Romanticism was a literary movement that emerged in the late 18th century valuing emotion, individualism, and nature. It rejected the rationalism and structure of previous Neoclassical works. The first generation of Romanticists embraced the democratic ideals of the French Revolution but later generations saw man as isolated from nature. While most early Romanticists were men, some women also wrote Romantic works. Feminine Romanticism valued domestic life over radical social change and suggested a balanced system with both maternal and paternal influences was needed.

1. Feminism and Romanticism

2. Rise of Romanticism Romanticism was a literary movement occurring at the end of the 18 th century, and into the very beginning of the 19 th century. Three criteria of Romanticist literature: --valuing of self as subject-matter -- valuing of emotion over reason -- interest in the exotic, bizarre, extraordinary

3. The Romanticists saw nature as the catalyst for imaginative experience. Art was not merely mimetic (mirroring) reality, but rather produced through the imaginative process within. Nature provides the context for transcendent experiences. Connecting with nature is connecting with something larger than oneself.

4. First Generation Romanticists William Wordsworth Samuel Taylor Coleridge William Blake They shared in common a sympathy towards the French Revolution.

5. The French Revolution was the defining historical event of the end of the eighteenth century in Europe. The Romanticists embraced the democratic goals of the French Revolution, by attempting to make their literature ‘democratic’ through their diction and syntax – a poetry of the people.

6. The Romanticists rejected 18 th century Neoclassicism, with its controlled, rational, emotionless and formulaic poetry. First generation Romanticists saw revolution as the state of romance on earth, a new kingdom on earth. Or, as Wordsworth puts it, the “mystic marriage” between the mind and nature

7. Second Generation Romanticists Lord Byron Percy Bysse Shelley John Keats These Romanticists were writing after the French Revolution. They are exiles from England, living in Europe.

8. The second generation Romanticists saw man in opposition to nature. Man was in quest for an absent ideal. Both generations took the view that the poet is isolated, introspective, subjective

9. Christianity is secularized in Romanticist literature. Common themes in Romanticist literature: alienation and exile, death and rebirth, self-consciousness.

10. Wordsworth was an idealist, with faith in nature and the perfectibility of man. The second generation of Romanticists were skeptics, distinct in their pessimism compared to the failed ideals of the first generation.

11. Romanticist Sisters Dorothy Wordsworth Joanna Baillie (Scottish) Mary Tighe (Irish) Mary Wollstonecraft Mary Shelley Emily Bronte

12. Percy Bysse Shelley, in Defense of Poetry , appropriates the metaphor of female procreativity to describe his creative process Emphasis on exoticism, fear of female power (Keats) and interest in the Satanic hero (Byron).

13. How would we define “feminine Romanticism”? Critic Ann Mellor: it is an alternative to the radical social transformation of male romanticists. If a man were to make “the tranquility of his domestic affections” his first priority, there would be no empires, and therefore no wars. Mellor: The system should have a mother as well as a father.