1776-1837
Access Module
116
The Industrial Revolution brought about an economy
Test yourself
The British kept strict political control over the colonies by
imposing a governor and by claiming the right to tax the
colonies in order to support the British troops that were stationed in America to defend the colonies themselves.
The American colonies considered the imposition of taxes
by Great Britain illegal, since they did not recognize the power of a British Parliament in which they were not represented.
They voiced their firm discontent in the slogan: “No taxation
without representation”.
The main points in the American Declaration of Independence were the democratic principles of equality and liberty. It
stated that all men had the same rights to life, freedom and
the “pursuit of happiness”.
The war of American Independence ended with the Treaty
of Versailles (1783). In the treaty Great Britain recognized the
independence of the colonies.
William Pitt the Younger became the British Prime Minister
just after the loss of the American colonies.
William Pitt imposed complete control over the whole of
India by appointing a General Governor (viceroy) to rule over
the continent; through the deportation of convicts from Britain,
the Prime Minister favoured the colonization of Australia,
which soon became an important and rich colony; moreover
under his government the subdivision of Canada into two
provinces, one inhabited mostly by French Catholic emigrants
and the other by British Protestant emigrants, took place.
From 1793 to 1814 Britain was at the head of European
coalitions against France and Napoleon. Although initially the
coalitions had to face defeat, Britain finally managed to defeat
Napoleon in such battles as Trafalgar and Waterloo, thanks to
its fleet (Trafalgar) and its army (Waterloo).
The Luddite Riots broke out in 1811-12 when workers attacked factories and destroyed machinery. In 1819, during a
demonstration of workers calling for parliamentary reforms in
Manchester the army killed eleven people and wounded several hundreds: this later became known as the Peterloo
Massacre. These episodes were related to the economic and political crisis that had set in during and after the Napoleonic wars.
Economic liberalism was founded on the new ideas of freedom for the individual and was to be subject only to the laws
of individual self-interest, and to the laws of supply and demand.
The ‘laissez-faire’ policy stated that the State must not interfere in the economic activities of the individual.
The Industrial Revolution took place in England from about
1760 to about 1840.
Such technical innovations as the use of new materials, like
HISTORY AND SOCIETY
Access Module
The Romantic Age
founded on industry and machine manufacture.
Literary Highlights
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1
The Romantic Age
iron and steel, and of new energy sources, like coal, petroleum
and electricity, together with the invention of new machines,
like spinning and weaving machines and the steam engine,
favoured an increase in production; important developments
in transportation and communication favoured commercial activities and the discovery of new overseas markets; small workshops and the cottage industry system disappeared and were
replaced by big factories.
Transport was greatly improved by the invention of
steamships and steam trains and by the development of an extensive network of roads, canals and railways in the course of
the 19th century. This also led to the introduction of a regular
postal service. The textile industry was mechanized and the
iron industry developed thanks to the great coal and iron deposits in Lancashire and Wales. Agriculture also developed,
favoured by the new techniques in fertilisation, draining and
crop rotation and by the invention of new threshing machines
and wheeled ploughs. The concentration of capital necessary
to the industrial growth and world-wide trade led to the foundation of the first international banks, like the powerful
Rothschild Bank.
One of the most striking consequences of the Industrial
Revolution was the spreading of social unrest, due mainly to a
high rate of unemployment in factories and agriculture because
of the invention of new machinery. Moreover, factory workers
were badly paid, underfed and badly-clothed, besides working
and living under unsafe conditions.
‘Slums’ were very poor, urbanized areas, inhabited by factory workers and their families. Here the most elementary sanitation was lacking and people lived in filthy overcrowded houses. Due to diseases and to the abuse of alcohol the death rate
was high in these areas.
Socialism was born in about 1830 as a criticism of industrialism and capitalism. It proposed a radical change in society
that would lead to the abolition of class differences and the redistribution of wealth.
Women were subject to discrimination (worse jobs and
wages, no education) and even high-class women enjoyed less
freedom than in the 18th century, because of the strict social
codes imposed by the middle class. However, since the end of
the 18th century women had begun their quest for emancipation and equal rights. The feminist Mary Wollstonecraft was
the first to write about all this in her A Vindication of the Rights
of Woman (1792).
Access Module
Romanticism involved the whole of Europe from Portugal
system by assigning the number of representatives for each
electoral district on the basis of the real number of its inhabitants. Thus, 150 agricultural districts by now almost depopulated – the so-called ‘rotten boroughs’ – lost their right to a representative, and more seats were given to the growing industrial towns, like Manchester or Sheffield, which after the
Industrial Revolution had seen their population greatly increased. However, suffrage was not a right for the whole population: half the middle-class, nearly all the working-class and
all women still had no right to vote.
Other reforms of the period were: the Factory Acts (1833),
which forbade child labour under the age of nine and improved
working conditions in general; the abolition of slavery and slave
trade in the British colonies (1833); a new system of national
education (1834).
Child labour was very common during the Industrial
Revolution. By the first part of the 19th century children began
to have their rights recognized (Factory Acts, 1833) and they
became the subjects of a new consideration, as was reflected
in the poetry of the age.
2
CULTURE
to Russia and different arts: literature, painting, sculpture and
music. While in England Romantic germs were already present in the second half of the 17th century in the form of pleasure in ruins, night scenery and melancholy; in France it developed later mainly under the influence of two Swiss-born writers: Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Madame de Staël. The former
put the basis of the cult of nature and the belief in man’s natural goodness, the latter started the Romantic vogue for Italy.
They were followed by other writers (such as Victor Hugo).
In Italy Romanticism started in the first decade of the 19th century thanks to Giovanni Berchet, Alessandro Manzoni and Ugo
Foscolo.
feeling: the ’knowledge of the heart’ was considered the
true knowledge as opposed to the ‘knowledge of the
head’. Feelings and emotions were considered the essential steps towards it.
imagination: it connected the individual mind and the
universe, the human and the divine, mortality and eternity, emotions felt and poetry written, in a word it was the
core of the creative process;
the commonplace: simple scenes and ordinary people began to acquire a new value; some poets (especially Wordsworth) tried to reveal the ordinary in its splendour by taking away the “film of familiarity” (Coleridge) that prevents
us from seeing things as they are;
nature: the Romantics didn’t mean only a realistic description of it, they endowed it with life, passion and feelings. Wordsworth’s poems for example begin with the
description of a landscape which leads to thoughts on man
and his role in the universe;
the supernatural: the commonplace had its counterpart
in the fascination with the supernatural and magic;
dreams, nightmares and visions were cultivated by Romantic writers;
individualism: the tendency to introspection that focused
on individual experience and made the poet speak of himself and his feelings; reality and truth were believed to be
subjective. The first-person lyric became a major form, in
novels the individual character became the centre of narration. This individualism was also reflected in isolation
from society which took the form of isolation in nature, revolt against the establishment, exile;
the dark hero: the Romantic hero is haunted by remorse
for his faults and wasted opportunities. He is often solitary,
in exile, as if he had committed some horrible unconfessed
crime. Past outlaws such as Satan, Cain, Faust or Napoleon
were greatly attractive;
the search for infinity: the desire to exceed human limitations became something glorious for which life was
worth living. This task was the artist’s mission and made
him a prophet-like figure in awakening the common
man.
A new American tradition was born in the Romantic period: writers began to favour local subjects and settings as a result of the sense of political and intellectual freedom that was
growing in the young American nation. The first example of a
truly American voice was Edgar Allan Poe.
Literary Highlights
The Romantic Age
The Reform Bill (1832) brought a change to the electoral
122
Test yourself
It is a word that referred to the new ideas on art and human perception, it was an aesthetic and philosophical ideal set
against the classical ideal of the beautiful to indicate irregularity, strength and fear as opposed to classical harmony, balance and regularity in form.
In the second half of the 18th century a higher value began to be placed on the individual’s emotional impressions and
feelings. A predilection for ‘Gothic’ tendencies such as gloomy
and frightening places, dark and night settings, exotic places,
Medieval and Northern literature and folklore characterized the
new pre-Romantic sensibility.
At first they were nearly all in favour of it, but its bloody excesses and later the imperialist tendencies of France made their
enthusiasm cool down.
The revolutionary spirit of the age expressed itself not only in the political and social revolutions in America and in
France, but also ideologically in the revolt against all forms of
authority conflicting with human dignity and free choice.
Therefore it developed in a criticism of the social results of the
Industrial Revolution, in radicalism, socialism, sexual freedom
and early feminism. Artistically it made itself felt in the revolution against neoclassical rules in favour of the free expression
of personal feelings.
The Romantic movement was anticipated in Germany by
the so-called ‘Sturm und Drang’ movement in the 1770s. The
word ‘romantic’ originally meant “typical of the old romances”.
The new connotation of the word ‘romantic’, as something
marked by feelings – especially loneliness and melancholy –
rather than intellect, was used in Germany at the turn of the
century. Among others, the poets Schiller and Goethe stated
that the new meaning indicated not just a change in taste but
a revolt against tradition and a belief in freedom for the individual and the artist and a return to nature.
© 2005 by Carlo Signorelli Editore, Milano - Edumond Le Monnier S.p.A. - Tutti i diritti riservati - www.carlosignorellieditore.it
Romantic Poetry
OBJECTIVES
PREREQUISITES
CONTENTS
1. To get to know the many new themes of the age present in the literary genre.
Specifically: innocence and experience, nature, countryside life and town life, sensitivity,
emotion and feelings, the poetry of the child, the natural and the supernatural, realism and
magic, individualism and isolation from society, the Romantic hero, personal and political
freedom, the reworking of ancient myths, the ethical value of beauty, Gothic horror.
2. To get to know the most representative Romantic poets and their features.
Specifically: the first-generation Romantic poets William Blake, William Wordsworth and
Samuel Taylor Coleridge; among the poets of the second generation, George Gordon, Lord
Byron and John Keats.
3. To get to know the various types of poems used.
Specifically: the song, the lyric and the ballad.
Features of the literary period
Have your students read the Access Module.
Features of the literary genre
Ask your students to have a look at RECOGNIZING GENRES on p. 13 for the technical
features of poetry.
Features of Romantic poetry
The table BEFORE STARTING on p. 127 gives students some useful preliminary information on Romantic poetry.
This module is subdivided into two submodules:
1.1
First-generation Romantics
The Lamb
The Tyger
William Blake
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways
Composed Upon Westminster Bridge
William Wordsworth
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
1.2
Windows
The Industrial Revolution
European Romanticism
Cross-Curricular Themes
The Romantic Hero
Nature
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151
152
154
157
118
122
182
186
Literary Highlights
LINKING AND
EXPANDING
129
131
133
136
138
139
140
143
148
Second-generation Romantics
So We’ll Go No More A-Roving
George Gordon, Lord Byron
La Belle Dame Sans Merci
John Keats
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The Romantic Age
127
Module 1 Romantic Poetry
Module 1
Romantic Poetry Module 1
Art Links
Visionary Painting (Füssli)
Visionary Painting (Blake)
Landscape Painting
The Sublime
TESTING
1.1
125
135
142
150
Two types of tests are provided in the Teacher’s Book on pp. 11-13:
a quick test (15 to 20 minutes) at the end of each submodule;
an Internal Certification (60 minutes) at the end of the module.
First-generation Romantics
a flock of lambs and a child feeding a lamb, a thatched
cottage and a big shadowing-tree in the background.
All around an interweaving of bower-like tendrils which
beside being a frame to the picture are also protective
towards the child and the lambs.
The Tyger: the trunk of a big and imposing bare tree
on the right; in the foreground a tiger stands alone,
powerful and in solitude giving an idea of sorrow and
suffering.
b. Open.
William Blake
The Lamb
129
Pre-reading
Open. Possible answer: innocence, youth, purity.
While-reading
The Romantic Age
4
a. With a question.
b. No, the stanza ends with the repetition of the questions
asked in lines 1 and 2.
c. “clothing of delight”, “Softest clothing wooly bright”,
“tender voice”.
d. “stream”, “mead”, “vales”.
e. Images of tenderness, purity, peaceful nature.
a. It gives the answer to the repeated question about the
creation of the lamb.
b. “meek”, “mild”, “little child”, “lamb”: all positive qualities.
Post-reading
While-reading
a. With an invocation and a question.
a. The poet.
b.
c.
d.
e.
f.
a.
b.
To the “Little Lamb”.
The Creator.
“He” / “a Lamb” / “a little child”.
“a child”.
The perfect innocence of childhood, a state of the soul.
Two stanzas.
Yes, they are both made up of ten lines and they both
start and end with an indented couplet.
c. aabbccddaa.
Summarizing
Literary Highlights
Open.
The poem is an invocation to the lamb in the title. In the
first stanza the lamb is shown as free and happy, in an unspoiled
environment where it receives and gives pleasure. The lamb’s
innocence and the perfect harmony of its existence make the
poet ask, “who made thee?”. The answer comes in the second
stanza, where the traditional identification of the lamb with
Christ is confirmed by the voice of the child in line 17. Both
the child and the lamb are united in God’s name, in a world
made up of light, running waters, grass and tender voices.
The Tyger
131
Pre-reading
a. The Lamb: peaceful, rustic setting: in the foreground
b. Terrifying: “burning bright”, “fearful”.
c. Yes, in line 2: ”In the forests of the night”can be compared with the opening of Dante’s Inferno when in
line 2 Dante says “mi ritrovai per una selva oscura”.
d. He is wondering about who created the tiger.
a. The distance between the Creator and ourselves.
b. A feeling of awe.
c. No; it appears like a supernatural animal.
a. The stanza continues the image of the forge but, more
than the physical aspect of the tiger it stresses the role
of intelligence, of mind in creation.
b. We should be terrified of the divine strength: the
Creator appears to be a daring and awesome craftsman.
a. Lines 17-18: the stars are personified as a kind of heavenly arm, as warriors yielding spears capable of pity and
compassion.
b. Perhaps they weep for poor suffering humanity.
c. Because they have different characters. The lamb is
meek and mild, the tiger is powerful and potentially aggressive.
a. Stanza 6 repeats stanza 1 with a single change of word
(“Could” / “Dare”).
b. In stanza 1 the verb “Could” gives a feeling of wonder at the Creator’s power, in stanza 6 with the verb
“Dare” there is wonder at the Creator’s fearlessness.
c. “fearful” has a negative connotation; “ symmetry” is
generally considered a positive quality; the former is associated with chaos and anxiety, the latter with order
and assurance.
d. Being a sort of oxymoron ( Glossary), the expression is
certainly typical of Blake’s theory of contrasts. Like all
oxymorons, it allows the poet to describe opposite feelings at the same time. In this way he is perhaps suggesting that life is made up of opposite things and contradictions.
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William Blake
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
Pre-reading
Open.
While-reading
a. Possible answer: a, b and d. The image of the one sin-
b.
a.
b.
a.
b.
133
c.
gle cloud in the sky can suggest ideas of freedom and
loneliness, but also the habit of dreams. The choice is
subjective.
In line 3-4 the terms used to define the groups of daffodils are crowd and host.
In line 12 the poet says that they throw up their heads
in a sprightly dance.
b (anthropomorphyze the daffodils).
The prevailing feeling is a spontaneous overflow of joy
and happiness, as expressed by the words: “they /
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee” (ll. 13-14); “A
poet could not but be gay, / In such a jocund company” (ll. 15-16); “the bliss of solitude” (l. 22); “my heart
with pleasure fills / And dances with the daffodils”
(ll. 23-24).
The pleasure is more in remembering the scene he saw,
since what really matters is the internal eye which creates the poetic vision using the material received from
the senses. This is clearly shown in lines 17-18 where
the poet declares that he was not really conscious of the
beauty of the scene at the time when he saw the daffodils. True awareness and pleasure come only when
the poet is in “vacant or in pensive mood” (l. 20). The
act of seeing is a prerequisite and a condition of poetic vision but never a substitute for it.
It is positive because the poet gains happiness through
a sense of deep communion with nature.
5
Post-reading
In the first stanza the poet compares himself to “a cloud”,
while in the second he compares the line of daffodils to “the
stars that shine / And twinkle on the milky way”. Notice how
earth and heaven are united in the beauty of the daffodils.
a. In the first three stanzas the tense is the past simple (“I
wandered”, l. 1; “I saw”, l. 3; “They stretched”, l. 9;
“saw I”, l. 11; “danced”, l. 13; “Out-did”, l. 14; “I
gazed – and gazed – but little thought”, l. 17), while
in the last stanza we have the present simple (“I lie”,
l. 19; “They flash”, l. 21; “my heart with pleasure fills
and dances”, ll. 23-24).
b. The first three stanzas refer to a past situation, while the
last one is a permanent condition of the poet in meditation. The change of tense underlines the gap between
the past experience and its remembrance in the poet’s
present which gives him a moment of ecstatic vision.
She Dwelt Among
the Untrodden Ways
138
While-reading
a. Lucy led the simple, solitary life of a country girl.
b. “untrodden ways” (l. 1); “Beside the springs of Dove”
(l. 2).
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Literary Highlights
Revising
He worked very hard as a poet, a drawer and an engraver,
but never became successful: he published his Songs of
Innocence and of Experience in 1794 but did not acquire fame
with them and neither did he with his first art exhibition. He
spent his life in obscurity, accompanied only by a small group
of faithful friends, rather than accept compromise.
Yes, he did. He was a supporter of the French Revolution
and opposed any form of political tyranny (he was against
monarchy) and of religious orthodoxy (the Church of England).
He was very concerned with social issues, criticizing the suffering of the poor and the oppressed and the exploitation of
children.
No, he did not. He considered innocence and experience
as two states of mind which co-exists in the same person. They
are contradictory but can never be reconciled, because a dialectical opposition is essential: the universe is made up of contrasts between good and evil, purity and corruption, lambs and
tigers.
Blake believed in the supreme power of imagination over
reason. Imagination allows us to see into the reality of things,
which is gained not through the senses but is the product of
man’s inner mind. Blake expressed his own imagination
through a complex mythology and an idiosyncratic concept of
the world.
Some of the symbols used by Blake are easy to decode because they belong to a well-established tradition (e.g. the lamb,
which is a symbol of innocence), while others are complex and
obscure, being the product of Blake’s highly creative thought
and of his culture. On the other hand, his language is easy to
understand, since he employs Anglo-Saxon vocabulary mostly
and refrains and repetitions typical of ballads and children’s
songs and hymns.
136
The Romantic Age
The Writer
William Wordsworth
Module 1 Romantic Poetry
Post-reading
a. No, his question remains without an answer.
b. No, there aren’t.
No, the layout is different from The Lamb; here we have six
stanzas of four lines each, rhyming aabb.
The lamb is a biblical image and symbol of innocence and
purity, but also of the sacrifice of Christ on the Cross (the
“Lamb of God”). The lamb is deeply connected with the child:
both have a tender voice and are meek and mild. In The Lamb,
Blake speaks of Christ, but also of a human condition of innocence, which has not been put to the test of experience.
The tiger, on the other hand, is a frightful creature, one that
causes fears and danger. Unlike the lamb, the tiger does not
belong to Christian symbolism and is one of Blake’s most powerful creations. The tiger is connected with the “forests of the
night”; its physical appearance is impressive due to a “fearful
symmetry” in its features. The symbolic quality of this animal
is evident in the reference to the fire in its eyes and in the numerous questions about its origins (“Did he who made the
Lamb make thee?”, l. 20). It is the opposite of the lamb; it is
the symbol of experience, of the sufferings and violence present in human life. God’s creation contains both good and
evil, innocence and experience as two contrary states of the
human soul.
Romantic Poetry Module 1
The Romantic Age
6
a.
metaphor: “A violet by a mossy stone” (l. 5);
simile: “Fair as a star” (l. 7).
Yes, through these two technical devices we can imagine Lucy as beautiful and bright, but at the same time
bashful and demure.
In the last two lines: “... and, oh, / The difference to
me!”.
An effect of suspense.
Stanzas 1 and 2 are limited to a description of the girl,
through which we can also perceive her personality; in
stanza 3 the poet enters the poem and laments her
death.
No, the other people seem indifferent to the girl’s death
(ll. 8-9), while such death is of great importance to the
poet.
b.
a.
b.
c.
d.
Post-reading
a. Three.
b. Yes, four lines each.
c. The poem rhymes abab, cdcd, efef.
d. The poem is made up of alternate iambic tetrameters
and trimeters such as we usually find in ballads.
Nature, which is a typical feature of Wordsworth’s poetry,
is here represented by the silent and peaceful countryside that
surrounds the Lake District. As it is typical of his poetry, an intimate communion between nature and man runs through the
three stanzas. The overflow of the poet’s feelings are well illustrated in the last two lines of the final stanza where we can
read the poet’s strong emotion and grief in recollecting the loss
of the young country girl.
Composed Upon Westminster
Bridge
139
While-reading
a. Ships, towers, domes, theatres, temples, the river
Literary Highlights
Thames, the houses.
b. These elements are said to be “silent”, “bare”, “bright
and glittering in the smokeless air”.
c. The beauty of the city in the sunny morning is superior
to that of natural landscape. The poet says that “Never
did sun more beautifully steep / In his first splendour,
valley, rock, or hill”, meaning that nature in his wildest
aspects is not more beautiful than the sight of London
in the morning.
d. He is accustomed to a city which is usually noisy, crowded and with a lot of smoke.
e. He experiences a deep sense of calm (l. 11), which he
hyperbolically says he never felt before in his life.
f. The exclamation of the last line restates the powerful
beauty of the city of London stressing the qualities usually arributed to Nature: silence and calm.
Post-reading
a. This poem is a sonnet: in fact it is made up of two quatrains and two tercets.
b. It belongs to the tradition of the Petrarchan sonnet, because it is made up of two quatrains and two tercets
(4+4+3+3), while the Elizabethan or Shakespearean
sonnet is made up of three quatrains and a couplet
(4+4+4+2). Its rhyme scheme is abba, abba, cdc, dcd.
The Writer
William Wordsworth
140
Revising
He lived in the Lake District, a region in the north-west of
England close to the Scottish border, in beautiful natural scenery, which was a source of inspiration for all his life. He spent
most of his adult life in Dorset with his sister Dorothy, enjoying the company and the friendship of Coleridge.
While in France he was a passionate supporter of the
French Revolution; he also had a daughter, whom he left in
France. When he went back to England he abandoned his revolutionary ideas.
Because they collaborated in writing the Lyrical Ballads,
that is, the collection of poems which is considered the manifesto of English Romantic poetry.
Lyrical Ballads came out in 1798. The Preface was added
to the 1800 edition.
Lyrical Ballads shows Wordsworth’s idea of poetry as
“spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” expressed in
ordinary language, telling ordinary events.
nature as the countryside: the countryside is opposed to
the town; its solitude contributes to a deep spiritual contact with nature and is the source of great pleasure for
the poet;
nature as a source of inspiration: the poet does not focus on the external aspects (sights, sounds, colours) but on
the relationship with nature, which gives man moral and
spiritual values;
nature as a life-force: God is present in the power of nature; in fact, nature and God often seem to be the same
thing (Wordsworth was accused of pantheism, but he denied it).
a (the child is capable of simplicity and goodness and is in
harmony with the living world);
b (during the process of growth the child loses the original contact with the perfect knowledge it had during its
pre-natal life. The child is still united to the universe but the
adult gradually loses this union);
c (this is true, but the child possesses a deeper wisdom, due
to its closer contact with nature).
Writing Practice (extra exercise)
Answer these questions (maximum 80 words for each answer).
1. Which are the different aspects of nature considered
by Wordsworth in his nature poems?
2. How does Wordsworth consider the ordinary world?
3. Explain Wordsworth’s belief in the pre-existence of the
soul.
1. Nature as the countryside opposed to the confusion of the
town is a source of joy and pleasure for the poet. But Nature
is also a source of inspiration: the contact with nature allows
the poet to see into “the life of things”. The third aspect is that
of nature as a life-force, a living entity. God is present in nature
and is not separable from it (this view is often called pantheistic). (73 words)
2. The ordinary world is worth attention and respect. The simple life of humble country folk can teach the poet more lessons
than a philosopher. By drawing our attention to the ordinary
things in life, Wordsworth shows us that they are really great
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3. Wordsworth believed that all we are in our present originates in our past experiences. The Child is closer to God than
the adult, and so he is also closer to nature. The soul after birth
gradually loses its perfect knowledge and cannot keep its deep
union with the universe. For adults, the deep union with nature is possible only in very short moments of vision. (65 words)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner
143
It Is an Ancient Mariner
144
Pre-reading
a and c (creates a sense of mystery but also an exotic atmosphere).
c (to reinforce the atmosphere of magic).
148
Revising
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s great friends and collaborators
were William Wordsworth and the latter’s sister Dorothy; they
settled in the Lake District and the two poets worked together on the composition of the Lyrical Ballads, which can be considered the most important work of English Romantic poetry.
He was an opium addict as a consequence of his worries
and frustration; he became addicted probably because he had
opium prescribed as a treatment for chronic rheumatism.
They are defined ‘demonic poems’ because they share
the presence of the supernatural in the forms of haunted souls.
The Rime, Christabel and Kubla Khan are seen as “nightmares
of passivity” because behind their exotic richness there are mysterious forces at play: the Ancient Mariner “does not act but
is acted upon”.
Coleridge mixes real and unreal elements and events all
through The Rime. He gives realistic details about the wedding
feast and about the Mariner’s native country; he is fairly precise about the position of the sun in the sky both when the ship
sails from the harbour and when it is about to change hemisphere; he describes the changes of weather at sea; the alternate blowing of a good south wind and its complete dropping;
the days of heat and those in which the ship is driven by the
storm. On the other hand, real creatures and natural elements
are endowed with a fantastic, magic and somehow nightmarish power: the old Mariner, who comes from nowhere, has
an hypnotic power and is compelled by a mysterious force to
tell his story. The Albatross seems to have supernatural powers; unnatural creatures, which look like spirits or sea monsters,
inhabit the sea.
According to the religious reading of The Rime the shooting of the Albatross is seen as a sort of sin against nature and
therefore against God. God’s punishment for the killing of the
albatross, considered a violence of the laws of nature, subsides
only when the Mariner blesses the water snakes that crawl
around the ship. According to the artistic reading of the poem the Mariner is an artist who goes through painful and extraordinary experiences in his search after truth and knowledge
and is finally saved by the power of imagination. Here again his
quest will end only when he is able to see beauty in the water
snakes.
His major critical work is Biographia Literaria. Opposing the
British tradition of empiricism, he believed in the creative mind
as capable of recreating the world of sense. Coleridge was also an important religious and political theorist. His idealism
powerfully influenced later political and philosophical thinking.
His criticism of Shakespeare is still valid and important.
Summarizing (extra exercise)
Briefly summarize The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, also adding a short comment. (maximum 200 words)
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is one of Coleridge’s most important poems. It is divided into 7 parts, in which the real and
the supernatural are mixed in a fascinating way. The story is
very easy, taken as it is from tales in folklore and traditional ballads, but what makes it unique is its deep psychological study
of the difficult relationship between man and nature, symbolized by the Mariner and the Albatross. The Albatross trusts in
men, it is innocent and benevolent (in fact its presence brings
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7
Literary Highlights
Post-reading
alliteration: “long grey beard and glittering eye” (l. 3);
“in mist or cloud, on mast or shroud” (l. 75: alliteration,
assonance and internal rhyme);
assonance: “The ship was cheered, the harbour cleared”
(l. 21); “the Wedding-Guest he beat his breast” (l. 37:
assonance and alliteration);
internal rhyme: “The guests are met, the feast is set”
(l. 7); “Out of the sea came he” (l. 26);
anaphora: “Below the kirk... / Below the lighthouse top”
(ll. 23-24); “And now... / And it... / And ice...” (ll. 51-53).
a. The rhyme pattern of the poem is abcb.
b. Each stanza is made up of four lines and therefore it is
a quatrain.
c. This is the traditional structure of a popular genre
known as ballad.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The Romantic Age
While-reading
a. He has got a “long grey beard”, a “glittering eye” and
a “skinny hand”.
b. a (a ghost). Many details contribute to this impression:
his “glittering eye”; the fact that the “Mariner hath
his will”. They are all attributed to a supernatural creature.
c. The Wedding-Guest cannot but stay still and listen to
the Mariner’s story, as if he were under a spell.
a. The ship is caught in a storm, then by mist and snow
and finally it is surrounded by ice.
b. The elements emphasized are mist and snow, but especially ice, which is the dominant presence, creating
an atmosphere of mystery and tension.
a. It is compared to a Christian soul, as if it were human.
b. Its presence breaks the ice, so that the ship can start its
journey again. The albatross follows the ship and keeps
good company with the mariners.
c. One day the Mariner kills the Albatross with no apparent reason (except, possibly, as an angry reaction to the
Albatross’ wish “God save thee”).
d. No. The killing of the bird is one of the most inexplicable events of the poem.
The Writer
Module 1 Romantic Poetry
and inspiring. He substitutes the great epics of the past with
shorter epic tales of simple country folk. (60 words)
Romantic Poetry Module 1
The Romantic Age
8
a good wind) but its innocence is betrayed by the Mariner’s cruel and inexplicable behaviour. Killing the bird brings bad luck
to the Mariner and all the crew: they get lost in a silent sea, tormented by drought and a horrible thirst, until the Mariner is
able to bless the water snakes that crawl around the ship. The
spell is broken and the Albatross falls off the Mariner’s neck:
communion with life is now mysteriously regained. The Mariner
has learnt that the only prayer, the only possible communion
with God, the Maker of all things, is to love and respect all His
creatures. (191 words)
1.2
Second-generation Romantics
George Gordon, Lord Byron
So We’ll Go No More A-Roving
Post-reading
a. energy and desire for love-making: “the heart be still
as loving, / And the moon be still as bright” (ll. 3-4);
“the sword outwears its sheath, / And the soul wears
out the breast” (ll. 5-6);
weariness: “So we’ll go no more a-roving” (l. 1); “the
heart must pause to breathe, / and Love itself have rest”
(ll. 7-8).
b. First of all the repetition of a refrain (“we’ll go no more
a-roving”), the easy rhyme pattern and the use of traditional elements such as the moon and the night,
which is “made for loving” and is opposed to day
which “returns too soon”. The unconventional aspect
is the reflection on the contrast between body and soul
and the weariness of worldly things.
c. b and c. It is light (notice the conversational tone), but
also sad, because the poet shows the end of the possibility of loving in the same spontaneous way he used to
love in youth. The poem is a farewell to youth and love,
but it has no pathos and drama in it, only a slightly sad
acceptance of the cycle of life.
a. The poem begins and ends with the image of the moon
shining bright in the sky.
b. Rhyme pattern: abab.
c. The most important rhyming words are “a-roving” and
“loving”: it is a love poem, although it concerns the end
of the possibility of loving.
The Writer
George Gordon, Lord Byron
152
Revising
family: Byron was born in London in 1788 from an old
noble family of Scottish origin;
education: he attended exclusive schools such as Harrow
and Cambridge;
interests: he won a reputation as a drinker, gambler, lover
and spendthrift;
travels: he travelled extensively. He set out in 1809 for
Europe, including Portugal and Spain, but also Malta,
Greece, Albania and Turkey. It was while he was on tour
that he started Child Harold’s Pilgrimage where the protagonist’s adventures take place in the same countries
Byron was visiting.
The publication of Child Harold in 1812, on his return to
England, and a series of oriental verse tales. Both works are
Literary Highlights
151
about love and adventure in exotic lands and the heroes are
proud and courageous, and, like their author, they never bend
to social requirements so as to be known as ‘Byronic heroes’.
His wife accused him of mental cruelty, but it was because
of his incestuous love for his half-sister that he was shunned
by almost all good society and chose voluntary exile from
England where he was never to return. He lived on the Continent, especially in Italy, where he was an active supporter of
the Carbonari.
He was only 36 when he died of fever in Greece where
he was taking part in the Greek rebellion against Turkey as one
of the revolutionary leaders. His increasing desire for action had
made him wish for a “soldier’s grave”. He is still considered a
national hero in Greece.
He influenced poets and novelists such as the German
Goethe, the French Balzac, the Russian Dostoyevsky, as well
as painters and composers like Beethoven. He embodied the
aspiration of freedom and the hate of social hypocrisy.
His Romantic hero is bold, impetuous, but also melancholy,
proud and independent. He is the living model of a rebel who
loves solitude, is attracted by wild nature and is haunted by
some grief or remorse.
Unlike Wordsworth’s or Coleridge’s, Byron’s language is
of classical elegance: his great models were the great Augustan
writers. So, although Romantic in spirit, he is neoclassical in
form.
John Keats
La Belle Dame Sans Merci
154
Pre-reading
We know that she is a lady (high social status) and that she
is not capable of pity and compassion.
While-reading
The setting is medieval (the world of knights and ladies)
and mysterious (vague references to place and time).
a. He is alone, looks tired and sorrowful and has a lily on
his brow and a withering rose on his cheeks (i.e. he is
pale and ill-looking).
b. The lily is a symbol of chastity and purity (for example
for the Virgin Mary and many saints); the rose is a symbol of sensual love and passion. (Notice that here it is
withering.) The message of the two flowers is contrasting.
a. She is beautiful, elegant, with long hair and wild eyes.
She is said to be a “fairy’s child”, with supernatural
qualities.
b. She accepts the knight’s presents, looks at him as if
she is in love and then she gives him strange things to
eat and takes him to her cave.
a. He dreams of pale kings and princes who warn him that
the lady had enslaved him. The vision is horrible because they all look dead.
b. We understand that the knight is prisoner of his condition and cannot free himself from the power of the
lady. He lives in a still life, where there is no movement
and no vital energy.
c. The story is clearly symbolic. There is no reference to a
well-determined setting, with characters identified by a
name. The setting is vaguely medieval, and the world
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Summarizing
La Belle Dame Sans Merci belongs to the supernatural line
of Romantic poetry. The sensuous magic created by the use of
verse, which produces a hypnotic atmosphere, is very important. The poem stands in the ballad tradition and shows a taste
for medieval themes and forms. The knight has a mysterious
love story with a lady, who turns out to be a witch and leaves
him alone and sad in a spectral atmosphere.
The Writer
John Keats
157
Revising
Keats was born in London in 1795 and lost both his fa-
9
Both Coleridge and Keats were fascinated by the supernatural,
which was considered by Coleridge as a major source of poetry in Biographia Literaria. The supernatural is attractive for
Keats, since it takes the form of a beautiful lady who persuades
the knight to follow her by pretending to love him. In The Rime
of the Ancient Mariner it is less attractive, since the WeddingGuest is frightened by the ghost-like appearance of the Mariner
but has no alternative than to listen to his story.
The contact with the supernatural deeply changes those who
experience it. The Wedding-Guest wakes “a wiser and a sadder man” after listening to the Mariner, while Keats’ knight
seems obliged to loiter “alone and palely” in a withered countryside with no signs of life around.
The effects of the contact with the supernatural world are
good only on the surface: at the end it carries with it a destructive force. In La Belle Dame Sans Merci the knight survives
in a world inhabited by pale figures of ghosts; the WeddingGuest seems unable to take part in the joy of the wedding
because the experience he has heard of has changed his attitude to life. (197 words)
Writing Practice A
158
1. We usually distinguish between a first generation of
Romantic poets, including William Blake, William Wordsworth
and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and a second generation, which
comprises (George Gordon) Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley
and John Keats. (35 words)
2. As Wordsworth announced in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads,
poets should use a language similar to that of common people. Blake’s language is simple, though charged with symbolic
© 2005 by Carlo Signorelli Editore, Milano - Edumond Le Monnier S.p.A. - Tutti i diritti riservati - www.carlosignorellieditore.it
Literary Highlights
ther and his mother before he was fourteen. He was first made
an apprentice to a doctor and apothecary, then he went on to
study medicine soon to abandon a possible medical career for
literature. In 1818 he published Endymion, an allegory of his
search for an ideal female love where he first established his
cult of beauty.
In 1818, coming back from a walking tour in the Lake
District he faced the first signs of tuberculosis, the same disease
of which his mother had died. Moreover, problems began after the publication of his first poems, which had fairly negative
reviews. In addition to this he fell in love with Fanny Brawne
whom he found impossible to marry because of his disease and
his dedication to poetry. All these sufferings together with the
haunting presence of death show in his poetic production.
The year 1819 saw an astonishing production of masterpieces characterized by a deeper inspiration. Most of his fa-
Writing Practice (extra exercise)
The supernatural is a very relevant component of Romantic poetry. Analyse how it is presented in two of the poems you have read: The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by
Coleridge and La Belle Dame Sans Merci by Keats. (maximum 200 words)
In particular consider whether:
1. it is attractive or not;
2. it changes the people who experience it;
3. it produces good or bad effects.
The Romantic Age
Post-reading
a. The first three quatrains are addressed to the knight.
b. The remaining ones are the knight’s reply.
c. The poem ends as it began, therefore it has a circular
structure.
a. Because the use of repetition is typical of the ballad style
he has chosen and it is aimed at creating an atmosphere
of magic and a suspension of rationality (the “willing
suspension of disbelief” theorized by Coleridge).
b. No, there is no real communication. At first there is
only an exchange of looks, which leads the knight to
think she loves him; when she declares her love she
does it in “language strange” (l. 27), which seems to
be the effect of the roots eaten by the knight. At the
end of the poem the knight is alone, while the lady
has disappeared.
c. sight: “I see a lily on thy brow…” (l. 9); “I saw pale
kings” (l. 37); “I saw their starv’d lips” (l. 41);
hearing: “made sweet moan” (l. 20); “sing a fairy’s
song” (ll. 23-24); “in language strange she said” (l. 27);
“sigh’d full sore” (l. 30); “They cried” (l. 39);
smell: “fragrant zone” (l. 18);
touch: “moist and fever dew” (l. 10); “I shut her wild
wild eyes / With kisses four” (ll. 31-32);
taste: “roots of relish sweet, / And honey wild, and
manna dew” (ll. 25-26).
mous odes are of this year: To a Nightingale, On a Grecian Urn,
To Autumn, On Melancholy. He also composed a long unfinished poem, Hyperion, where mythological figures and incidents are reworked into a new personal myth, typical of the
Romantics. He also wrote ballads, displaying a taste for medieval themes: Lamia, The Eve of Saint Agnes, La Belle Dame
sans Merci.
Keats finds in the realm of art the perfect answer to man’s
longing for permanence in an ever-changing world. Like the
ancient Greeks’, his love of beauty has an ethical basis: there is
a close union of beauty and truth, beauty is a sufficient ideal in
itself. Art, thus, is the only solution to mortality.
Romantic poetry finds its highest technical achievements
in Keats for his mastery of language and style in such different forms as the sonnet, the ode, the heroic couplet, the
Spenserian stanza. His verse is melodic, his language sensuous and hypnotic.
In his letters he defines “negative capability” the fact of his
looking so closely at the objects as to lose his own identity
and his sense of separation from them.
Module 1 Romantic Poetry
of fairy tales is mentioned explicitly in many cases (ll. 14,
24, 29). The story is a symbol of the tragic effects of
love on someone who is not acquainted with it, but the
tragic effect is reached through a skilful usage of medieval imagery and of colours and symbols.
Romantic Poetry Module 1
The Romantic Age
10
value. The choice of the form of the ballad is also significant of
this attitude, as can be seen in Coleridge’s Rime. (50 words)
3. For Wordsworth childhood is the moment of life when we
are closer to nature and to God and in which our powers of
vision are at their highest level. Blake shared this interest in the
child as a symbol of innocence and was the first to denounce
the exploitation of children. (50 words)
Writing Practice B
158
(Notice that all the topics have been included in the answer.
Students, however, are asked to report only on one of them,
as they choose.)
1. Coleridge says that the idea of the composition of the poems came from their conversations when they lived together
in the Lake District. Wordsworth’s main interest was to give
charm and novelty to ordinary events taken from everyday life
and the simple country folk of the area. Coleridge, instead,
chose to concentrate on the supernatural as a source of poetry. Wordsworth regards poetry as the “spontaneous overflow
of powerful feelings”, which produce a deep emotion which
is the result of contemplation. The emotions he preferred were
those of ordinary life, especially of simple people in the country. Poetry should use simple, ordinary language, but in such a
way as to present ordinary things in an unusual way, colouring them with the imagination. On the other hand, Coleridge
maintained that poetry originates in a “willing suspension of
disbelief”, in which both the poet and the reader believe in the
“shadows of imagination”. His main interest was for people
and characters “supernatural or at least romantic”. These shadows are not interesting for their own sake but because we
can project on them our “inward nature” and take a human
interest in them. (190 words)
2. Coleridge’s “demonic poems” (The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner, Christabel, Kubla Khan) are all sublime visions which
do not conform to realistic standards and share the presence
of the supernatural in various forms. They are all dreams of
haunted souls, and behind their exotic richness or ballad-like
simplicity we sense that mysterious forces are at play. The contact with the supernatural is a frightening experience for the
Mariner of Coleridge’s Rime, who is a sort of ghost obliged to
tell the story of his voyage in an unknown dimension. Keats also wrote a visionary poem: La Belle Dame Sans Merci, in which
the supernatural takes on disturbing aspects in the figure of
the lady, who deceives and destroys those who love her. Both
these poems are based on that “willing suspension of disbelief” that Coleridge defined in his Biographia Literaria as the
most important principle of poetry. (147 words)
3. Byron was famous in Europe as the model of the Romantic
hero – passionate, impetuous and solitary. Despite this fame,
which is linked to real traits of his life and personality, his poetry is late neoclassical in form. His style has a classical elegance
and an ironical attitude which links him more to the tradition
of the Augustan Age than to his contemporaries. Unlike
Wordsworth, he considered mainly the wild, sublime aspects
of nature (as in Childe Harold and Manfred) and he was not interested in the supernatural that so deeply fascinated
Coleridge. Keats lived a very short life, during which he composed great poems, such as the Ode on a Grecian Urn, in
which he expressed his love for art. He regarded art as the only force which could resist time and gain access to truth. None
of the Romantics shared his passionate faith in the value of
art as a means of superior knowledge. Unlike Blake and
Wordsworth, neither Byron nor Keats were interested in the
poetry of the child. (171 words)
Module 2
The Romantic Novel
OBJECTIVES
159
1. To get to know the various types of novel produced in the Romantic period. Specifically:
the novel of manners, the novel of purpose and the American short story.
Literary Highlights
2. To get to know the representative Romantic novelists and their features. Specifically:
Jane Austen, Mary Shelley and Edgar Allan Poe.
3. To get to know the new themes of the age present in this literary genre. Specifically:
middle-class moral values, love, psychological insight, interiors, the Romantic hero, individualism and isolation from society, the reworking of ancient myths, science and technical innovations, feelings and emotions, Gothic horror, rationality and irrationality.
4. To get to know the novelty, sometimes the influence of the new subgenres on the following literary productions. Specifically:
influence from Richardson and the epistolary novel and from the Gothic novel;
influence on love story writers, science fiction novelists, the Decadents, detective story
and thriller writers.
© 2005 by Carlo Signorelli Editore, Milano - Edumond Le Monnier S.p.A. - Tutti i diritti riservati - www.carlosignorellieditore.it
PREREQUISITES
CONTENTS
Features of the literary period
Have your students read the Access Module.
Features of the literary genre
Ask your students to have a look at RECOGNIZING GENRES on p. 90 for the technical features of the novel.
Features of the Romantic novel
The table BEFORE STARTING on p. 159 gives students some useful preliminary information on the Romantic novel and the American short story.
This module is subdivided into three submodules, two dealing each with a different type
of Romantic novel, one with the American short story:
2.1
The novel of manners
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Austen
2.2
167
170
11
Windows
European Romanticism
Interdisciplinary Cards
The Detective Story
Cross-Curricular Themes
The Romantic Hero
Nature
Art Links
The Sublime
122
179
182
186
150
Texts and Films
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
TESTING
2.1
175
180
The Romantic Age
LINKING AND
EXPANDING
The American short story
The Black Cat
Edgar Allan Poe
The novel of purpose
Frankenstein
Mary Shelley
2.3
161
165
Module 2 The Romantic Novel
172
Two types of tests are provided in the Teacher’s Book on pp. 14-17:
a quick test (20 to 50 minutes) at the end of each submodule;
an Internal Certification (60 minutes) at the end of the module.
The novel of manners
Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice
161
Hunting for a Husband
162
Post-reading
a. The opening and the closing lines consist of the narra-
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Literary Highlights
Pre-reading
Marriage. The word “Hunting” points out how important
it was for young girls to find a good husband.
Yes, the opening and closing sentences are consistent with
the title given because they express a commonly accepted
truth: a single man with a good fortune is of great interest to
a woman whose aim in life is to get her five daughters married.
tor’s comment while most of the passage is taken up by
the dialogue between Mr and Mrs Bennet:
dialogue: lines 7-67;
narration: lines 1-6; lines 68-74.
b. The opening lines contain an ironic description of the
situation; the lines at the end of the passage focus the
reader’s attention on the characters of Mr and Mrs Bennet by restating in effective, descriptive prose what
has already emerged from the dialogue.
c. Yes, they do.
a. Mrs Bennett is “a woman of mean understanding,
little information and uncertain temper” (ll. 71-72);
she is vain and silly: “My dear you flatter me. I certainly have had my share of beauty... When a woman
has five grown-up daughters, she ought to give over
thinking of her own beauty. In such cases, a woman
The Romantic Novel Module 2
The Romantic Age
12
b.
c.
a.
b.
has not often much beauty to think of” (ll. 37-40).
Mr Bennett is sarcastic (ll. 24, 30, 34-36, 60-62, 67);
he has self-control; he seems to have little interest in his
wife’s main aim of marrying their daughters (ll. 34).
Bingley is seen with great interest as an ideal husband
by Mrs Bennett because he is young, rich and must
come from a good family: “a young man of large fortune” (ll. 16-17); “he came down on Monday in a
chaise and four” (ll. 17-18); “some of his servants”
(l. 20); “A single man of large fortune; four or five thousand a year” (ll. 25-26);
Mr Bennet loves his daughter Elizabeth more than
their other children because he thinks she is intelligent
(ll. 50-57).
Examples of irony run throughout the passage. Just to
mention a few, we can quote lines 1-2, 24, 30, 34-36,
60-62, 67.
Austen’s use of a third-person omniscent narrator is
never obstrusive. Her use of irony makes it clear that she
does not take sides with either of the characters – they
both have their faults – but rather smiles gently at human frailties. However, Mrs Bennet’s character shows
that Austen could not have much consideration for a
woman whose only interest “was to get her daughters
married” and whose “solace was visiting and news”.
Summarizing
England she knew so well.
Her characters belong to the rural middle class, landed
gentry and the country clergy. They are lively round characters
because they show Austen’s fine psychological insight.
Their plots revolve around the themes of love and marriage
and are centred on the experience of a young woman who develops a new consciousness of herself and understanding of
other people through a series of errors and delusions. All her
novels end with the young protagonist’s happy marriage.
Pride and Prejudice is centred on the life of the five Bennet
sisters and their mother striving to find excellent prospective
husbands for her daughters. The heroine is Elizabeth Bennet,
the most intelligent and witty of the girls. After a series of misunderstandings, the novel ends with Elizabeth’s happy marriage.
In her novels Austen makes use of an omniscent, unobtrusive third-person narrator, clear, witty and precise dialogue,
gentle irony and fine psychological insight. Her characters are
lively round characters.
No, we cannot. Her novels are rich in irony, she insists on
the moral values of the society of her time and her novels have
a didactic aim. All these features are typical of the Augustan
classics, which she admired, and are very different from the
qualities of most Romantic literature. She drew inspiration from
Richardson and 18th-century epistolary novel for the psychological depth of her characters.
Order of sentences: c e g d b f a.
The passage deals with Mrs Bennet’s aim in finding an appropriate husband for her daughters, which seems to be the only concern for most families with growing girls.
In the first paragraph Jane Austen gives an ironic description of
the situation; then, through a witty dialogue, she expands on
the characters of Mr and Mrs Bennet.
The gentleman who has just rented a large property in the
neighbourhood seems to arouse Mrs Bennet’s interest because
he is “a young man of large fortune” with “a chaise and four”,
“some servants”and an income of “four or five thousand a
year”.
The passage ends with the author restating in effective, descriptive prose what has already emerged from the dialogues.
The Writer
Jane Austen
165
Revising
She was born in 1775, the seventh child of the rector of
Literary Highlights
All her novels are set in the provincial world of southern
the village of Steventon, Hampshire, and was educated at
home. In 1801, after her father retired, the family settled in
Bath and then, after her father’s death, they moved to a large
cottage in Chawton, not far from Steventon. She died in Winchester in 1817. On the one hand, we can say that she went
through an uneventful, quiet, domestic life in provincial southern England, unaffected by the great political and social events
of her time (the French Revolution, the Napoleonic wars, social
unrest as a consequence of unemployment and the terrible living conditions of the workers after the Industrial Revolution);
on the other hand, what is remarkable in Jane Austen’s life is
her talent for writing, which she cultivated at an early age, although her novels were published many years later (Sense and
Sensibility, 1911; Pride and Prejudice, 1913; Mansfield Park,
1814; Emma, 1816) and even posthumously (Persuasion and
Northanger Abbey, both in 1817).
2.2
The novel of purpose
Mary Shelley
Frankenstein
167
The Creation of the Monster
168
Pre-reading
Open.
Post-reading
a. Three: paragraph 1: lines 1-7; paragraph 2: lines 8-15;
paragraph 3: lines 16-44.
b. 1. The setting; 2. The monster; 3. Dr Frankenstein’s feelings and reaction.
a. the setting: “dreary night” (l. 1); “one in the morning” (l. 4); “the rain pattered dismally” (ll. 4-5); “my
candle was nearly burnt out” (l. 5); “the glimmer of the
half-estinguished light” (l. 6);
the monster: “dull yellow eye of the creature” (ll. 67); “it breathed hard” (l. 7); “a convulsive motion agitated its limbs” (l. 7); “the wretch” (ll. 8-9); “his yellow skin... beneath” (ll. 11-12); “his hair... flowing”
(l. 12); “his teeth... whiteness” (ll. 12-13); “watery
eyes” (l. 14); “dun-white sockets” (l. 14); “shrivelled
complexion” (l. 15); “straight black lips” (l. 15); “miserable monster” (l. 36); “daemoniacal corpse” (l. 44);
Dr Frankenstein’s feelings and reaction: “anxiety”
(l. 2); “breathless horror and disgust” (ll. 20-21); “lassitude” (ll. 23-24); “tumult” (l. 24); “horror” (l. 33);
“I escaped and rushed downstairs” (l. 40); “greatest agitation” (l. 42); “fearing” (l. 43).
b. Yes, they are strictly connected because they all contribute to creating an atmosphere of horror, fear and
uneasiness.
© 2005 by Carlo Signorelli Editore, Milano - Edumond Le Monnier S.p.A. - Tutti i diritti riservati - www.carlosignorellieditore.it
b. a and b (narration and description).
Summarizing
Dr Frankenstein’s experiments come to an end on a drea-
The Writer
Mary Shelley
170
Revising
Her father, the radical philosopher William Godwin, and her
Writing Practice
The novel in the Romantic Age is well represented by two
women writers, Jane Austen and Mary Shelley, who, though
living in the same period, led two completely different lives. The
former in fact never married and spent an uneventful, quiet
and domestic life in the country village where she was born,
Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
172
Pre-watching
The director’s intention to stick to the literary text.
No answer is required.
13
While-watching
Setting:
a. In a room on the top floor of a house.
b. Yes.
Events:
c. Monster sank into the sarcophagus, sarcophagus sealed
and heated from below, electricity sent through the
body.
d. He has the body electrocuted.
e. Yes.
Atmosphere:
f. b, c and f (dark, loaded with expectations, Gothic and
mysterious).
Music, sounds of mechanical devices working into place,
Victor Frankenstein breathing hard and moaning.
a. Yes.
b. Yes.
c. No.
Post-watching
physical traits: young and beautiful, fair-haired, strong;
clothes: wearing only trousers;
attitude: very excited;
reactions: nervous, worried and then depressed;
relation to other characters: none. He is alone.
Open.
Open.
2.3
The American short story
Edgar Allan Poe
The Black Cat
175
I Had Walled the Monster up
within the Tomb!
175
Pre-reading
Open. Any answer might be accepted if consistent.
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Literary Highlights
mother, the feminist essayist Mary Wollstonecraft, brought her
up in an atmosphere of great concern for the rights of people.
She married the famous Romantic poet Percy Bysshe
Shelley – an ardent admirer of her father – whom she met during one of his visits to the house.
While in Switzerland with her husband and their friend, the
Romantic poet Byron, they decided, on a rainy night, to write
a ghost story each.
It exploits the horrific and macabre of the Gothic tales
mainly in the description of the setting where the events take
place and in the description of the monster, while it deals with
the effects of science on man in Dr Frankenstein’s attempt at
creating a new human being through scientific experiments.
Because we have Dr Frankenstein’s attempt to overcome
man’s limitation and acquire a God-like power over physical
matters, taking life into his hands.
The monster can be seen as the scientific counterpart of a
number of Romantic dark heroes: outcasts of society who
suffer for no specific fault of their own.
The story is narrated in the first person by three different
narrators (Captain Robert Walton – an English explorer in the
Artic Regions –, Dr Frankenstein and the monster). It is written in the epistolary form (Captain Walton) and as an autobiographical report (Dr Frankenstein and the monster).
TEXTS AND FILMS
The Romantic Age
ry November night, with the rain beating on the window
panes: he finally succeeds in bringing to life the thing he has
assembled. As soon as he does, he is filled with horror at what
he sees. He takes refuge in his room but has nightmares; on
waking he sees the monster at his bedside. Again filled with
horror, he rushes downstairs, regretting he ever created what
he calls a “daemoniacal corpse”.
Possible answer: Dr Frankenstein’s experiments come to an
end on a dreary November night, with the rain beating on the
window panes of his house. The feelings we can perceive from
the narration are of anxiety and great emotion. He finally succeeds in bringing to life the thing he has assembled but as soon
as he does, he is filled with horror at what he sees. He takes
refuge in his room but has nightmares and he wakes in great
agitation and almost terrified; on waking he sees the monster
at his bedside. Again filled with horror, he rushes downstairs,
regretting he ever created what he calls a “daemoniacal
corpse”. The gloomy setting, the frightening description of the
monster and Dr Frankenstein’s horrified reaction, all contribute
to the creation of an atmosphere of horror, fear and uneasiness. (137 words)
while the latter was brought up in an atmosphere of great concern for the rights of the people and had quite an eventful life.
Jane Austen’s novels of “domestic life” are psychological studies of ordinary people whose lives are to be well regulated by
social conventions and good manners. In her novel Frankenstein, instead, Mary Shelley exploits the horrific and macabre
elements of the Gothic tales both in the setting and in the description of the monster. Her themes are rooted in the 18thcentury philosophical tradition that made isolation and social
injustice fictional subjects.
Even in the narrative technique the two writers differ: while
Austen uses a third-person unobtrusive narrator with a good
balance of dialogue, description and irony, Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein is written in the epistolary form and as an autobiographical report by three different first-person narrators.
(190 words)
Module 2 The Romantic Novel
a. By a first-person narrator: Dr Frankenstein himself.
The Romantic Novel Module 2
The Romantic Age
14
Open. Any answer might be accepted if consistent.
EUROPEAN
/ AMERICAN LITERATURE
While-reading
1b 2b 3b 4b 5a 6a 7b 8a 9b 10a 11a 12b 13a
The Detective Story
Post-reading
Imagination, horror, mystery are the elements which characterize this passage; the tone used is either tragic or overexcited. The presence of the cat, still alive, in the tomb may be
seen as a supernatural effect. All these elements are typical of
the Gothic sensibility.
Open. Any answer might be accepted if consistent and coherent with the answers to the questions in the Pre-reading exercise.
different writers. The French novelist Émile Gaboriau, who
wrote in the 1880s, is the true father of this genre and his detective Monsieur Lecocq is provided of analytical genius and
deductive logic. The first example of the intelligent, refined
‘armchair detective’ is of the American Edgar Allan Poe:
Auguste Dupin, who is seen through the eyes of a narratorfriend. The British Arthur Conan Doyle takes inspiration for the
method of his famous detective Sherlock Holmes from both
the previous two examples. But his detective lacks the depth,
sense of mystery and the religious fear of death and evil present in Poe’s. He embodies the typical late Victorian belief that
a British gentleman, gifted with style and efficiency, can control everything in the world from his room. The initiator in
Britain is Wilkie Collins – Dickens’ friend – who wrote his first
detective story in 1868: his detective is Sergeant Cuff.
Summarizing
Most of the narration takes place in a cellar in the narrator’s house, where, one day, tormented by the cat, he attempts
to kill it, but because of a sudden rage he murders his wife.
After committing the murder he feels a bit worried about
where to hide the body and eventually decides to wall up the
corpse in a wall of the cellar.
Days pass and, not seeing the cat around any more, he thinks
it has fled away in terror and he feels relieved. When the police come to investigate, the narrator is calm and even overconfident.
After searching the cellar, the police prepare to depart but,
while the party is ascending the steps, the narrator taps his
cane against the wall, exactly where his wife was buried.
A cry, similar to an inhuman scream, is heard coming from inside the wall; the police start toiling at the wall and discover
the dead woman with the cat, still alive, seated on her head.
The narrator lets us understand that the narrator will be sentenced to be hanged.
This passage is characterized by imagination, mystery, horror. The cat may be seen as a supernatural element. (194
words)
179
Four types of detectives are introduced in literature by four
The Writer
Edgar Allan Poe
180
Revising
Unhappy childhood, adventurous and not easy life.
He said that brevity is essential to achieve effects of surprise
and strong emotion in the reader.
That they are based on a strict logic, but they also show the
limits of reason.
Yes, the narrator kills his wife in a fit of rage but immediately after that he evaluates rationally which is the best way
to hide the corpse. He takes the police round the house feeling perfectly calm, but then, by an act of irrationality, he is himself the cause of the discovery of the corpse.
Yes. His poems were translated by the French poet Baudelaire and he was greatly admired by the Decadents. In modern times, a number of his tales have been turned into films.
Cross-Curricular Themes
Literary Highlights
The Romantic Hero
Writing Practice (extra exercise)
The theme of the ‘Romantic Hero’ is one of the major
themes in Romantic literature. Define its complex and often contradictory features as shown in the works of
English Romantic poets and novelists. (maximum 250
words)
The theme of the Romantic hero is one of the most intriguing
in English literature. He is bold, impetuous, restless and proud,
but at times lonely and melancholy. He loves freedom and nature, especially in its wild, sublime aspects, and wandering in
solitude. He is a rebel who opposes political and religious op-
182
pression, often lives in exile, feels detached from society and
is haunted by some grief or remorse.
The poet Lord Byron embodied all the intrisic qualities of the
Romantic hero both in his life and his works (Childe Harold,
Manfred) to such an extent that his fame swept all over Europe
and the term ‘Byronic hero’ became current.
The struggle of the individual to overcome human limitations
– the Romantic striving for infinity – and the revolt against all
forms of tyranny are the characteristics of another famous
Romantic hero: Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus, the champion of mankind who, with his relentless resistance against
© 2005 by Carlo Signorelli Editore, Milano - Edumond Le Monnier S.p.A. - Tutti i diritti riservati - www.carlosignorellieditore.it
acquire God-like power by creating a human being. The monster he creates, on the other hand, is the scientific counterpart
of the dark Romantic hero isolated from society: he is an outcast who suffers for no specific fault of his own. (229 words)
Nature
Writing Practice (extra exercise)
Nature is the main source of inspiration for the poets and
painters of the Romantic Age. On the basis of the poems read and on what you know of the Romantic paintings, point out the links between visual arts and the literature of the period. (maximum 150 words)
The Romantic poets and painters endowed nature with life, passion and feeling. The painters spoke of landscapes as having a
significance beyond the visual. Constable even said they expressed moral sentiments. He believed in the language of the
heart and that “painting is another name for feeling”. Const-
186
able’s rural landscapes and Wordsworth’s poems share the same
quality: they draw their inspiration directly from nature.
‘Man’s best communion is with nature’ is the Lyrical Ballads’
fundamental message. Painters and poets shared the Romantic
idea of nature as capable of raising the highest kind of emotion.
The taste for the sublime, wild aspects of nature reflected in
the poems by Coleridge, Byron and Shelley also shows in the
paintings by Friedrich, Martin and Turner, whose seas, storms,
waterfalls and mountainous landscapes are flooded by light
and colour and tend to lose their definite outlines to merge in
overall luminous images. (148 words)
Cross-Curricular Themes
Jupiter’s despotism, became the symbol of man’s infinite aspiration to intellectual perfection and spiritual liberty.
The same yearning for superhuman knowledge is shared by the
protagonist of Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, who wants to
15
The Romantic Age
Literary Highlights
© 2005 by Carlo Signorelli Editore, Milano - Edumond Le Monnier S.p.A. - Tutti i diritti riservati - www.carlosignorellieditore.it