R J 13 (335)

[http://umwblogs.org/wiki/images/SIO.doc Section Intro. Outlines]

Aesthetic Theory and Literary Criticism

What is Romanticism?

Romantic Imagination

art "as a unique and original creation of the subjective imagination that expressed the artist's individual emotional and intellectual response to a particular human or natural event" (126-127). "the structure and language of the poem develops organically from and thus gives outward form to the particular subjective or phenomenological movement of the poet's mind and feelings" (127).

"the human imagination participates in the same divine power the created and sustains the universe" (127).

Romantic Irony

"they viewed the universe as an unknowable chaos that is constantly creating and de-creating life-forms. The artist who seeks to represent this chaos in his art must similarly create and de-create both his narrative fictions and his own selfhood" (127).

"The work of art, then, like nature itself, is in constant process and can never be more than a fragment, a partial and incomplete representation of an always becoming, never fully comprehensible universe" (127).

Probabilism

"the function of art is to teach morality or right feeling by arousing readers' sympathies through the representation of probable or believable examples of virtuous and evil human behavior in contemporary situations" (128).

"In opposition to a neoclassical hierarchy of the genres which gave priority to epic poetry and tragic drama, they argued that the most realistic and hence the most moral genre was the novel, an eighteenth-century outgrowth of Greek and medieval romances" (128).

Return to ENGL 335B, British Romantic Literature.