Literature week 9 Flashcards
Literature played a role in abolition. GIVE THREE EXAMPLES
Hannah More & William Cowper wrote against slavery.
Blake’s “The Little Black Boy” highlighted racial issues.
Barbauld’s Hymns in Prose for Children addressed God’s care for enslaved Africans.
Romantic poets challenged
previous literary traditions.
Romanticism reacted against Enlightenment ideals of reason and instead valued:
Emotion, imagination, nature, individualism
Canonical Romantic Poets
First Generation:
William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Canonical Romantic Poets:
Second Generation:
Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats
The period saw a shift in publishing, transitioning from handmade books to
industrial printing.
William Blake:
Songs of Innocence and Experience (1794):
Explored duality of childhood innocence vs. societal corruption.
William Blake:
The Tyger, The Chimney Sweeper, London:
Critiqued social injustice.
William Wordsworth:
“Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” (1798):
Connection between nature and memory.
William Wordsworth:
Lyrical Ballads (1798) (with Coleridge):
Defined Romantic poetry.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:
Guilt, redemption, supernatural themes.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge:
Kubla Khan:
Dreamlike imagery, exoticism.
Lord Byron:
Created the “Byronic hero”—dark, brooding, rebellious figures.
Don Juan, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.
Percy Bysshe Shelley:
“Ode to the West Wind,” “To a Skylark”:
Themes of change, freedom.
John Keats:
Great Odes (1819):
“Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn.”
Great Odes (1819) explored
beauty, transience of life.
Key Themes of Romanticism:
Nature as a source of inspiration.
Emotion over reason.
The supernatural and exotic.
Critique of industrialization and social inequality.
Individual freedom and imagination.
