sort of cheap, vulgar doppelganger of Romanticism.
- Weak hero, apparently weak but enduring heroine who often makes key discoveries – although they seem helpless, they always win.
- Male authority gone mad
- The reader being immersed in the fiction, trying to figure things out as the characters do, maybe it provided a form of agency for female readers that didn’t have it in reality.
- In the Gothic, death clears the way for ascendency of bourgeois/protestant values through the protagonist
- Ideological ambiguity
Nature as a retreat from politics?
A personal retreat yes, but nature is used to reflect on society's wrongs, its corruption, and the artifice and injustice of its structure
Byron
What is natural is what is good.
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Cantos II and III
- CII, S38: ‘Albania! […] thou rugged nurse of savage men!’ - suggests both culture and nature cultivating the character of the nation
- Harold is at home in nature.
- S13: 'they spake/ A mutual language, clearer than the tome / Of his land's tongue'
- S15: in man's dwellings he became 'Droop'd as a wild-born falcon with clipt wing'
- Man corrupts nature: S68: ‘There is too much of man here, to look through / With fit mind the might which I behold’
- S72: ‘I become / Portion of that around me; and to me / High mountains are a feeling, but the hum / Of human cities torture’
- S89: all still and thoughtful – idea that every little element has its part, which you could infer as every being having its part in life, some socialist value. ‘from the high host / Of stars, to the lull’d lake and mountain-coast, / All is concenter'd in a life intense, / Where not a beam, nor air, nor leaf is lost’. In this kind of stillness and reflection we find ‘a truth’ (S90)
There's a purity in the connection of man and nature that does away with social boundaries and cultural separation. It's as if we should learn from the boundlessness of nature, a state of 'democratic globalisation' that Hubbel theorises of Byron's beliefs. However, his exoticisation of the East undermines this idea of some socialist, globalised society.
Comparisons
Blake's "London" and Canto III of Harold have chain imagery, not only that but chains that seem self-imposed. (S9)
What's interesting in Childe Harold is that the blame seems to be both on himself and on the society he's left. Struggles of self-hatred or societal hatred.
CRITICS
Arber. "Specific Orientalism [...]"
- Although Byron critiques both the East's despotism and British Imperialism, often comparing them, his exoticisation of the East reinforces hierarchies, as well as the fact that the West has both a good and a bad side in Hellenism and Imperialism but the East is only bad.
Hubbel
- Unstable ecology presents, for Byron, the opportunity for revolution because a society's ecology reflects its sociological structure and values.
- He sees democratic globalisation as a solution to 19th century imperialism (unlike the lake poets, who thought closer to home through nature). The flowing of culture and nature without rigid boundaries.
CONTEXT
- Both sides of the revolution argument want to claim nature as on their side.
Romance of the Forest
- Natural world a place of emotional refuge, especially the mountains and places with vast expanses. 'deep solitude' of the mountains, and the 'gloomy grandeur of the woods' that awaken 'sublime' sensations (Adeline)
Byron: same notes as nature and politics. Nature is a retreat from society's artifice, it's where truth is, and thus societies are criticised through this.
CONTEXT
- Urbanisation, industrial revolution (steam engines, factories, quicker transport).
- Further anonymity and separation from nature.
- Rural population suffered - law of enclosure meant communal/waste land was converted into private land. First act 1773. (John Clare writes on it)
- Widening wealth gap
- British population doubled between 1771-1831
- Natural sublimity can be seen as an escape route, particularly from trauma of the reign of terror and the industrial changes happening all around.
Politics
Blake
Chimney Sweeper
- General: it's irony. Kind of jeering at those that take the Innocence poem literally.
Innocence
- 'curl's like a lamb's back, was shaved'
- 'and wash in a river and shine in the sun' - sun and a bath is their idea oot f heaven.
- 'So if all do their duty, they need not fear harm'
Experience
- Father and mother, having left him, are 'gone up to the church to pray'
- 'because I am happy, & dance & sing, / They think they have don me no injury'
- God, Priest and King 'make up a heaven of our misery'
London
- 'charter'd street'
- 'marks' of weakness and woe
- 'in every' anaphora
- 'mind-forg'd manacles'
- reminds me of Althusser's ideological state apparatus, where people are led to believe the ideology of the ruling group that oppresses them. Not just repressive state apparatus.
- 'youthful Harlot's curse' with a newborn, 'blights with plagues the marriage hearse'
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CONTEXT
- Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man 1791: argument that revolution is permissible when a government does not safeguard the natural rights of its people.
- Pamphlet war
- French revolution as ‘the master theme of the epoch in which we live’, poets expressing less their spirit than ‘the spirit of the age’
- Reign of terror 1793-4
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GENERAL KEY CONTEXT
- Enlightenment and Romanticism: Liberation (Rousseau), self-dependence (Kant), rejecting stale customs (Wollstonecraft)
GENERAL TIPS
- Identify materials that address module themes and sub-themes in interesting ways
- Often they want to see you thinking on your feet.
- Get to grips with terminology!
- There always needs to be a reason I'm including something, eg a quote or a terminology (eg 'sonnet')