Friday 27 September 2019
Wednesday 18 September 2019
The Sublime
Term coined by Edmund Burge, he draws a distinction between the Sublime—which is awe inspiring—and the less evocative and thought-provoking beautiful and picturesque. The Sublime instills in the mind of its beholder a sense of smallness or powerlessness—it renders the self both passive and receptive as the grandeur of sublimity floods and enhances the senses. Characteristically, sublimity is associated with monumental size: a mountain can be sublime, as can be a chasm of infinite depth; likewise, a vast, empty plain is sublime, as is an ocean, whether tempest-tossed or eerily becalmed. If extent were not enough, obscurity can equally evoke sublime emotions.
Read more here
Hughes, W. (2012) Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature. Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press
Read more here
Wednesday 11 September 2019
Romanticism
The “Romantic Period” is usually taken to extend approximately from the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789—or alternatively, from the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798—through the first three decades of the nineteenth century.
A movement in European art, aesthetics, literature, and philosophy, romanticism influenced popular as well as elite taste between the 1770s and the mid-19th century. A reaction to the controlled and implicitly secular and predictable world of the Enlightenment, Romantic thought drew on the energy and radicalism perceived in the early days of the French Revolution of 1789, and the lingering influence of the progressive politics exposed by the American War of Independence (1775–1783).
Romanticism is a movement premised on imagination and introspection rather than functionality and the collective mind. It values the selfconsciousness that comes with walking or thinking alone, and the wanderer who is “lonely as a cloud” in the verse of William Wordsworth has his literary parallel in the Gothic Hero who contemplates, alone and obsessively, his sins of excess, neglect, or incest. Such gloomy figures punctuate the Romantic poetry of Lord Byron in particular, but have their novelistic parallel in figures such as the monk Schedoni in The Italian by Ann Radcliffe or Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë.
The Romantic wanderer, though, may equally appreciate and be uplifted by the sublime scenery he encounters in his travels. This convention, certainly, is protracted from the Romantic and into the Gothic, where particularly in the 18th century, authors, most notably in the Female Gothic tradition, favored the spectacular geography of the European Continent. The Burkean Sublime, with its conventions of horror and (more emphatically) terror, may be associated in both Romantic and Gothic thought with an interest in the uncanny and the occult. Supernatural figures such as the ghost enjoy neither place nor function in Enlightenment thought, though they gain emblematic status as affirmations of the enduring mystery of the world even in the context of progressive modernity.
Characteristics:
1. The prevailing attitude favored innovation over traditionalism in the materials, forms, and style of literature.2. In his preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth repeatedly declared that good poetry is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” According to this view, poetry is not primarily a mirror of men in action; on the contrary, its essential component is the poet’s own feelings, while the process of composition, since it is “spontaneous,” is the opposite of the artful manipulation of means to foreseen ends stressed by the neoclassic critics.
3. To a remarkable degree external nature—the landscape, together with its flora and fauna—became a persistent subject of poetry, and was described with an accuracy and sensuous nuance unprecedented in earlier writers.
4. Romantic subjects were the poets themselves or other people, they were no longer represented as part of an organized society but, typically, as solitary figures engaged in a long, and sometimes infinitely elusive, quest; often they were also social nonconformists or outcasts. Many important Romantic works had as protagonist the isolated rebel, whether for good or ill: Prometheus, Cain, the Wandering Jew, the Satanic hero-villain, or the great outlaw.
5. What seemed to a number of political liberals the infinite social promise of the French Revolution in the early 1790s fostered the sense in Romantic writers that theirs was a great age of new beginnings and high possibilities. Many writers viewed a human being as endowed with limitless aspiration toward an infinite good envisioned by the faculty of imagination.
Abrams, M., Harpham, G. (2012) A Glossary of Literary Terms. Boston: Wadsworth
Hughes, W. (2012) Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature. Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press
A movement in European art, aesthetics, literature, and philosophy, romanticism influenced popular as well as elite taste between the 1770s and the mid-19th century. A reaction to the controlled and implicitly secular and predictable world of the Enlightenment, Romantic thought drew on the energy and radicalism perceived in the early days of the French Revolution of 1789, and the lingering influence of the progressive politics exposed by the American War of Independence (1775–1783).
Romanticism is a movement premised on imagination and introspection rather than functionality and the collective mind. It values the selfconsciousness that comes with walking or thinking alone, and the wanderer who is “lonely as a cloud” in the verse of William Wordsworth has his literary parallel in the Gothic Hero who contemplates, alone and obsessively, his sins of excess, neglect, or incest. Such gloomy figures punctuate the Romantic poetry of Lord Byron in particular, but have their novelistic parallel in figures such as the monk Schedoni in The Italian by Ann Radcliffe or Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë.
The Romantic wanderer, though, may equally appreciate and be uplifted by the sublime scenery he encounters in his travels. This convention, certainly, is protracted from the Romantic and into the Gothic, where particularly in the 18th century, authors, most notably in the Female Gothic tradition, favored the spectacular geography of the European Continent. The Burkean Sublime, with its conventions of horror and (more emphatically) terror, may be associated in both Romantic and Gothic thought with an interest in the uncanny and the occult. Supernatural figures such as the ghost enjoy neither place nor function in Enlightenment thought, though they gain emblematic status as affirmations of the enduring mystery of the world even in the context of progressive modernity.
Characteristics:
1. The prevailing attitude favored innovation over traditionalism in the materials, forms, and style of literature.2. In his preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth repeatedly declared that good poetry is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” According to this view, poetry is not primarily a mirror of men in action; on the contrary, its essential component is the poet’s own feelings, while the process of composition, since it is “spontaneous,” is the opposite of the artful manipulation of means to foreseen ends stressed by the neoclassic critics.
3. To a remarkable degree external nature—the landscape, together with its flora and fauna—became a persistent subject of poetry, and was described with an accuracy and sensuous nuance unprecedented in earlier writers.
4. Romantic subjects were the poets themselves or other people, they were no longer represented as part of an organized society but, typically, as solitary figures engaged in a long, and sometimes infinitely elusive, quest; often they were also social nonconformists or outcasts. Many important Romantic works had as protagonist the isolated rebel, whether for good or ill: Prometheus, Cain, the Wandering Jew, the Satanic hero-villain, or the great outlaw.
5. What seemed to a number of political liberals the infinite social promise of the French Revolution in the early 1790s fostered the sense in Romantic writers that theirs was a great age of new beginnings and high possibilities. Many writers viewed a human being as endowed with limitless aspiration toward an infinite good envisioned by the faculty of imagination.
Abrams, M., Harpham, G. (2012) A Glossary of Literary Terms. Boston: Wadsworth
Hughes, W. (2012) Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature. Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press
Pathetic Fallacy
A phrase invented by John Ruskin in 1856 to signify any representation of inanimate natural objects that ascribes to them human capabilities, sensations, and emotions.
The attribution of human feelings and responses to inanimate things or animals, especially in art and literature.
“Pathetic fallacy” is now used mainly as a neutral name for a procedure in which human traits are
ascribed to natural objects in a way that is less formal and more indirect than in the figure called personification.
The attribution of human feelings and responses to inanimate things or animals, especially in art and literature.
“Pathetic fallacy” is now used mainly as a neutral name for a procedure in which human traits are
ascribed to natural objects in a way that is less formal and more indirect than in the figure called personification.
Abrams, M., Harpham, G. (2012) A Glossary of Literary Terms. Boston: Wadsworth
Wednesday 4 September 2019
Gothic Literature
The Gothic novel, or in an alternative term, Gothic romance, is a type of prose fiction which was inaugurated by Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764)—the subtitle denotes its setting in the Middle Ages—and flourished through the early nineteenth century. Some writers followed Walpole’s example by setting their stories in the medieval period; others set them in a Catholic country, especially Italy or Spain. The locale was often a gloomy castle furnished with dungeons, subterranean passages, and sliding panels; the typical story focused on the sufferings imposed on an innocent heroine by a cruel and lustful villain, and made bountiful use of ghosts, mysterious disappearances, and other sensational and supernatural occurrences (which in a number of novels turned out to have natural explanations). The principal aim of such novels was to evoke chilling terror by exploiting mystery and a variety of horrors. Many of them are now read mainly as period pieces, but the best opened up to fiction the realm of the irrational and of the perverse impulses and nightmarish terrors that lie beneath the orderly surface of the civilized mind.
Abrams, M, Harpham, G. (2012). A Glossary of Literary Terms. Boston: Cengage Learning
Abrams, M, Harpham, G. (2012). A Glossary of Literary Terms. Boston: Cengage Learning
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