Chapter Seventeen
The Romantic Era
Edgar Allen Poe,
American
Romantic Author
This is as
romantic as
romantic
gets.
Caspar David
Friedrich’s
“Mountianeer
in a Misty
Landscape”
This is as
romantic as
romantic
gets.
Man alone,
finding himself
in the awesome
world of nature
Caspar David
Friedrich’s
“Mountianeer
in a Misty
Landscape”
Industrial Development, Social
Progress, Scientific Progress
First era of Feminism and Workers’ Rights (Trade
Unions, Socialism)
Industrial Revolution: industry overtakes agriculture
as source of national wealth
Urbanization:More people living in cities than country
for first time in human history
Steam power, railroads, factories
“a wilderness of human beings”
Scientific Discoveries
Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) discovers source of
disease in germs; proposes vaccination
Charles Robert Darwin (1809-1882)
Theory of evolution, natural selection
“Social Darwinism”
The Concerns of Romanticism
Exploration of oppositions and relations
between things
Expression of personal feelings
Emotionality, subjectivity (in place of
intellectual concerns of Enlightenment era)
Individual creative imagination (sometimes
led to sense of artist’s alienation from society)
Mystical attachment to nature, the wild, the
unpredictable, and the unexplored
Love of the fantastic and exotic
Attempt to “re-humanize” urbanization,
science, and the industrial revolution
Often very politicized
The Idealist Intellectual Background
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
Transcendental idealism
Critique of Judgment (1790)
Art reconciles opposites; unites general
with particular, reason with intellect
Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831)
Applies Aristotelian dialectic to working of
material world itself: synthesis of thesis
(pure infinite being), antithesis (world of
nature)
“World Spirit” the result of world’s
synthesis of its own differences
The Intellectual Background:
Thinking in Terms of Interrelations
Karl Marx (1818-1883)
Universal proletariat, revolution
Progressive, materialist, dialectical sense
of history; developed by ‘standing Hegel on
his head’
Artistic realism: social and political
Pro-worker
Charles Darwin (1809-1882)
Natural selection, dialectic of species and
environment
On the Origin of Species
Nineteenth-Century Literature:
British Romantic Poetry
William Wordsworth (17701850)
Founded Romantic movement
“Emotion recollected in
tranquility”
Lord Byron (1788-1824)
Tormented Romantic hero,
Byronic
Personal liberty, freedom
Nineteenth-Century Literature:
Romantic Poetry
Percy Bysshe Shelley (17921822)
Atheism, anarchy
Perfectability of humanity
Unification of extreme
emotions
John Keats (1795-1821)
Tragedy of existence, peace of
death
The Romantic Era in America:
American Literature
European
influences+individuality
Transcendentalists
Unity of humans with nature
Emerson, Thoreau
Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
Importance of the individual,
freedom
Humanity united with the
universe
The Romantic Era in America:
American Literature
Edgar Allan Poe invents the short
story form
Emily Dickinson (1830-1881)
Balance of passion, reason
Psychology, faith, skepticism
Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter
(1850)
Evil in society
Melville’s Moby Dick (1851)
Profound moral issues
Search for truth, self-discovery
Romantic Art:
Painting at the Turn of the Century
Francisco Goya, romantic
extraordinaire (1746-1828)
The Third of May, 1808
Execution of the Madrileños
No idealization
Persuasive emotionality
Personal commitment, vision
Goya’s “Saturn
Devouring One of His
Sons”
Romantic Art:
Painting in France
Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1818)
Romantic art of Delacroix (1798-1863)
Use of color to create form
Violent, emotional scenes
The Death of Sardanapalus (1826)
Romantic Art:
Realist Painting in France
Another art movement of this time that
didn’t attempt to romanticize the world
but to represent how it really is.
However, those realistic representations
are also very individualistic statements.
French Realists
Honoré Daumier (1808-1879)
Daumier’s realist “Third Class”
Daumier’s “The Legislative Belly.” What reality is this commenting on?
Romantic Art:
Painting in Germany and England
Landscape as Romantic device
Friedrich’s Sea of Ice (1810)
Constable’s Hay Wain (1821)
Turner’s Slave Ship (1840)
Friedrich’s “Sea of Ice.” How is this romantic?
The Romantic Era in America:
American Painting
Significance of landscape painting
Natural beauty=moral beauty
Hudson River School (Thomas Cole),
Luminists (Martin Johnson Heade)
Winslow Homer (1836-1910)
Realism, naturalism, drama
Thomas Eakins (1844-1916)
Scientific accuracy, objective truth
American romantic painters such as Thomas Cole in his
“Landscape with Figures” celebrated the virgin land of the
young nation. How is this a romantic landscape? (do you
see the figures?)
Another work of Thomas Cole. What is he saying about
America?
Heade uses oils to remove all trace of brushstroke from his painting of
Lake George in New York. The result is luminous and almost
photographic.
Winslow Homer’s “Gulf Stream,” a very powerful
American romantic vision. What does this seemingly
terrifying image represent?
Eakins’ Miss Van Buren
(1889)
The angle of the
subject’s head and the
position of the chair
make us approach the
subject as a person.
We wonder: what is she
thinking? Looking at?
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Pit and the Pendulum.”
American Romanticism. What is romantic about this?