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E212: British Literature since 1760
Romantic Backgrounds, by Richard Kroll
Al Drake. 520 Hum. T/Th. 7:30-8:30 | ajdrake@ajdrake.com
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1. See Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, 1780-1950
(Penguin, 1961). Williams defines at least five distinguishing features
of Romantic concerns:
(a) “a major change was taking place in the nature of the relationship
between a writer and his readers”
(b) “a different habitual attitude towards the ‘public'
was establishing itself”
(c) “the production of art was coming to be regarded as one
of a number of specialized kinds of production”
(d) “a theory of the ‘superior reality' of art, as
the seat of imaginative truth, was receiving increasing emphasis”
(e) “the idea of the independent creative writer, the autonomous
genius, was becoming a kind of rule”
2. See Robert Langbaum, The Poetry of Experience (Norton,
1957)
(a) “the romanticist is not against science. He is merely trying
to limit the applicability of its findings”
(b) “By giving us as exotic a past as possible, the romanticist
gives us a past which, because it is inapplicable to the present,
we can inhabit as a way not of learning a lesson but of enlarging
our experience”
(c) “The whole conscious concern with objectivity as a problem,
as something to be achieved, is in fact specifically romantic”
3. Earl Wasserman, “The English Romantics: The
Grounds of Knowledge,” Studies in Romanticism 4 (1964): 17-34
(a) “what Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats chose to confront
more centrally and to a degree unprecedented in English literature
is a nagging problem in their literary culture: How do subject and
object meet in a meaningful relationship?”
Methods and Myths of Union:
--shock; surprise
--intense moments of feeling
--“spots of time” or “epiphanies” --“glimpses,”
or suggestions of something operating behind observed phenomena --transfigurations
of the physical world
--incest
--sympathy; identification
--romantic union; especially male-female (Romantics assume male as
subject)
--the privileged insights of children, savages, madmen, or idiots
--marginal figures: the Wandering Jew; Cain; Faust; Prometheus
--desire unfulfilled; guilt (existential vs. actual guilt)
--women as objects of desire; as the ethereal; the destroyer?
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