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Romanticism
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The
age of Romanticism broadly spans the period
between the French Revolution in 1789
and the coronation of Queen Victoria in
1837. Never a unified and self-conscious
movement, it resists definition.
Romanticism
does, however, have certain characteristics
that distinguish it from the preceding
age of Enlightenment. Where the Enlightenment
emphasised objectivity and reason, Romanticism
looked to the more subjective and irrational
parts of human nature: emotion, the imagination,
genius, introspection, our response to
the natural world.
The Romantic age produced an extraordinary
wealth of writers, artists and composers
throughout Europe – in literature,
figures such as Goethe, Rousseau, Pushkin
and Hugo; in art, Turner, Constable, Delacroix,
Géricault and Friedrich; and in
music, Beethoven, Schubert and Berlioz.
In English poetry there were six outstanding
figures: William Blake, William Wordsworth,
and Samuel Taylor Coleridge from the first
generation, and Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe
Shelley and John Keats from the second.
These writers –
none of whom would have
thought of himself as
a Romantic poet –
produced varied and
individually very distinctive
work. They shared, nevertheless,
a feeling that they
were contributing to
a period of enormous
political, social and
intellectual change.
‘ The literature of England’,
wrote Shelley in A Defence of Poetry, ‘has
arisen as it were from a new birth …
we live among such philosophers and poets
as surpass beyond comparison any who have
appeared since the last national struggle
for civil and religious liberty.’
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- 1789
- Storming of the Bastille
in Paris marks the beginning of
the French Revolution.
- 1790 - Blake writes The Marriage
of Heaven and Hell.
- 1791 - Publication of Thomas Paine’s Rights
of Man and Burns’s Tam O’Shanter.
- 1794 - Blake publishes Songs
of Innocence and Experience.
- 1796 - Death of Burns
- 1797 - Jane Austen completes
Pride and Prejudice ; Coleridge writes ‘The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ and ‘Kubla
Khan’.
- 1798 - Wordsworth writes ‘Tintern
Abbey’ and with Coleridge publishes Lyrical
Ballads.
- 1799 - Napoleon becomes First
Consul in France; Wordsworth and Dorothy move into
Dove Cottage in the English Lake District.
- 1804 - Napoleon proclaimed Emperor
in France; Beethoven composes Symphony No. 3 (Eroica).
- 1805 - Wordsworth completes
the twelve-book Prelude ; Battle of Trafalgar.
- 1807 - Abolition of Slave-Trading
in British ships; Wordsworth publishes Poems in
Two Volumes.
- 1808 - Goethe writes Faust Part
I.
- 1812 - Byron publishes Childe
Harold I and II; Napoleon’s retreat from
Moscow; Turner paints Snow-Storm: Hannibal and
his Army crossing the Alps.
- 1814 - Beethoven’s Fidelio;
Napoleon exiled to Elba; Wordsworth publishes The
Excursion; Goya completes Disasters of War.
- 1815 - Battle of Waterloo brings
the end of the Napoleonic Wars between Britain
and France.
- 1816 - Byron and Shelley meet
in Geneva; Mary Shelley writes Frankenstein; Keats
writes ‘On first looking into Chapman’s
Homer’.
- 1819 - Byron begins Don Juan;
Keats writes Odes, ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’, ‘Eve
of St. Agnes’; Géricault paints The
Raft of the Medusa.
- 1820 - Publication of Keats’s
Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes and Other
Poems, Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, and
John Clare’s Poems Descriptive of Rural Life.
- 1821 - Keats dies in Rome. Shelley
writes Adonais. Byron publishes Don Juan III-V;
death of Napoleon; Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions
of an English Opium Eater ; Constable paints The
Haywain.
- 1822 - Death of Shelley; Schubert’s
Symphony No. 8 (Unfinished).
- 1824 - Death of Byron in Greece.
- 1825 - William Hazlitt publishes
The Spirit of the Age.
- 1827 - Deaths of Blake and Beethoven;
Delacroix paints The Death of Sardanapalus.
- 1831 - Hugo publishes The Hunchback
of Notre Dame.
- 1832 - Great Reform Bill passed.
- 1833 - Pushkin publishes Eugene
Onegin.
- 1834 - Death of Coleridge.
- 1837 - Coronation of Queen Victoria.
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