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The Early Romantic Age - Coggle Diagram

- - - - War of independence (1775): Patriots (led by George Washington) + French vs Britain
        
        Declaration of independence (4 July 1776) by Thomas Jefferson. right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", governments could govern only if they were approved by those who were governed
        
        Treaty of Versailles (1783): Britain recognized USA
        
        Federal constitution (1787) + First President George Washington
      - Loyalists: pro Birtain, pro USA
      - supported by Burke, Thomas Paine's Common sense and Rights of man about republicanism and emancipation of women, Mary Wollstonecraft's A vindication of the rights of women about women's education and social value
- - - - gave dignity to anything ugly existing in nature, gave rise to the Gothic novel
- - - - toured France and Italy with Horace Walpole, who helped him publish his masterpiece
        
        interest in primitve life and humble people, 1st person, personal emotions, BUT still neoclassical in use of poetic diction and use of complex language
      - Elegy written in a country churchyard: written after death of his best friend Richard West in 1742. uses elegiac form (BUT unconventional: no mourners, no procession, no flowers, no refrain of grief) to meditate also on universal themes (destiny, equality, ambition, humility)
        
        the poet contemplates country churchyard at twilight, then meditates on the forefathers of the village who died, talks about life of rural people that couldn't become neither famous nor ambitious, meditation on the tomb as a link between living and dead, final hypothetical death of the author and his epitaph
        
        heroic quatrains of 10 syllable lines, inspired Foscolo's Dei sepolcri
    - - humble origins, engraver (influence of Michelangelo,'s muscles) and lover of Gothic art, combined pictures+text as counterparts, radical freethinker who supported French Revolution and abolition of slavery and egalitarian principles, disillusioned with Industrial revolution, artist as the guardian of the spirit and imagination, religious
      - Songs of innocence: lambs, flowers, children, village, happiness, freedom, imagination, simple language (wirtten during French Revolution) +
        Songs of experience: pessimism, adulthood, tigers (written during French Terror)
      - prophetic prose books like The marriage of heaven and hell: aphorisms, anecdotes, proverbs about Hell=freedom and energy and Heaven=restraint and reason
        
        Christianity responsible of man's dualism, instead he wanted complementary opposites (they exist also in God): ("without contraries there is no progression")
        
        "negation": process according to which people split contraries in two morally, so that one ends up being good and the other bad
      - imagination (=Divine vision) to know the world: power of the child, God, the poet (a prophet)
  - - - denunciation of social problems
    - - daughter of the radical thinkers Mary Wollstonecraft (died of childbirth) and William Godwin, met Coleridge and her would-be husband Shelley, they fled to Drance and then Lake Geneva with Byron and Polidori, Shelley drowned at sea and she kept wiriting and edited his work
      - Frankentein or the modern Prometheus: the Swiss scientist Frankenstein creates a human being from corpses and electricity, but hates his creature and the rejected monster becomes a murderer who will destroy him.
        
        < challenge by Byron to write the most horrifying story, ghost stories, anxieties about the death of her mother, her parents' ideas about social justice and education, science and chemistry, evolutionism and electricity, <monster is similar to Rousseau's noble savage who discovers limitations of civilization, <Coleridge's Rime of the ancient mariner about crime against nature, <myth of Prometheus (overreacher)
        
        1st person frame narrative: letters by Walton to his sister about his failed expedition to the north pole, Victor's story, the monster's story
        
        theme of the double: Walton-Frankenstein (ovverreachers), Frankenstein-monster (alienation, isolation, desire to be good erased by revenge)
        
        other themes: forbidden knowledge, overcoming God and Nature, usurpation of female role