HY 102 Lecture Notes - Lecture 64: Friedrich Schiller, Rosetta Stone, Ethnography
30 May 2018
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I.Cultural Revolt: Romanticism
A. General observations
1. A diverse intellectual and cultural movement
2. A reaction against the Classicism of the eighteenth century
3. Instead of reason and discipline, Romanticism embraced emotion, freedom, and
imagination
4. The individual, individuality, and the subjective experience
5. Intuition, emotion, and feelings as the guides to truth
B. British Romantic poetry
1. William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
a. Lyrical Ballads
b. Compassion and feeling bind all men together
c. Nature as humanity's most trusted teacher
2. William Blake (1757-1827)
. Individual imagination and the poetic vision
a. Fierce critic of industrial society
b. The imagination could awaken human sensibilities
3. George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)
. Poetry was the "lava of imagination"
a. An aristocrat who rebelled against conformity and inhibition
b. His Romanticism was inseparable from his liberal politics
4. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
. Prometheus Unbound (1820)
a. Defined romantic heroism and the cult of individual audacity
C. Women writers, gender, and Romanticism
1. Mary Godwin Shelley (1797-1851)
. Daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft
a. Fascination with contemporary scientific developments
b. Frankenstein, or, the Modern Prometheus (1818)
i. A twisted creation myth
ii. Individual genius gone wrong
2. George Sand (1804-1876)
. Defying convention
a. Rebellion against middle-class moral values
3. Madame de Staël (1766-1817)
. Popularized German Romanticism in France
a. De l'Allemagne (Germany, 1810)
b. Suggested that men could be emotional and that men and women shared a
common human nature
D. Romantic painting
1. Britain
. John Constable (1776-1837)
. "It is the soul that sees"
i. Emphasized the artist's individual technique
a. W. Turner (1775-1851)
. Intensely subjective, personal, and imaginative
i. Experimented with brush strokes and color
2. France
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