THE AGE OF TRANSITION
The most important events of the reign of George III (1760-1820) were:
- The loss of the American colonies was due to the fact that the Americans
were not represented in the English Parliament, so they didn’t accept to pay
taxes that were imposed on them. So some rioters in Boston threw a large
quantity of tea into the harbor and asked England to withdraw the garrison.
However, sooner or later, the Americans would have obtained independence
because they had developed a habit of independent existence from the
mother country, and most of them were American-born.
- The French Revolution and the struggle against Napoleon;at the beginning
England remained neutral, but after the execution of the French king, England
realized that it was necessary to oppose the French hegemony in Europe.
- The Industrial Revolution which transformed England from an agricultural
country into a manufacturing one. There was the invention of machines that
changed commercial production, for example the water-frame (telaio ad
acqua) of Arkwright and the steam engine (macchina a vapore) of James
Watt. These inventions destroyed the old domestic weaving and spinning
systems and introduced the methods of factory production. Immigration into
the new industrial districts brought many evils, i.e. overpopulation and the
lack of the most elementary principles of sanitation.
New scientific techniques were also applied to agriculture.
This revolutions required financial support, so people with money to invest
became important in economic life. So there was a deeper social division
between capital on one side and labour on the other.
The “laissez faire” theory was worked out by Adam Smith in The Wealth of
Nations (1776), according to which the State should not interfere with economic
activity.
LITERARY PRODUCTION
New themes began to appear side by side with the old ones. Satire was gradually
replaced by sentimentalism, while realism and reason made room for symbolism
and imagination. For convenience’s sake, the Age of Transition is sometimes divided
into 2 periods slightly different from each other, though often overlapping
Twilight of Classicism
Early Romanticism.
Twilight of Classicism
The “twilight of the Augustan Gods” began, more or less, by 1770. The age still
preserved its main features (reason, precision, order, harmony).
The coffee house preserved their role, but new ideas began to circulate inside them.
In fact, greater attention was being paid to the problems caused by Industrial
Revolution and interest began to shift from town to country life. The rural middle
class was described as morally wholesome. This led to a new approach to nature,
which was seen as something real and tangible, endowed of an existence of its own.
The countryside thus became the ideal setting of poets.
New themes based on intimate feeling began to appear, so poetry was more and
more pervaded by a melancholy tone, often associated with meditation on death.
The “Age of Reason” slowly turned into an “Age of Sensibility”, dominated by
sentimentalism and the quest for new sources of inspiration.
POETRY
It was perhaps the branch of literature in which the conflict between intellect and
emotion was most evident by the middle on the 18th century. Unable to voice their
own “dejection”, some poets began to look for relief or escape in nature or in the
humble life of country people. This feeling for nature began to tinge meditation with
melancholy that slowly turned into a more sombre mood, leading to an interest in
ruins, deserted places, night scenes, and tombs. A new type of poetry emerged,
known as “Graveyard poetry”, because of its meditation on death and its
preoccupation with the macabre and the loneliness of the grave. (Edward Young and
Robert Blair). A particular type of poem lamenting someone’s death or meditating
on death in general, was Elegy. It has always been considered classical in form
(universality of themes like death, clear influence of poetic classics such as Dante,
Petrarca and Lucretius) and early romantic in content (a country churchyard, death,
nature-man relationship). The greatest poet of elegy was Thomas Gray, who wrote
“Elegy written in a country Churchyard”. The impact of its lines spread throughout
Europe anticipating the democratic concepts of Wordsworth and other Romantic
writers. It became very popular in Italy, where it inspired Foscolo’s I Sepolcri. But
Foscolo, unlike Gray, concentrated on the function of the grave as a link between
the living and the dead, as a testimony of past memories to be handed down from
generation to generation, as a symbol of glory and a source of poetry and
inspiration. Foscolo believed in a life that continued after death through the
memories of the living (“corrispondenza di amorosi sensi”), while Gray laments the
hopeless transiency (fugacità, caducità) of man and things.
Early Romanticism
Early Romanticism (or Pre-romanticism) wasn’t a real literary movement, because it
lacked precise rules; it was a trend because at the end of the 18th century, the first
signs of a new approach to literature began to appear in some writers, who shared a
common distaste for the artificiality, the conventional formality and the intellectual
elegance of the Augustans, and were united by a belief in imagination and feeling
against realism and common sense.
They were influenced above all by the new aesthetic and social theories of Jean
Jacques Rousseau, which paved the way for Romanticism:
1) Childhood: the child was no longer seen as a half-grown human being, but the
archetypal innocent endowed with wisdom and happiness;
2) Noble savage: he believes that our civilization, based on the ownership of
property, creates inequality and envy. So he asserts that “man is naturally
good and only by institutions he is made bad”, so it is necessary a “return to
nature”, where primitive savage men lived innocent and happy;
3) Imagination: Rousseau opposes the “ideal” to “real”, because imagination
allows escape from the here-and-now of human society;
4) Nature: it also becomes a refuge from society, assimilating nature to the
individual’s mood, of which it becomes the outer manifestation;
5) Intimacy and melancholy: the disproportion between the dream and the fact
led to depression and melancholy.
Early Romantic features
against
Classical features
Originality and creativity
Imitation
Emphasis on feeling and emotions
Reason
Return to free imagination
Conventional established rules
Interest in the Middle Ages
Classical Greece and Rome
Subjective feeling for nature
Objective feeling for nature
Interest in exotic times and places
Routine
life
environment
and
domestic
POETRY
New sources in poetry
In this period new sources of inspiration were found in Nordic (Scandinavian) and
Celtic culture, whit their ancient pagan tradition, so mysterious and little known.
Another important source of inspiration was the ancient national folk poetry. It was
rediscovered by Thomas Percy, known as Bishop Percy. He was a clergyman who
published Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, a collection of songs and ballads,
dating back to medieval times.
James Macpherson was a Scottish poet, who published some poems, collected in
two volumes under the title of The works of Ossian. Macpherson maintained that
these poems were translations of poems written by a legendary third-century
warrior and bard, Ossian. This work made known to Europe the Ossianic Poetry, a
cycle of Gaelic heroic tales, which were another great source for the poetry of this
period.
Robert Burns was a Scottish poet, whose poems were collected under the title
Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect. He wrote in a simple Ayrshire dialect (his
Scottish region) and drawn inspiration from oral Scottish folk literature, language
and songs.
William Blake
Born in
Family situation
Education
Jobs
Literary works
Death
London, 1757
Poor
No regular school, apprenticed to an engraver
Engraver, painter, writer
Songs of Innocence, Songs of Experience, the French Revolution, etc..
London, 1827
Blake was the “prophet” of imagination and symbolism. He is often considered the earliest of the
Romantics, but his poetry was so original that it is difficult to classify him. However it’s certain that
Blake gave the final blow to the Age of Reason and paved the way for the return to the supremacy
of the spirit, which was to become the doctrine of the later Romantics.
Blake was a great mystical and visionary poet. He hated the rationalism and materialism of Locke
and Newton and atheism of the Enlightenment. He hated also the realistic art and literature of the
18th century, which regarded art as “imitation”.
His philosophy was a visionary exaltation of the spirit over the body, of instinct over education, of
spiritual vision over the impressions of the physical senses.
Blake anticipates the themes of Romanticism for many reasons:
 His exaltation of art anticipated the aestethic movement;
 His social conscience and sympathy for the suffering of poor people;
 His belief that art is creative vision (Coleridge);
 His attack of the values of the 18th century;
 His sense of freedom, which rebelled against any form of oppression.
He denied the existence of God separaterd from man, since God to him was the imagination, i.e.
the creative and spiritual power in man. He believed in the Fall of Man, which, however, was not
caused by the eating of the forbidden fruit (i.e. disobedience), but occurred when the reason
revolted against God, (i.e. against imagination). This revolt led to this world, limited in space
through our five senses. So he always tried to discover the reality beyond the visible world. Hence
the role of the poet who is seen as a prophet, whose task is to awaken manship to the world of
imagination.
“Songs of Innocence” is a collection of poems mostly centred on childhood. They are written in a
very simple language and in an apparently nursery-like style. The tone is on the surface very
sweet and positive as in a fairy tale. Childhood has a profound symbolic significance to Blake. It
doen’t only represent an age of man, but a condition of the spirit, which may persist in maturity,
too. But man cannot remain a child forever: in order to grow, he must know not only joy but also
sorrow, and must tested by experience.
“Songs of experience” ia a complementary collection, which represents the perspective of the
adult, in which people have lost all spontaneity and have become corrupt, selfish, aggressive.
Although the style generally remains simple, the language of the poems is very different from
Songs of Innocence. The tone becomes dramatic and the images used are more violent.
PROSE
The Gothic Novel
The Gothic Novel developed towards the end of the 18th century as a reaction to Augustan
rationalism. The term “Gothic” has 3 meanings, in fact it can be refered to:
- medieval architecture, old, ruined castle;
- irregular and barbarous, opposite to the Classicism of the 12th-14th century;
- wild, supernatural, mysterious, fearful.
Characteristics:
- use of terrifying descriptions (people, places, events are scary and mysteroius),murders,
supernatural events;
- Unusual settings: ancient castles, abbeys, prisons, foreign countries, imagery past time,
usually the Middle Ages
- Sense of mystery which pervades everything;
- Very intricate and complicated plots
- Natural phenomena as moonlight and thunderstorms, to increase the sense of terror;
- Tendency to produce anxiety in the reader, more than amusement.
Characters:
- supernatural beings (as Dracula), monsters, ghosts, vampires.
- An heroine, a victim who is phisically persecuted;
- A villain, a man who is usually old and a victim of his own personality.
The beginning of G.N. is usually traced to 1764, when Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole was
published.
Other G.N. are:
The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and the Italian (1797) by Anne Radcliffe
The Monk (1796) by M.g: Lewis.
However, the most popular G.N. was Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818), written by
Mary Shelley, the wife of the poet Shelley. Frankenstein is a Swiss scientist, that after long studies,
manages to create a living creature, ugly and strong, who, eventually turns into a murderer and
destroys his own creator.
This novel is concerned with moral and ethical problem, that is the bad use man can make of
science. Frankenstein, in fact, manipulates nature, but his creature gets out if his control. Another
theme is the Rousseauian conception of man as originally good. In fact, the monster is good, as
long as he does not come into contact with society. But his love turns into hatred and violence
when he is rejected by men because of his uglyness, thus becoming a prototype of the outsider,
the outcast from society because of his “difference”.
The Gothic genre gave way to the modern horror fiction.