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English Literature II : More Recent Period notesFrankenstein, Mary Shelley, 1816
➔ Written as part of a contest
➔ Characters: her husband, Lord Byron and Polidori
➔ Written in Villa Diodati
➔ Bate in 1996 → wrote about the Switzerland 1816 rainy year and summer = determined by
an eruption from a volcano 12.000km away, happened in 1815 (the mount Tambora)
➔ Lord Byron wrote a poem called “Darkness” in 1816 = but they didn’t know about the
eruption in Indonesia
➔ Dream = important in Romantic poetry
➔ Byron also references a volcano
➔ Affect became material = hope that the whole world could feel
➔ Rhetorical figures that combine abstract with concrete (death and clay)
➔ Ecocriticism = exploring the intersection of literary texts and natural phenomena (see Bate
1996), Romanticism as important for our modern vision of nature
Poetry in the Romantic Period
What is romanticism?
2 ways of looking at it = 1) as a label (descriptive) 2) as a specific literary movement
➔ The years between 1798 and 1824
➔ 1798 = publications of the lyrical ballads
➔ 1824 = Lord Byron’s death
There is a tension between the period term and the literary movement = labelled after
British Romantic Poetry → Ferber (2012)
None of the Romantic poets ever referred to themselves as Romantics
Term “romantics” came after their time
Strong link between Romanticism in Britain and poetry as a genre
➔ 5000 books published
The Big Six (the canonical authors) -> William Blake, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, John Keats,
Coleridge, Shelley
Lake poets = Wordsworth, Coleridge
Ferber’s ‘mouthful’
His definition of Romanticism
“plot” → unusual to use the word plot for poetry = internalized plot (a matter of inner
events and feelings)
Wordsworth ode
➔ A contrasting feeling between nature and the poet
➔ “to me alone” = internal, separated from the natural world
, The self’s relationship to others (poets vs society)
➔ Blake’s London
➔ Sense of busyness, pressure to conform, repetition of the word “I”
Romantics
Imagination > reason (as opposed to the enlightenment)
Sensory imagination (evoking existing images in the mind) = deeply emotional and
shaped by affect
the preface to the lyrical ballads → Wordsworth in 1800
lyrical poetry → about expression of emotion, poet also needs to be able to distance themselves
from these emotions
Wordsworth, I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud (1807)
➔ Experiencing an emotion, taking a step back and recollecting these feelings
➔ ‘detranscendentalized’ = something that exists in a different world, God usually seen as
transcendent, romantics saw God as nature or in the human soul
Religious feelings
➔ Wordsworth “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”
➔ A presence that is emotionally impactful
➔ Felt through taking attention of the natural world
➔ Pantheism → God as inherent in nature
A sense of sublime
Burke & Kant
- Uses the word sublime for vast objects, it overpowers the mind and is so much bigger
than us
- While beauty relates to small things
- Physically we are small (threatening) but our mind is big (empowering)
Shelley, Mont Blanc, 1817
Identifying the divine in the natural world
Notion of solitude “my own separate fantasy”
Everything exists in the mind in relation to the individual
Ferber’s view on Romanticism
1) Focus on internal events (the poet’s self)
2) Emphasis on imagination and affect
3) Divine pervades nature and the human soul
4) Ambiguous relationship with nature
Seminar 1: Shelley Ode to the West Wind and Wordsworth Tintern Alley
- Focus on imagination, relation to nature, the artist as a genius
Shelley – Ode to the West Wind, 1820
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