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European Literature in 19th Century: Romanticism

ROMANTICISM

 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism

Romanticism (also the Romantic era or the Romantic period) was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850. It was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution,[1] the aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment, and the scientific rationalisation of nature.[2] It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography,[3] education,[4]and the natural sciences.[5] It had a significant and complex effect on politics, and while for much of the Romantic period it was associated with liberalism and radicalism, its long-term effect on the growth of nationalism was perhaps more significant.

The movement emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as apprehensionhorror and terror, and awe—especially that experienced in confronting the new aesthetic categories of the sublimity and beauty of nature. It considered folk art and ancient custom to be noble statuses, but also valued spontaneity, as in the musical impromptu. In contrast to the rationaland Classicist ideal models, Romanticism revived medievalism[6] and elements of art and narrative perceived as authentically medieval in an attempt to escape population growth, early urban sprawl, and industrialism.

Although the movement was rooted in the German Sturm und Drang movement, which preferred intuition and emotion to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, the events and ideologies of the French Revolution were also proximate factors. Romanticism assigned a high value to the achievements of "heroic" individualists and artists, whose examples, it maintained, would raise the quality of society. It also promoted the individual imagination as a critical authority allowed of freedom from classical notions of form in art. There was a strong recourse to historical and natural inevitability, a Zeitgeist, in the representation of its ideas. In the second half of the 19th century,Realism was offered as a polar opposite to Romanticism.[7] The decline of Romanticism during this time was associated with multiple processes, including social and political changes and the spread of nationalism.

Central features of Romanticism include:

 

PRE-ROMANTICISM: STURM UND DRANG

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturm_und_Drang

Sturm und Drang (German pronunciation: [ˈʃtʊɐ̯m ʊnt ˈdʁaŋ], literally "Storm and Drive", "Storm and Urge", though conventionally translated as "Storm and Stress")[1] is a proto-Romantic movement in German literature and music taking place from the late 1760s to the early 1780s, in which individual subjectivity and, in particular, extremes of emotion were given free expression in reaction to the perceived constraints of rationalism imposed by the Enlightenment and associated aestheticmovements. The period is named for Friedrich Maximilian Klinger's play Sturm und Drang, which was first performed by Abel Seyler's famed theatrical company in 1777.

The philosopher Johann Georg Hamann is considered to be the ideologue of Sturm und Drang, with Jakob Michael Reinhold LenzH. L. Wagner and Friedrich Maximilian Klinger also significant figures. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was also a notable proponent of the movement, though he and Friedrich Schiller ended their period of association with it by initiating what would become Weimar Classicism.

 

Characteristics                                                              

The protagonist in a typical Sturm und Drang stage work, poem, or novel is driven to action—often violent action—not by pursuit of noble means nor by true motives, but by revenge and greed. Goethe's unfinished Prometheus exemplifies this along with the common ambiguity provided by juxtaposing humanistic platitudes with outbursts of irrationality.[7] The literature of Sturm und Drang features an anti-aristocratic slant while seeking to elevate all things humble, natural, or intensely real (especially whatever is painful, tormenting, or frightening).

The story of hopeless love and eventual suicide presented in Goethe's sentimental novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774) is an example of the author's tempered introspection regarding his love and torment. Friedrich Schiller's drama, Die Räuber (1781), provided the groundwork for melodrama to become a recognized dramatic form. The plot portrays a conflict between two aristocratic brothers, Franz and Karl Moor. Franz is cast as a villain attempting to cheat Karl out of his inheritance, though the motives for his action are complex and initiate a thorough investigation of good and evil. Both of these works are seminal examples of Sturm und Drang in German literature.

Notable literary works

 

Goethe

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born in August 1749, in the Free Imperial City of Frankfurt, Holy Roman Empire. He wrote his first important play, Goetz von Berlichingen in 1773, in Shakespearean style, a defining characteristic of the Sturm und Drang movement (Wilson and Goldfarb 287). Shakespeare was considered a genius among German playwrights, and was idolized for his “shattering of the dramatic unities of time, place and action; and his sharply individualized, emotionally complex characters” (Waterhouse v). Goethe was well known for his staging as well as his long dramatic poem Faust (Goethe's Faust) (Wilson and Goldfarb 287). Goethe was the director of theatre at the Weimar Theatre where he eventually ran the entire company. He went to Italy for two years to collect himself and while there discovered the beauty of the Greek and Roman ruins. After this trip he returned with interest in classical ideas and writing, and a new form of writing emerged calledWeimar Classicism.

Schiller

Friedrich Schiller was born in Marbach on November 10, 1759. He studied medicine at Karlsschule Stuttgart, a prestigious military academy founded by the Duke of Württemberg. He developed a strong relationship with Goethe, one of the most influential writers of the time (Wilson and Goldfarb 287). They were particularly interested in questions concerning aesthetics. This relationship leads to an epoch known as Weimar Classicism, a style that integrates classical, romantic andenlightenment ideals (Leidner xiv). Following Schiller’s plays, Die Räuber (The Robbers) and Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love), he went on to became a major poet as well as to write famous essays and Weimar Classical drama (Leidner xiv). The Robbers tells the story of two brothers, the younger of which is infuriated by how society favors the first-born child and he acts on his feelings without any regard to societal rules or social standing. In act five, his views on God “represent the most blasphemous attack on religion in German literature up to that time… [and] is a masterful work of social dynamics that takes deep German patterns of sensibility into account” (Leidner xiv).

 

ROMANTIC POETRY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantic_poetry

Romantic poetry is the poetry of Romanticism, a philosophical, literary, artistic and cultural era[1] reacting against prevailing Enlightenment ideals of the nineteenth century providing natural, emotional, personal and artistic themes.[2][3] Inevitably, the characterization of a broad range of contemporaneous poets and poetry under the single unifying name can be viewed more as an exercise in historical compartmentalization than an attempt to capture the essence of the actual movement.[citation needed]

Poets such as William Wordsworth were actively engaged in trying to create a new kind of poetry that emphasized intuition over reason and the pastoral over the urban, often eschewing consciously poetic language in an effort to use more colloquial language.;” he also emphasizes the importance of the use of meter in poetry (which he views as one of the key features that differentiates poetry from prose).[4] Although many people stress the notion of spontaneity in Romantic poetry, the movement was still greatly concerned with the pain of composition, of translating these emotive responses into poetic form. Indeed, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, another prominent Romantic poet and critic in his On Poesy or Art sees art as “the mediatress between, and reconciler of nature and man”.[5] Such an attitude reflects what might be called the dominant theme of Romantic poetry: the filtering of natural emotion through the human mind in order to create art, coupled with an awareness of the duality created by such a process.

For some critics, the term Romantic establishes an artificial context for disparate works and so removes a work from its real historical context, at the expense of equally valid terms (particularly those related to politics).

The six most well-known English authors are, in order of birth and with an example of their work:

Although chronologically earliest among these writers, William Blake was a relatively late addition to the list; prior to the 1970s, romanticism was known for its "Big Five.

 

GERMAN ROMANTIC POETRY

Hölderlin

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_H%C3%B6lderlin

Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (German: [ˈjoːhan ˈkʁɪsti.aːn ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈhœldɐliːn]; 20 March 1770 – 7 June 1843) was a major German lyric poet, commonly associated with the artistic movement known as Romanticism. Hölderlin was also an important thinker in the development of German Idealism.

The poetry of Hölderlin, widely recognized today as one of the highest points of German literature, was little known or understood during his lifetime, and slipped into obscurity shortly after his death; his illness and reclusion made him fade from his contemporaries' consciousness – and, even though selections of his work were published by his friends during his lifetime, it was largely ignored for the rest of the 19th century.

Indeed, Hölderlin was a man of his time, an early supporter of the French Revolution – in his youth at the Seminary of Tübingen, he and some colleagues from a "republican club" planted a "Tree of Freedom" in the market square, prompting the Grand-Duke himself to admonish the students at the seminary. In his early years he was an enthusiastic supporter ofNapoleon, whom he honors in one of his couplets.

Like Goethe and Schiller, his older contemporaries, Hölderlin was a fervent admirer of ancient Greek culture, but his understanding of it was very personal. He understood and sympathized with the Greek idea of the tragic fall, which he expressed movingly in the last stanza of his "Hyperions Schicksalslied" ("Hyperion's Song of Destiny").

In the great poems of his maturity, Hölderlin would generally adopt a large-scale, expansive and unrhymed style.

Hölderlin’s major publication in his lifetime was his novel Hyperion, which was issued in two parts (1797 and 1799). Various individual poems were published but attracted little attention and in 1799 he also attempted to produce a literary-philosophical periodical, Iduna. His translations of the dramas of Sophocles were published in 1804 but were generally met with derision over their apparent artificiality and difficulty caused by transposing Greek idioms into German.

Hölderlin was a poet-thinker who wrote, fragmentarily, on poetic theory and philosophical matters. His theoretical works, such as the essays "Das Werden im Vergehen" ("Becoming in Dissolution") and "Urteil und Sein" ("Judgement and Being") are insightful and important if somewhat tortuous and difficult to parse. They raise many of the key problems also addressed by his Tübingen roommates Hegel and Schelling.

 

Novalis

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Novalis

Novalis (German: [noˈvaːlɪs]) was the pseudonym of Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg (May 2, 1772 – March 25, 1801), a poet, author, and philosopher of early German Romanticism. Hardenberg's professional work and university background, namely his study of mineralogy and management of salt mines in Saxony, was often ignored by his contemporary readers. The first studies showing important relations between his literary and professional works started in the 1960s.

Novalis, who was deeply read in science, law, philosophy, politics and political economy, started writing quite early. He left an abundance of notes on these fields and his early work displays his ease and familiarity with them. His later works are closely connected to his studies and his profession. Novalis collected everything that he had learned, reflected upon it and drew connections in the sense of an encyclopaedic overview on art, religion and science.

Novalis' whole works are based upon an idea of education: "We are on a mission: we are called upon to educate the earth."

Poetry

In August 1800, eight months after completion, the revised edition of the Hymnen an die Nacht was published in the Athenaeum. They are often considered to be the climax of Novalis’ lyrical works and the most important poetry of the German early Romanticism.

The six hymns contain many elements which can be understood as autobiographical.

The topic is the romantic interpretation of life and death, the threshold of which is symbolised by the night. Life and death are – according to Novalis – developed into entwined concepts. So in the end, death is the romantic principle of life.

The Hymns to the Night display a universal religion with an intermediary. This concept is based on the idea that there is always a third party between a human and God. This intermediary can either be Jesus – as in Christian lore – or the dead beloved as in the hymns. These works consist of three times two hymns. These three components are each structured in this way: the first hymn shows, with the help of the Romantic triad, the development from an assumed happy life on earth through a painful era of alienation to salvation in the eternal night; the following hymn tells of the awakening from this vision and the longing for a return to it. With each pair of hymns, a higher level of experience and knowledge is shown.

 

ENGLISH ROMANTIC POETRY

Lake poets

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Poets

The Lake Poets were a group of English poets who all lived in the Lake District of England, United Kingdom at the turn of the nineteenth century. As a group, they followed no single "school" of thought or literary practice then known. They were named, only to be uniformly disparaged, by the Edinburgh Review. They are considered part of the Romantic Movement.

The three main figures of what has become known as the Lakes School were William WordsworthSamuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey. They were associated with several other poets and writers, including Dorothy WordsworthCharles LambCharles LloydHartley ColeridgeJohn Wilson, and Thomas De Quincey.

The beauty of the Lake District has also inspired many other writers over the years, beyond the core Lake Poets. These include their contemporaries Bryan Procter,Felicia Hemans, and Walter Scott, as well as the labouring-class and slightly later John Close, who catered particularly to the growing tourist trade. Other poets includeJames Payn, and Norman Nicholson.

 

COLERIDGE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Taylor_Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (/ˈkoʊləˌrɪdʒ/; 21 October 1772 – 25 July 1834) was an English poet, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He wrote the poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as the major prose work Biographia Literaria. His critical work, especially on Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped introduceGerman idealist philosophy to English-speaking culture. Coleridge coined many familiar words and phrases, includingsuspension of disbelief. He was a major influence on Emerson and American transcendentalism.

Throughout his adult life Coleridge had crippling bouts of anxiety and depression; it has been speculated that he hadbipolar disorder, which had not been defined during his lifetime.[1] He was physically unhealthy, which may have stemmed from a bout of rheumatic fever and other childhood illnesses. He was treated for these conditions with laudanum, which fostered a lifelong opium addiction.

Coleridge is one of the most important figures in English poetry. His poems directly and deeply influenced all the major poets of the age. He was known by his contemporaries as a meticulous craftsman who was more rigorous in his careful reworking of his poems than any other poet, and Southey and Wordsworth were dependent on his professional advice. His influence on Wordsworth is particularly important because many critics have credited Coleridge with the very idea of "Conversational Poetry". The idea of utilising common, everyday language to express profound poetic images and ideas for which Wordsworth became so famous may have originated almost entirely in Coleridge’s mind. It is difficult to imagine Wordsworth’s great poems, The Excursion or The Prelude, ever having been written without the direct influence of Coleridge’s originality.

Coleridge is probably best known for his long poems, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Christabel.

 

WORDSWORTH

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wordsworth

William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads (1798).

Wordsworth's magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semiautobiographical poem of his early years that he revised and expanded a number of times. It was posthumously titled and published, before which it was generally known as "the poem to Coleridge".[1] Wordsworth was Britain's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850

In 1807 Wordsworth published Poems in Two Volumes, including "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood".

In 1814 Wordsworth published The Excursion as the second part of the three-part work The Recluse, even though he had not completed the first part or the third part, and never did. He did, however, write a poetic Prospectus to "The Recluse" in which he laid out the structure and intention of the whole work. The Prospectus contains some of Wordsworth's most famous lines on the relation between the human mind and nature.

 

Rebel poets

LORD BYRON

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Byron

George Gordon Byron (later Noel), 6th Baron ByronFRS (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), commonly known simply as Lord Byron, was an English poet and a leading figure in the Romantic movement. Among Byron's best-known works are the lengthy narrative poems Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and the short lyric "She Walks in Beauty".

Byron is regarded as one of the greatest British poets,[1] and remains widely read and influential. He travelled widely across Europe, especially in Italy where he lived for seven years. Later in life, Byron joined the Greek War of Independence fighting the Ottoman Empire, for which many Greeks revere him as a national hero.[2] He died one year later at age 36 from a fever contracted while in Missolonghi. Often described as the most flamboyant and notorious of the major Romantics, Byron was both celebrated and castigated in life for his aristocratic excesses, including huge debts, numerous love affairs with people of both sexes, rumours of a scandalous liaison with his half-sister, and self-imposed exile.[3]

He also fathered Ada, Countess of Lovelace, whose work on Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine is considered a founding document in the field of computer science, and Allegra Byron, who died in childhood — as well as, possibly,Elizabeth Medora Leigh out of wedlock.

Byron wrote prolifically.[101] In 1832 his publisher, John Murray, released the complete works in 14 duodecimo volumes, including a life[96] by Thomas Moore. Subsequent editions were released in 17 volumes, first published a year later, in 1833.

Don Juan

Byron's magnum opusDon Juan, a poem spanning 17 cantos, ranks as one of the most important long poems published in England since John Milton's Paradise Lost.[102] The masterpiece, often called the epic of its time, has roots deep in literary tradition and, although regarded by early Victorians as somewhat shocking, equally involves itself with its own contemporary world at all levels — social, political, literary and ideological.

Byron published the first two cantos anonymously in 1819 after disputes with his regular publisher over the shocking nature of the poetry; by this time, he had been a famous poet for seven years, and when he self-published the beginning cantos, they were well received in some quarters.[29] It was then released volume by volume through his regular publishing house.[29] By 1822, cautious acceptance by the public had turned to outrage, and Byron's publisher refused to continue to publish the works.[29] In Canto III of Don Juan, Byron expresses his detestation for poets such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.[29][103] In letters to Francis Hodgson, Byron referred to Wordsworth as "Turdsworth".

 

PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley

Percy Bysshe Shelley (/ˈpɜrsi ˈbɪʃ ˈʃɛli/;[2] 4 August 1792 – 8 July 1822) was one of the major English Romantic poets, and is regarded by some as among the finest lyric, as well as epic, poets in the English language. A radical in his poetry as well as in his political and social views, Shelley did not see fame during his lifetime, but recognition for his poetry grew steadily following his death. Shelley was a key member of a close circle of visionary poets and writers that included Lord ByronLeigh HuntThomas Love Peacock; and his own second wife, Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein.

Shelley is perhaps best known for such classic poems as OzymandiasOde to the West WindTo a SkylarkMusic, When Soft Voices DieThe Cloud and The Masque of Anarchy. His other major works include a groundbreaking verse dramaThe Cenci (1819) and long, visionary poems such as Queen Mab (later reworked as The Daemon of the World), Alastor,The Revolt of IslamAdonaïsPrometheus Unbound (1820)—widely considered to be his masterpiece—and his final,unfinished workThe Triumph of Life (1822).

Shelley's close circle of friends included some of the most important progressive thinkers of the day, including his father-in-law, the philosopher William Godwin and Leigh Hunt. Though Shelley's poetry and prose output remained steady throughout his life, most publishers and journals declined to publish his work for fear of being arrested for either blasphemy or sedition. Shelley's poetry sometimes had only an underground readership during his day, but his poetic achievements are widely recognized today, and his advanced political and social thought impacted the Chartist and other movements in England, and reach down to the present day. Shelley's theories of economics and morality, for example, had a profound influence on Karl Marx; his early—perhaps first—writings on nonviolent resistance influenced both Leo Tolstoy and Mahatma Gandhi.

Shelley became a lodestone to the subsequent three or four generations of poets, including important Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite poets such as Robert Browning and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He was admired by Oscar WildeThomas Hardy,George Bernard ShawBertrand RussellW. B. YeatsUpton Sinclair and Isadora Duncan.[3] Henry David Thoreau's civil disobedience was apparently influenced by Shelley's non-violence in protest and political action. Shelley's popularity and influence has continued to grow in contemporary poetry circles.

 

KEATS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Keats

John Keats (/ˈkiːts/ 31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English Romantic poet. He was one of the main figures of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, despite his work having been in publication for only four years before his death.[1]

Although his poems were not generally well received by critics during his lifetime, his reputation grew after his death, and by the end of the 19th century, he had become one of the most beloved of all English poets. He had a significant influence on a diverse range of poets and writers. Jorge Luis Borges stated that his first encounter with Keats was the most significant literary experience of his life.[2]

The poetry of Keats is characterised by sensual imagery, most notably in the series of odes. This is typical of romantic poets, as they aimed to accentuate extreme emotion through the emphasis of natural imagery. Today his poems and letters are some of the most popular and most analysed in English literature.

He composed five of his six great odes at Wentworth Place and, although it is debated in which order they were written, "Ode to Psyche" opened the published series. According to Brown, "Ode to a Nightingale" was composed under a plum tree in the garden.[nb 2][41][42]Brown wrote, "In the spring of 1819 a nightingale had built her nest near my house. Keats felt a tranquil and continual joy in her song; and one morning he took his chair from the breakfast-table to the grass-plot under a plum-tree, where he sat for two or three hours. When he came into the house, I perceived he had some scraps of paper in his hand, and these he was quietly thrusting behind the books. On inquiry, I found those scraps, four or five in number, contained his poetic feelings on the song of our nightingale."[43] Dilke, co-owner of the house, strenuously denied the story, printed in Richard Monckton Milnes' 1848 biography of Keats, dismissing it as 'pure delusion'.[44]

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" and "Ode on Melancholy" were inspired by sonnet forms and probably written after "Ode to a Nightingale"

 

FRENCH ROMANTIC POETRY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19th-century_French_literature

19 th-century French literature concerns the developments in French literature during a dynamic period in French history that saw the rise of Democracy and the fitful end of Monarchy and Empire. The period covered spans the following political regimes:Napoleon Bonaparte's Consulate (1799–1804) and Empire (1804–1814), the Restoration under Louis XVIII and Charles X(1814–1830), the July Monarchy under Louis Philippe d'Orléans (1830–1848), the Second Republic (1848–1852), the Second Empire under Napoleon III (1852–1871), and the first decades of the Third Republic (1871–1940).

French literature enjoyed enormous international prestige and success in the 19th century. The first part of the century was dominated by Romanticism, until around the mid-century Realism emerged, at least partly as a reaction. In the last half of the century, "naturalism", "parnassian" poetry, and "symbolism", among other styles, were often competing tendencies at the same time. Some writers did form into literary groups defined by a name and a program or manifesto. In other cases, these expressions were merely pejorative terms given by critics to certain writers or have been used by modern literary historians to group writers of divergent projects or methods. Nevertheless, these labels can be useful in describing broad historical developments in the arts.

French literature from the first half of the century was dominated by Romanticism, which is associated with such authors asVictor HugoAlexandre Dumas, pèreFrançois-René de ChateaubriandAlphonse de LamartineGérard de NervalCharles NodierAlfred de MussetThéophile Gautier and Alfred de Vigny. Their influence was felt in theatre, poetry, prose fiction. The effect of the romantic movement would continue to be felt in the latter half of the century in diverse literary developments, such as "realism", "symbolism", and the so-called fin de siècle "decadent" movement.

French romanticism used forms such as the historical novel, the romance, the "roman noir" or Gothic novel; subjects like traditional myths (including the myth of the romantic hero), nationalism, the natural world (i.e. elegies by lakes), and the common man; and the styles of lyricism, sentimentalismexoticism and orientalism. Foreign influences played a big part in this, especially those of Shakespeare, Sir Walter ScottByronGoethe, and Friedrich Schiller. French Romanticism had ideals diametrically opposed to French classicism and the classical unities, but it could also express a profound loss for aspects of the pre-revolutionary world in a society now dominated by money and fame, rather than honor.

Key ideas from early French Romanticism:

 

VICTOR HUGO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Hugo

Victor Marie Hugo (/ˈhjuːɡoʊ/;[1] French: [viktɔʁ maʁi yɡo]  26 February 1802 – 22 May 1885) was a French poet, novelist, and dramatist of the Romantic movement. He is considered one of the greatest and best-known French writers. In France, Hugo's literary fame comes first from his poetry and then from his novels and his dramatic achievements. Among many volumes of poetry, Les Contemplations and La Légende des siècles stand particularly high in critical esteem. Outside France, his best-known works are the novels Les Misérables, 1862, and Notre-Dame de Paris, 1831 (known in English as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame). He also produced more than 4,000 drawings, which have since been admired for their beauty, and earned widespread respect as a campaigner for social causes such as the abolition ofcapital punishment.

Though a committed royalist when he was young, Hugo's views changed as the decades passed, and he became a passionate supporter of republicanism;[2] his work touches upon most of the political and social issues and the artistic trends of his time. He is buried in the Panthéon. His legacy has been honoured in many ways, including his portrait being placed on French franc banknotes.

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poems_of_Victor_Hugo

Poems of Victor Hugo

The poems of Victor Hugo captured the spirit of the Romantic era. They were largely devoted to 19th century causes. Many touched on religious themes. Initially they were royalist but soon became Bonapartist, Republican, and liberal. Hugo's poems on nature revealed a continuing search for the great sublime.

Like many young writers of his generation, Hugo was profoundly influenced by François-René de Chateaubriand, the founder of Romanticism and France’s pre-eminent literary figure during the early 1800s.

Between 1829 and 1840 he would publish five more volumes of poetry (Les Orientales, 1829; Les Feuilles d'automne, 1831; Les Chants du crépuscule, 1835; Les Voix intérieures, 1837; and Les Rayons et les ombres, 1840), cementing his reputation as one of the greatest elegiac and lyric poets of his time.

The passion and eloquence of Hugo's early work brought success and fame at an early age. His first collection of poetry (Nouvelles Odes et Poésies Diverses) was published in 1824, when Hugo was only twenty two years old, and earned him a royal pension from Louis XVIII. Though the poems were admired for their spontaneous fervor and fluency, it was the collection that followed two years later in 1826 (Odes et Ballades) which revealed Hugo to be a great poet, a natural master of lyric and creative song.

 

ITALIAN ROMANTIC POETRY

GIACOMO LEOPARDI

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giacomo_Leopardi

Giacomo Taldegardo Francesco di Sales Saverio Pietro Leopardi (Italian: [ˈdʒaːkomo leoˈpardi]; June 29, 1798 – June 14, 1837) was an Italian poetphilosopheressayist and philologist. He is widely acknowledged to be one of the most radical and challenging thinkers of the 19th century.[2][3] Although he lived in a secluded town in the ultra-conservativePapal States, he came in touch with the main thoughts of the Enlightenment, and, by his own literary evolution, created a remarkable and renowned poetic work, related to the Romantic era. The extraordinary lyrical quality of his poetry made him a central protagonist in the European and international literary and cultural landscape.

The Idilli (1819–1821)[edit]

The six Idilli ("Idylls"), namely Il Sogno ("The Dream"), L'Infinito ("The Infinite"), La sera del dì di festa ("The Evening Of the Feast Day"), Alla Luna ("To the Moon"), La vita solitaria ("The Solitary Life") and Lo spavento notturno ("Night-time Terror"), followed hard upon the first canti. Il Sogno is still Petrarchesque, while the others which followed are the fruit of a more mature and independent art. Leopardi establishes with nature a sort of accord which attenuates the pain and discomfort.

In all of the idylls, the initial sparks, offered by memory or by the sweetness of nature, transmute their colors into the intuition of universal pain, of the transience of things, of the oppressive weight of eternity, of the inexorable passing of time, of the blind power of nature.

 

The Canzoni (1820–1823)[edit]

Leopardi returns to the evocation of ancient eras and exhorts his contemporaries to seek in the writings of the classics the noble ancient virtues.

 

New Canti (1823–1832)[edit]

After 1823, Leopardi abandoned the myths and illustrious figures of the past, which he now considered to be transformed into meaningless symbols and turned to writing about suffering in a more "cosmic" sense.

 

ROMANTIC NOVEL

 

WALTER SCOTT

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Scott

Sir Walter Scott, 1st BaronetFRSE (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832) was a Scottish historical novelist, playwright and poet with many contemporary readers in Europe, Australia, and North America.

Scott's novels and poetry are still read, and many of his works remain classics of both English-language literature and ofScottish literature. Famous titles include IvanhoeRob RoyOld MortalityThe Lady of the LakeWaverleyThe Heart of Midlothian and The Bride of Lammermoor.

Although primarily remembered for his extensive literary works and his political engagement, Scott was an advocate, judge and legal administrator by profession, and throughout his career combined his writing and editing work with his daily occupation as Clerk of Session and Sheriff-Depute of Selkirkshire.

Although Scott had attained world-wide celebrity through his poetry, he soon tried his hand at documenting his researches into the oral tradition of the Scottish Borders in prose fiction—stories and novels—at the time still considered aesthetically inferior to poetry (above all to such classical genres as the epic or poetic tragedy) as a mimetic vehicle for portraying historical events. In an innovative and astute action, he wrote and published his first novelWaverley, anonymously in 1814. It was a tale of the Jacobite rising of 1745. Its English protagonist, Edward Waverley, like Don Quixote a great reader of romances, has been brought up by his Tory uncle, who is sympathetic to Jacobitism, although Edward's own father is a Whig.

There followed a succession of novels over the next five years, each with a Scottish historical setting. Mindful of his reputation as a poet, Scott maintained the anonymity he had begun with Waverley, publishing the novels under the name "Author of Waverley" or as "Tales of..." with no author.

Scott's 1819 series Tales of my Landlord is sometimes considered a subset of the Waverley novels and was intended to illustrate aspects of Scottish regional life. Among the best known is The Bride of Lammermoor, a fictionalized version of an actual incident in the history of the Dalrymple family that took place in the Lammermuir Hills in 1669.

Tales of my Landlord includes the now highly regarded novel Old Mortality, set in 1679–89

Ivanhoe (1819), set in 12th-century England, marked a move away from Scott's focus on the local history of Scotland. Based partly on Hume's History of England and the ballad cycle of Robin HoodIvanhoe was quickly translated into many languages and inspired countless imitations and theatrical adaptations. 

Although on the surface an entertaining escapist romance, alert contemporary readers would have quickly recognised the political subtext of Ivanhoe, which appeared immediately after the English Parliament, fearful of French-style revolution in the aftermath of Waterloo, had passed the Habeas Corpus Suspension acts of 1817 and 1818 and other extremely repressive measures, and when traditional English Charter rights versus revolutionary human rights was a topic of discussion.[20]

Ivanhoe was also remarkable in its sympathetic portrayal of Jewish characters: Rebecca, considered by many critics the book's real heroine, does not in the end get to marry Ivanhoe, whom she loves, but Scott allows her to remain faithful to her own religion, rather than having her convert to Christianity. Likewise, her father, Isaac of York, a Jewish moneylender, is shown as a victim rather than a villain. In Ivanhoe, which is one of Scott's Waverley novels, religious and sectarian fanatics are the villains, while the eponymous hero is a bystander who must weigh the evidence and decide where to take a stand. Scott's positive portrayal of Judaism, which reflects his humanity and concern for religious toleration, also coincided with a contemporary movement for the Emancipation of the Jews in England.

 

ALEXANDRE DUMAS

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Dumas

Alexandre Dumas (French: [a.lɛk.sɑ̃dʁ dy.ma], born Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie [dy.ma da.vi də la pa.jə.tʁi]; 24 July 1802 – 5 December 1870),[1] also known as Alexandre Dumas, père, was a French writer. His works have been translated into nearly 100 languages, and he is one of the most widely read French authors. Many of his historical novels of high adventure were originally published as serials, including The Count of Monte CristoThe Three MusketeersTwenty Years After, and The Vicomte de Bragelonne: Ten Years Later. His novels have been adapted since the early twentieth century for nearly 200 films. Dumas' last novel, The Knight of Sainte-Hermine,unfinished at his death, was completed by a scholar and published in 2005, becoming a bestseller. It was published in English in 2008 as The Last Cavalier.

Prolific in several genres, Dumas began his career by writing plays, which were successfully produced from the first. He also wrote numerous magazine articles and travel books; his published works totaled 100,000 pages.[2] In the 1840s, Dumas founded the Théâtre Historique in Paris.

Dumas' father (General Thomas-Alexandre Davy de la Pailleterie) was born in Saint-Domingue (present-day Haiti) to a French nobleman and an enslaved African woman. At age 14, Thomas-Alexandre was taken by his father to France, where he was educated in a military academy and entered the military for what he made as an illustrious career.

 

MARY SHELLEY

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (née Godwin; 30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was an English novelist, short story writer, dramatist, essayist, biographer, and travel writer, best known for her Gothic novel Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus (1818). She also edited and promoted the works of her husband, the Romantic poet and philosopher Percy Bysshe Shelley. Her father was the political philosopher William Godwin, and her mother was the philosopher and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft.

After Wollstonecraft's death less than a month after her daughter Mary was born, Mary was raised by Godwin, who was able to provide his daughter with a rich, if informal, education, encouraging her to adhere to his own liberal political theories. When Mary was four, her father married a neighbour, with whom, as her stepmother, Mary came to have a troubled relationship.[2][3]

In 1814, Mary began a romance with one of her father’s political followers, the then married Percy Bysshe Shelley. Together with Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont, Mary and Shelley left for France and traveled through Europe. Upon their return to England, Mary was pregnant with Percy's child. Over the next two years, she and Percy faced ostracism, constant debt, and the death of their prematurely born daughter. They married in late 1816, after the suicide of Percy Shelley's first wife, Harriet.

Until the 1970s, Mary Shelley was known mainly for her efforts to publish her husband's works and for her novelFrankenstein, which remains widely read and has inspired many theatrical and film adaptations. Studies of her lesser-known works, such as the travel book Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844) and the biographical articles forDionysius Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopaedia (1829–46), support the growing view that Mary Shelley remained a politicalradical throughout her life. Mary Shelley's works often argue that cooperation and sympathy, particularly as practised by women in the family, were the ways to reform civil society. This view was a direct challenge to the individualistic Romanticethos promoted by Percy Shelley and the Enlightenment political theories articulated by her father, William Godwin.

 

ROMANTIC THEATRE

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteenth-century_theatre

Nineteenth-century theatre describes a wide range of movements in the theatrical culture of Europe and the United States in the 19th century.

Several important technical innovations were introduced between 1875 and 1914. First gas lighting and then electric lights, introduced in London's Savoy Theatre in 1881, replaced candlelight. The elevator stage was first installed in the Budapest Opera House in 1884. This allowed entire sections of the stage to be raised, lowered, or tilted to give depth and levels to the scene. The revolving stage was introduced to Europe by Karl Lautenschläger at the Residenz Theatre, Munich in 1896.

Romanticism in Germany and France                                                                                 

In Germany, the plays of Gotthold Ephraim LessingJohann Wolfgang von GoetheFriedrich Schiller, and other Sturm und Drang playwrights, inspired a growing faith in feeling and instinct as guides to moral behavior. Romantics borrowed from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant to formulate the theoretical basis of "Romantic" art. According to Romantics, art is of enormous significance because it gives eternal truths a concrete, material form that the limited human sensory apparatus may apprehend.

 After a time, Romanticism was adopted in France with the plays of Victor HugoAlexandre DumasAlfred de Musset, and George Sand. By the 1840s, however, enthusiasm for Romantic drama had faded in France and a new "Theatre of Common Sense" replaced it.

Theatre in Britain

In BritainPercy Bysshe Shelley and Lord Byron were the most important literary dramatists of their time (although Shelley's plays were not performed until later in the century). Shakespeare was enormously popular, and began to be performed with texts closer to the original, as the drastic rewriting of 17th and 18th century performing versions for the theatre (as opposed to his plays in book form, which were also widely read) was gradually removed over the first half of the century. In the minor theatres, burletta and melodramawere the most popular.

Melodramas, light comedies, operas, Shakespeare and classic English drama, pantomimes, translations of French farces and, from the 1860s, French operettas, continued to be popular, together with Victorian burlesque.

 

LORENZACCIO

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorenzaccio

Lorenzaccio is a French play of the Romantic period written by Alfred de Musset in 1834, set in 16th-century Florence, and depicting Lorenzino de' Medici, who killed Florence's tyrant, Alessandro de' Medici, his cousin.[1] Having engaged in debaucheries to gain the Duke's confidence, he loses the trust of Florence's citizens, thus earning the insulting surname "Lorenzaccio". Though he kills Alessandro, he knows he will never return to his former state. Since opponents to the tyrant's regime fail to use Alessandro's death as a way to overthrow the dukedom and establish a republic, Lorenzo's action does not appear to aid the people's welfare. Written soon after the July revolution of 1830, at the start of the July Monarchy, when King Louis Philippe I overthrew King Charles X of France, the play contains many cynical comments on the lack of true republican sentiments in the face of violent overthrow. The play was inspired by George Sand's Une conspiration en 1537, in turn inspired byVarchi's chronicles. As much of Romantic tragedy, including plays by Victor Hugo, it was influenced by William Shakespeare's Hamlet.

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