Introduccion and general British and American literature romantics aspects

Introduccion and romantic aspects

Hi my name is Sun and i´m going to trow some light in the darkness of life. So i´m going to start speaking about the big and most importance  (and from my point of view difficult) masterpieces related to innovation and breakup in english literature. For this reason i´m going to allude to works like The life and opinions of Tristam Shandy Gentleman, some texts about T. S. Elliot (in order to cover modernism) and with the Virginia´s Wolf book To the lighthouse. 

Darkness and mystery are the paths which guide ours lives. Shadows won't be nothing without light and the most intensive darkness is born from the end of light. Romanticism is part of our lives and most of us we are not able to notice this. 

 

The life and opinions of Tristam Shandy Gentleman

         Self consciousness

T. S. Elliot

Virginia´s Wolf

I´m going to analyze these literary works in general, but specifically taking into account their romantic characteristics. However this fack, firsly we have to take into account some aspects.

In the first place, Tristram Shandy can´t be considered a romantic novel if we take into account that was published in 1759 and we may say approximately that romanticism started in 1770. Taking this into account we could stablish the work as pre-romantic, but considering Tristam Shandy as prerromantic it can be dangerous due to I see more conectión between the current of self consciousness and the Laurence´s Sterne mode with he express himself in the book. 

 

Self consciousness is related with the freedom to express your thoughts in a very similar way that would appear in your mind. When we think, we can go to one point to another without being absolutely conscients about the connection between one topic or other, so we could being reasoning about the topic A and go to the issue (which apparently don't have any relation whit the matter A) F without realising. Well, that´s  what happen if you read Tristram Shandy.  If you read this book, you possibly  won't notice that you have just already go to another subject even without perceiving it,  which may be quite like when you are lost i your thoughts. If you read the book, you will  see that this is happening almost every time. Taking this into account, we are going to  explore the romantic mystery which hides

 

In the second place if we want to study some books from a romantic point of view, we will have to stablish firts the general romantic bases and aspects and then the specific brithish romantic traits since we are going to analisy britihs autors. 

One of the romanticisms traits are having a bad, horrible and disastrous live whitout an absolute lack of good luck. Romantic characters use to be antiheroes who can´t fight against the inevitable and inescapable destiny. These antiheores who many times becomes pirates, bandits or marginal people abandoned by a corrupt and dabase society, they usually rebel agains this unffair sistem by two ways. One way it would be by fighting physically against  this horrible sistem. The other way is by expresing their own emotions which many times are going to be a critic agains people, society and a sistem that need a  compulsory and inmediat change. The importance of the I and of the individual person who need to vent their emoutins showing the importance of this fack to avoid collapsing is something that even if it not specifically said that happens in Tristam Shandy, we can deduce that this posibility may be correct. 

Other peculiarity is that the chaos, mistery and the inmediate neccesite of breakout. Breakdown in form  and content by utilising the literary´s and theoric´s term obfuscation was restard by the pre-romanticism and by the romanticism movement whose people didn´t considered absolutly necesarry to make everything absolutly perfect and with a complete perfeccion when they had to put diferents ritmes in poetry, theatra or narrative. However this romantic poems usually repeated their own irregular estructures making the poem regular if it was perceived from a global view. Moreover, althought they began to broke up with some Aristotelical standats that were fix in the Poetics of Aristoteles, we don´t observe an incredible quantity of open endings (which they really break brusquely with the aristotelic precep of clarity) in the romantics works. Owing to this,  despite of they broke with tradition, we notice that they continue to mantein certain degree of order. 

Mistery, darkness, deaht magic, thigns which can´t be explain, the fack of losing your hope, the fight for rigts and of course love (which most times ends truncate by destiny and by the circunstances) are other romantic features which couldn´t be forgivenn. The imporante of the independence of the nacional territories is other romantice atributte. Despite this, the independence´s and exaltation´s importance is not going to be explained a lot owing to it doen´t appear in the text and books which we are going to analise. The longing and the fack of exploration of wild nature, brutal rainforest and about mitical, savage and unexplored spacies involucrated in mistery and mysticismis is other fack to take into account. 

 

        Romanticism american aspects

The american and british Romanticism is similar to this general aspects. American romanticism was a literary movement which approximately began in 1820 and ended in 1865. American romanticism was characterised by representing important values as we see if we take the case of feeling, intuition over reason, importance of the individual freedom, pure nature etc. 

 

Romantic american writers

 

Some very importants american romanticism writers are Ralph waldo Emerson thanks to his famous essay called: “Nature”. Hernan melville owing to having write a masterpiece like “Moby dick”, Edgar Allan Poe and his shorts romantic and terror stories as we observe for example with: “THe Black cat”, “The oval portrait”, “Berenice”, “Tell tale heart”and “The mask of the red death”, Nathaniel Hawrtrone who wrote a novel whose name is “The scarlet letter””

and least but not least Walt Whitman with his work “Leaves of grass” 

 

         Romanticism british aspects

 

It´s establised that British´s Romanticism started in 1798 with the publication of  lyrical ballads. The year which finished it is said that was around 1850.  British  Romanticism presents some aspects like the significance of self self-expression,  the individual feelings and such as imaginative spontaneity. 

 

Romantic British writers

 

In the novel, we can see the creation of the gothic and terror novel which appeared  in the British romanticism. Gothic novel was started by Oralce Warpole with The Otranto´s castle. Frankenstein that was done by Mary Shelley initiated the science  fiction novel and creating an incredible psychologist novel of high level in which we can appreciate the development of Frankenstein's monster who in fact isn't evil.  Shelly shows a perfect development of a being who doesn't want to hurt anyone but that due to being abandoned suffered a lot and ended up collapsing and taking revenge with his creator  (who was called father by the “monster”) whose name was Frankenstein. We also perceived that he didn't decide to be a monster and being rejected, feared and hated by almost everyone. To sum up we can see an amazing psychological development in a tormented being who needs to realize the self expression of his internal, chaotic and personal feelings to avoid collapsing and exploding. Writing a novel like this was quite significant and important in literature and obviously in romantic literature.

 

Other important British writers are William Wordsworth whose major work was Tintern Abbey, Samuel Coleridge who wrote The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Keats  William Blake, Percy Shelley,   and Lord Byron with his epic poem Don Juan.