The Romantic Era of Literature
Culture of the time:
· British Empire became the world's leading power, controlling one quarter of the world's population and one fifth of the total land area.
· The 19th century was an era of invention and discovery, with significant developments in the fields of mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, electricity, and metallurgy that lay the groundwork for the technological advances of the 20th century.
· Advances in medicine and the understanding of human anatomy and disease prevention took place in the 19th century, and were partly responsible for rapidly accelerating population growth in the western world.
· The 19th century was remarkable in the widespread formation of new settlement foundations which were particularly prevalent across North America and Australasia, with a significant proportion of the two continents' largest cities being founded at some point in the century
Poetry:
· 1798: Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge was published
o Within the preface, Wordsworth defines his theory of poetry, stating that it should be about common people and events and should be written in the language of ordinary men and women
o This idea came from the French and American Revolutions and the writings of Rousseau and his “social contract”
· Poets then fell in the footsteps of these two men
Prose:
Though poetry was the major literary form in this period, two forms of prose also developed: the essay and the novel.
There were three major forms of romantic novel:
Novels of manners
· Took a satirical look at society
· Included Jane Austen and the Bronte sisters
Historical romance novels
· Set in the period before the life of the author
· Usually depicted historical events containing both fictional and non-fictional characters
· Topics were often medieval days with knights and maidens
· Included Sir Walter Scott
Gothic novels
· Inspired by an architectural movement
· The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole was the first of its kind (this was one of Poe’s inspirations later)
· Long stories containing elements of mystery, magic and the macabre with exotic settings
o These tied the reader to terror (suspense and dread) and horror (illustrating a sickening realization)
Conventions of Gothic novels included:
· Use of the supernatural
· Nocturnal activities
· Subterranean regions
· A “Gothic” atmosphere (cathedrals, untamed wilderness, haunted castles, graveyards, apparitions, ancestral curses, ruins, decay, etc.)
· Musty manuscripts and secret documents
· Often dealt with mortality and/or the seat of power being disrupted (like a foiled inheritance)
· Included doppelgangers (characters that mirror each other like unrelated twins (like the black cat)
· Story structure was often like a Chinese box (a story within a story)
The hero of Gothic literature (a Byronic hero) was:
· Has superior emotional and intellectual capacities
· Is lacking in “heroic virtue” which is replaced by dark traits
· Often moody/passionate about a specific issue or task
· Arrogant and confident to their own detriment
· Abnormally sensitive
· Extremely conscious of himself and his decisions
· Usually isolated from the rest of society due to a rejection of morals that he is unrepentant for initially
· Suffers from guilt over a poor decision or horrifying event
Themes in Gothic Literature:
· Cosmic struggle (God vs. Satan, good vs. evil, natural vs. supernatural)
· Sin of pride and delusions of grandeur (thinking one is better than they are)
· Guilt (which the hero suffers from a past deed)
· Gender stereotyping
· Violence against the innocent
· Death interwoven with love
Frankenstein:
· Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a novel written by Mary Shelley about a monster produced by an unorthodox scientific experiment.
· Shelley started writing the story when she was eighteen, and the novel was published when she was twenty-one.
· The storyline emerged from a dream. Mary, Percy, Lord Byron, and John Polidori decided to have a competition to see who could write the best horror story. After thinking for weeks about what her possible storyline could be, Shelley dreamt about a scientist who created life and was horrified by what he had made. She then wrote Frankenstein.
· The first edition was published anonymously in London in 1818 because it was seen as unfeminine.
· Shelley had travelled the region in which the story takes place, and the topics of galvanism and other similar occult ideas were themes of conversation among her companions, particularly her future husband, Percy.
· Frankenstein is considered to be one of the earliest examples of science fiction
· most reviewers thought it "a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity"
