http://theliterarylink.com/prerom.html
An Outline
of Trends in Preromanticism through Romanticism
Preromanticism:
- faith in the
instinctive goodness of human beings: Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd
Earl of Shaftesbury, "An Inquiry Concerning Virtue or Merit";
Characteristics
- faith in the
relatively high moral and religious value of sympathy or benevolence (School
of Sensibility): Steele, Careless
Husband (drama); Geo. Akenside, The
Pleasures of Imagination; Samuel Rogers, The
Pleasures of Memory; Richardson, Pamela;
Stern, Tristram Shandy.
- Accurate observation
of nature, though without mysticism, sometimes with the suggestion that
nature has a religious significance (Thomson, the
Seasons
- Elegiac interest:
in death, mutability, mourning, melancholy (Graveyard School): Blair’s "The
Grave"; Gray’s "Elegy in a Country Churchyard"
- Interest in
humanitarian movements and reforms (origin of labor standards, child labor
laws, slave trade, mental health, and penal reform
- Interest in
kindness toward animals
- A democratic
attitude: insistence on the rights and dignity of man, and on the freedom
of the individual socially and politically
- Attacks upon
wrongs in the established order or in conventional usages: political, economic,
social, or educational
- Interest in
the state of nature: the "noble savage" preference for the simple
life of earlier ages, primitive religions, folk-poetry.
- Interest in
the medieval period as a age of faith, chivalry, and poetry
- Attacks on
Pope and other neo-classical authors
- Revival or
imitation of older forms of verse: ballads, sonnets, blank verse, Spenserian
stanzas etc.
- Use of local
dialects and color
- Translation
or imitation of Oriental tales, Scandinavian, or old Celtic tales or literature
- Development
of the historical novel, the Gothic school, and the School of Terror
- Development
of literary theories and literary criticism, stressing the relatively greater
importance of the imaginative, emotional, intuitive, free, individual, and
particular over the rational, formal, and general.
- Exaltation
of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton
- Period of
violent and Revolutionary spirit, especiallyAmerica and France.
Romanticism
- Interest in
German aesthetics and philosophy: Kant, Schiller, Schlegel Bros, Schelling
Goethe, and in Italy, Spinoza and in Spain, Calderon.
- Pantheism
- Madness
- Breaking aesthetic,
artistic, and perceptive boundaries of time and space (Dante, Milton, Virgil)
- Struggle of
artist to discover or create a higher order in a chaotic universe
- Society is
not normative, but part of the meaningless world.
- Visionary
imagination, not simply dream, but often nightmarish.
- Implies variety,
rather than homogeneity; details, particulars, "fine isolated verisimilitude"
first,
and broad, general truth only later.
- Fragmentation,
incompleteness, and ruin (as modalities which are part of the phenomemology
of human awareness; McFarland says, are the diasparactive triad—breaking
into pieces—are at the very center of life; Hegel says, "In existence
there is a permanent incompleteness which cannot be evaded" (städige
Unganzheit—which cannot be evaded).
- Individuality
- Implies transcendence
- Romantic ego
is confessional (from Rousseau and Montaigne), autobiographical, portraits
of the self
- Romantic consciousness:
self as measure/problem
- Nature as
subject matter, as model and guide, as repository of physical, moral, and
spiritual value capable of inspiring the creative mind; as guide for, and
insight into, man’s life whereas classicist starts with man and treasures
nature only insofar as it confirms prior ideas about what man is.
- Idealism,
particularly among the younger Romantics, fascination with a world beyond
reality, though selfdom conceived of in a conventional religious sense.
- Imagination
as the means of reaching truth through creativity rather than, or at least
superior to, rational, logical, ratiocination, subject to development—maturation
and decline.
- Increased
awareness and sensibility to themes of mutability in self and nature
- Despair, disillusionment,
or dejection—the Romantic equivalent of doubt or loss of faith in formerly
held hopes and belief.
- Implies "romance,"
as exotic, new, even strange and fresh experience, advemture
- Whereas the
classicist relives and conforms to tradition (the values of the experience
patterns proven by time), the Romantic discovers
what s/he hopes are new
values, new experience patterns, and his/er impulse is to rebel against
any restriction upon that process of discovery, that quest for new and higher
truth.
Key
Terms in Romanticism:
Organicism, subjective,
emotion, intuition, self, ruins, mountains, crags, vistas, conversation in
poetry, lyric, ode, lamp, energy, tragedies, Plato vitalism, memory, darkness,
caves, action, demythologized universe, psychological, childhood, yearning,
striving, sublime, desire, guilt and remorse, rebellion, futurity, symbolism,
Negative Capability,
Key
terms in Neo-Classical
Deism, objectivity,
general mechanistic, rational, epic, satire, mirror, logic, thought (reason),
aristocracy, tabula rasa, Rules and reguations, society, wit, comedies.