From the Enlightenment to Romanticism  
 
o       The Enlightenment (originating in London and Paris): self-conscious desire to challenge old ways of thinking and enlighten others by using reason to improve the world
o       (Anti Church, monarchy, hereditary privilege)
o       Humanism (from the Renaissance): the idea that man is created in God’s image; focus on man’s potential versus older ideas of religious doctrine, the authority of the Church and monarchy (e.g Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus dramatizes the tension between these ideas)
o       Religious scepticism and cultural relativism: Michel de Montaigne (Essays)
o       Rise of the merchant class (a new, powerful middle class, the bourgeoisie) emerged to challenge the landed aristocracy and power of the monarchy); celebration of individual merit
o       Urbanization; contact with other cultures; exploitation of resources from abroad
o       In France: growing social unrest and resentment of the aristocracy
o       New ideas about social injustice: e.g. the slave trade
o       Religious change: deism
o       America’s war of independence (revolution):
o       The French Revolution
Important thinkers:
 
 Voltaire (France): through reason and education mankind may change the world (did not support revolutionary ideas)
Rousseau (France): argued that inequality was unnatural and damaged society France
 John Locke, David Hume (Britain)
 
 Franklin, Washington, Paine, Jefferson (America)
 Origins and Aspects of Romanticism

Germany: literary movement known as “sturm und drang”

Significant works:  
J. W. v. Goethe, The Sufferings of Young Werther and Faust   
 
Romantic: The term itself was first used in Germany by Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Von Schlegel (1772-1829) to describe a kind of literature departing from classical or neo-classical values. The term was used in Britain from the early nineteenth century to describe a particular kind of landscape (able to affect the emotions)
 
Perspectives and characteristics:
  • Belief that mankind was naturally good, but spoiled by civilization, city life, materialism, oppression. Romantics especially celebrated childhood and early life when people are not yet spoiled, and have access to this goodness and to a sense of joy that is gradually lost
  • Fascination with certain historical periods (pre-modern) and with figures like Faustus and Prometheus (the over-reacher, searcher after transcendent knowledge), wanderers and outcasts (e.g. the creature in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein)
  • Desire to challenge classical rules and the idea that civilized urban life is superior to a life lived close to nature
  • More intensive focus on the individual: imagination, memory, responses as unique
  • Desire to oppose reason and the universal with emotion and the personal  
 
Some subjects and themes associated with Romantic Poetry:
 
  • Social conditions/the need for and circumstances of revolutionary change   
  • Nature, landscape (the impact of these on people and on the imagination)
  • Folklore, legend, myth, history
  • Orientalism, the exotic
  •  Religion (deism)
  • The supernatural
  •  Gothic and medievalism  
  • The nature of human beings: interest in certain kinds of people (simple and unspoilt by civilization), such as the “noble savage”, the rural labourer, the child   
  • The poet’s own emotions, thoughts, beliefs and experiences (imagination and memory in particular)  
 
Some changes associated with Romantic poetry:
 
o       Use of colloquial language and speech, instead of formal, elevated language
o       Use of poetic forms not usually used by the neoclassical eighteenth-century poets, such as the ballad   
o       Description of ordinary, working people, rather than high society
o       A focus on the imagination, creativity and emotional experience of the individual