The Unwarped British Romanticism that came in towards the concluding part of the 18th century as a revolt against the glorification of reason and order that the Enlightenment accompanied marked a massive shift in literature, art, and thought. With a focus on religious and spiritual depth, the magnificent beauty found in the natural world is made to be enjoyed and appreciated in its own right, the importance of expression by individuals, not to mention in complete contrast to the era clamouring for a reason and society’s norms. The so-called Romantic Era is a period that constituted a cultural movement of art and intellect during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It was right after two of the greatest revolutions—the Americans were just finishing, while the French were fully underway with the stimulation of the Industrial Revolution. This series of events and the continually growing sense of disillusion towards industrial society’s effects on the human spirit and its natural surroundings played a significant role in Romanticism’s coming to idealize emotion, nature, and the experience and expression of the individual. Clearly indicated through the use of works such as Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”, Jane Austen’s “Love and Friendship”, Percy Shelley’s “To a Skylark” and John Keats’s “To Autumn”, is that this Romantic sensibility directed a very detailed multitudinous exploration of such themes in a varied way of addressing.
Thesis Statement: British Romanticism is the high confluence of emotion, nature, and individualism in diametric opposition to the Enlightenment’s priorities; richly varied expressions found during works like “Frankenstein,” “Love and Friendship,” “To a Skylark,” and “To Autumn” reveal the movement’s break from the norm.
Major Work Analysis
Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” belongs to the base works of British Romantic literature, incarnating the spirit of this epoch in a set of deep emotions, the sublime, and the risks of uncontrolled individuality. Shelley’s tale deals with the private life of Victor Frankenstein, a scientist who is convinced that he will be able to defeat death if his experiments come to breathe human life into a loosely stitched patchwork creature first comprised of stolen cadaveric material. In fact, by that point, powerful emotional turbulence and moral ambiguity were typical in Romanticism as characteristic explorations of the human condition; such a sign galvanizes a period further on their path to the foreground of introspection and the vagaries of the human spirit.
The novel is replete with instances that showcase the Romantic reverence for nature’s majesty and power. For example, Shelley herself writes most eloquently on the sublimity of the Alpine landscape: “The sight of the awful and majestic in nature had indeed always the effect of solemnizing my mind and causing me to forget the passing cares of life.” The passage signifies a classical Romantic idealization of nature’s attitude that nature may carry many high emotions and even become a philosophical subject. Frankenstein violates the second precaution of the dangers held in unbounded ambition and hunting knowledge, disregarding moral and public safety. Victor’s calamitous journey becomes a meditation on the Romantic concern with each man’s situation in the world and what man would bear the investigations of knowledge with which they would make and thereby exercise defiance of natural limits. His creation, the Creature, symbolizes an outcome of human hubris in the round, at once evoking pity and horror.
The Creature’s story underlined Romantic themes of isolation, the search for identity, and a longing to understand the world—an alien one in an indifferent world—accompanied by despair. Shelley, through “Frankenstein,” manages to bring close into view the Romantic ideals with some sophistication, presenting a torturous and complex play of the emotion, nature, and individual aspiration that Romanticism represents (Shelley). The novel is then a poignant comment on the existence of human beings and a reflection of the continued attention with which the Romantic age pursued the obscurities of human experience and mysteries of the universe.
Minor work analysis
In “Love and Friendship,” Jane Austen satirizes the Romantics in a tone characteristic of their movement, prizing sentiment over reason. In her epistolary novella, “Love and Friendship,” Austen is quite exuberant in decrying the excesses of Romantic sensibility and melodramatic attitudes attributed to the Romantics through much contemporary work. The work of Austen, especially in its satiric nature, cast jibes at the overweening notions of Romantic aspirations, highlighting that overindulgence in feelings leads to an untenable and foolish mode of living. The irony in this Austen sentence is ripe: “Run mad as often as you choose; but do not faint”(Austen). This line epitomizes Austen’s ironic attitude towards romantic ideals, like the sense of dry humour warning to guard against the extremities of romantic despair while mocking just terrible polite period dramatic emotional expressions.
Percy Shelley’s “To a Skylark” is a quintessential Romantic ode to the beauty of nature and all that is transcendental. Shelley uses the skylark to symbolize complete, independent joy and unattainable perfection humanity is estranged from. In so doing, the poem extols the boundless freedom of the Bird and its song as an emblem of ideal beauty, further than the large understanding of humankind. Shelley gives this love when he writes, “Hail to thee, blithe Spirit! / Bird thou never wert”—giving right to the core of the otherworldly attributes of the skylark as well as the Romantics’ sense of pursuing the transcendent sublime (Percy). This poem is, therefore, Romantic in the meaning of “all mysteries of nature and deep emotional feelings. The poem “To Autumn” by John Keats is an example of the obsession of Romantics with transient natural beauty and change against time. It is a rich, sensual celebration of plenty, mingled with a contemplative reel over the cycle of life and death. “Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness.” The imagery developed by Keats to conjure up seasonality anticipates so much. This impossibly well-captures full appreciation for touchable and viewable richness, the consistency of the Romantics, respect toward the cycles in nature, and shows bittersweet beauty in the transitory nature of life. The work of Keats articulates very well the raw and unaffected instruction concerning the Romantics’ obsession with the natural world, that infinitude of wonder and beauty, all enshrined in its terminal ingénues, tied to the things of this world and its mortal nature, reflecting the fragile grandeur of human experience.
The criticism of Mary’s, “Frankenstein”, by Shelley, as well as more minor works like “Love and Friendship” by Jane Austen, and British poets Percy Shelley’s “To a Skylark” and “To Autumn” by John Keats all individually portray each other the variety surrounding the British Romantic essence. These simultaneously expressed different aspects of a pluralist world, although their attitude differed: some might say purely Gothic narrative, others—satirical prose, lyrical poetry. Each, in a singular fashion, treads ground between emotion and reason, taking argument up against the rationalist imperatives of the Enlightenment while still permitting a more careful, deeply felt, and sensible comprehension of both human capabilities and nature.
The minor works “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley, the little works “Love and Friendship” by Jane Austen, “To a Skylark” by Percy Shelley, and “To Autumn” by John Keats then, together, go onto unveil a complex character depicted by British Romanticism. All these works border on “the great variety of means” in the Romantic movement, which comes from Gothic narrative and satirical prose to lyrical poetry—employ only distinctive reasons; therefore, they are Romantic as bordering on the profound emotional life of the noblest, beauty of nature through enigma-wrapped, exaltation of individualism. They walk a fine line; both do with emotion and logic in their critique of rationalist imperatives launched by the Enlightenment. They plead for more nuanced, deeply considered apprehensions of the human condition and the natural world.
The synthesis of British Romanticism is understood in the variety of literary expressions to reflect arousal and intensification in the emotional and experiential vivacity in consideration of life, signalled from humanistic and intrinsic relation to the natural environment, rallying for the fashioning and fulfilment of self-expression and meaning for the individual; Romanticism showed a radical departure from the Enlightenment precedents. The readings demonstrate how Romanticism represented a total departure from these Enlightenment precedents, contributing to an understanding of the movement and its lasting effects on literature and thought. Hence, the impact of British Romanticism profoundly delved into emotions, nature, and individualism, all making its heritage. In short, it beautifully revealed the human experience more significantly. Its relevance continues in the modern world with reminders of empathy, curiosity about the natural world, and personal truth-seeking.
Works Cited
Austen, Jane. Love and Friendship. United Kingdom, Lulu.com, 2016.
Percy Bysshe Shelley. “To a Skylark by Percy Bysshe Shelley | Poetry Foundation.” Poetry Foundation, 2020, www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45146/to-a-skylark.
Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. United States, Dover Publications, 2013.
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