Historic Context:
The 18th century has been a period full of great events: it’s now famous
for the changes in the political, social and economical life.
This is the time of the industry revolution. The positive factors of
this period are: an increasing economic development, the new sciences applied
to industry work, the increasing of trade (domestic and colonial), the
population rise, the gradual agricultural revolution, a series of new
productions and the improvement of domestic transport.
The negative effects of this economic movement are basically two. First,
the difference between rich and poor became more and more deep, then, the other
problem is the enclosure of the lands, that took away the great part of the
common lands.
The social movement from countryside to the polluted industry cities
started to create problems, especially for the worse living conditions.
The factory labourers had long
working hours, low wages, and bad living conditions.
Women and children started to work in the new industries, even though
without any rights.
Politic Context:
The Stuart’s dynasty ended in 1714 with Queen Anne. She hadn’t any
direct heir. The other members of the royal family were Catholics, and
Catholics couldn’t come to the throne of England . The nearest heir found was
George I, an important member of a noble German family called Hannover .
We remember George III because he reigned for over sixty years (from
1760 until 1820) in a period of political stability and economic expansion.
Cultural Point of view:
The Enlightenment introduced concepts like liberty, equality ,freedom
and independence. Enlightenment is a philosophic movement that influenced the
way of thinking.
Neoclassicism, instead, was an artistic-literary current, that
influenced the way of writing and composing poems.
In the last 30 years of the 18th century there’s the
gradually transition to the Early Romantic age. The rationalism of the last
period was substituted by a new interest in emotions and feelings.
The individual aspects of human life, the introspection, the importance
of the subject, the humble everyday-life, the primitive and simple culture were
the main characteristics of this period.
The ideas of “melancholy” and “misery”, the importance of the opposites
like life and death, good and evil, emotion and reason, were fundamental.
The vision of the Nature changed. Nature became something real and
dynamic, a living being..
Beauty is something perceived differently by each mind, each subject.
The concept of Sublime expresses the contrary of beauty. It is the inquietude
perceived in front of something magnificent, powerful, limitless. Sublime is
the highest emotion you can feel mixed with fear. Sublime is often considered
something strange, a mixture of horror and pleasure. Sometimes it’s compared
with the night, and the day is the opposite idea of Beauty.
Sublime is examined by Burke, for the literature, and by Kant ,for the
philosophical point of view.
The Gothic novel is associated to the idea of sublime. It expresses the
taste for strange situations, deep
emotions, darkness, fear and the dimension of the supernatural.
The new generation of poets left behind the impersonal way of writing, the
loud and noble style of the classical. They started a new subjective and
reflective way of writing poems.
The Graveyard school was a group of early-romantic poets. They set their
compositions in cemeteries, or in places like graveyards and churchyards (a
series of tumuls distributed around a church, especially in the small Britannic
villages).
The main themes of their poetry are: the cult of simple life, the sense
of misery, the research of the sublime and the interest in great events of
human life.
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