TERM 1 TASK-8 DISCOVERING LITERATURE

Discovering Literature: Romantics & Victorians

What’s the Romanticism?

-The Romanticism is an artistic, literary and cultural movement that began in England and Germany at the end of the 18th century, and spread to other countries in Europe and the Americas during the first half of the 19th century. It marked a break with the ideology of the Enlightenment, opposing the rational precepts and the new structure of society that was built around the bourgeoisie. On the one hand it broke with the order, calm and composure of the Neoclassical, and on the other with rationalism and materialism that began to generalize.

-Themes:

The opposition to the norms, a main feature of the romantics, extended to literary production. They did not respect the boundaries of genres and mixed the tragic with the comic and the verse with prose. In poetry reigned polymetry, and in the narrative there was a special interest in cultivating the historical novel and costumbrismo. These are the most relevant topics in romantic literature:

Exaltation of the self: The romantics emphasized individualism and subjectivism. From there an interest arose within the man and the mysteries of the subconscious. The emphasis on the "I" drives a claim of particular taste, rejecting the principle of universal beauty.

Rebel and hipster hero: The romantics rescued the great works of the Golden Age, such as Cervantes, Lope de Vega, Tirso de Molina and Calderón de la Barca. The protagonists of these works served as a model of the romantic prototype: Don Juan as the rebel hero and Don Quijote as the idealist and dreamer.

Melancholy and disappointment: There is an inner tear. The romantics rejected the time they had to live, and lamented the injustice of the world and the transience of life.

Authenticity of emotions: the romantics believed that the human emotions that were behind the artistic expressions should go afloat without predetermined parameters or molds to accommodate. These should come from the imagination of each artist and without rules that dictate how to express them.

Evasion: This disenchantment led to an elusive tendency. The romantics were attracted to the medieval, particularly the Gothic, and exotic places. There was also a fascination with the night, the ruins, the graves, the paranormal, the storms, the abandoned castles, the terrifying and the fantasy. For non-Spanish romantics, Spain was an exotic place. An example is Washington Irving, who spent time in Spain and wrote Tales of the Alhambra (1832).

Wild and hostile nature: Unlike the tame and stylized nature of Neoclassicism, romantics wrote about forests, mountains and raging landscapes. Nature represented a space for spiritual experiences, and this reflected the sadness and anguish of their dejected and disenchanted souls of reality. In the same way there was a return for the taste of the rural and primitive in comparison to the urban and developed, in addition to an exaltation to the own and local versus the cosmopolitan and progressive trends.