Romantic Age literary context

Political background:

Sturm Und Drang

A German movement which influenced the second half of the 18th centuri, against Classicism and Enlightment 220px-Goethe_(Stieler_1828)

-American Revolution

-French Revolution Eugène_Delacroix_-_La_liberté_guidant_le_peuple-1024x811

-Industrial Revolution

Characterized by

• Sensibility

• Immagination

• Inner self

• Individual feelings

• nature romanticism-thomas-cole-the-oxbow-view-from-mount-holyoke-northampton-massachusetts-after-a-thunderstorm

Poetry best for expressing emotion and feelings

Two Generations

Themes

• Beauty

• Emotions

• Nature

• childhood

Firts generation: faith in the future, they defined the style and the themes of Romanticism with "Lyrical Ballads"

• William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge: “Lyrical Ballads” camp600span

Second Generation: more pessimistic about French ideals, in contrast with Coleridge and Wordsworth:

• Lord Byron, adventurer: “Don Juan”

• Percy Shelley: critical of any form of tyranny

• John Keats: moods and sensation in his poetry

they all died young

Other Literary Forms

Gothic Novel: supernatural and mistery. Mary Shelley with "Frankenstein"

Novel of Manners with Jane Austen

Essay: subjective and introspective, with Charles Lamb and Thomas De Quincey

Pre-Romantic Poets

William Blake:
visionary elements and symbolism

Thomas Gray: “ Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”