BRITAIN AND AMERICA

George III came to the throne in 1760, his reign lasted 60 years and was one of the
longest in English History.
To reduce the public debt due to the Seven Years War he introduced new duties on
corn, paper and tea, which caused fierced opposition in american colonies.
The english parliament responded to the protest by repealing some of them, but
the tax on the tea remained.

At the Boston Tea Party in 1773 some rebels dressed as native americans threw the
British tea into the harbour.
The rebels manteined that the taxes were unjust, as the colonies had no political
power; they said “no taxation without representation”.
The Americans divided into Patriots, who wanted the indipendence, and Loyalists,
who wanted to remain part of Britain; the war of Indipendence began in 1775.
The Americans set up an army under the command of George Washington to face
the British army.
On 4 July 1776 in Philadelphia the Congress signed the Declaration of indipendency,
written by Thomas Jefferson. It claimed not only that the colonies were a new
nation, but also that all men had a natural right to “life, liberty and pursuit of
happiness”; it also stated that governments can only claim the right to rule if they
have the approval of those they govern, that is “the consent of the governed”.
In 1781, at the battle of Yorktown, the British army was defeated and Britain
recognised the indipendence with the Treaty of Versailles. America became the
symbol of a new start.
The new republic of USA adopted a federal constitution and Washington became the
first president, the loyalists moved to canada.

George II had a difficult ime with his ministers, he asked William Pitt to became
Prime Minister; he won a majority, he was in office for 18 years, during which he
tried to simplify the financial system to reduce national debt.

THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

At the end of 18th century economic changes took place in England, that would
transform the country from an agricultural to an industrialised nation.
The origins of the economic transformation can be traced back to the Black Death
and the rise in living standards that followed it.
The population increased and agriculture was intensified.
.Open fields were inclosed into smaller portions of land to make more efficient
arable farms
.The soil was drained and made more fertile (cereal production increased)
.Animals were bred selectively
.Mass consuption of machine-made goods started, which marked the beginning of
the industrial revolution

In this century there was a succession of technological innovations that transformed

the productivity of workers.
Thomas Newcomen invented a practical steam engine which made possible
pumping water out of coal mines;
James Hargreaves’s Spinning Jenny increased spinning efficiency;
James Watt panted a steam engine that was more powerful and wasted less fuel;
Edmund Cartwright’s loom linked cloth manifacture to water and steam power.
Cheaper products met the growing demand for goods. Heavy investments increased
and innovation became linked to energy generated from coal.
The geography of the country changed, concentrating the new industrial activities
near the coalfields of the Midlands and the North; people shifted from the south
and small town called “mushrooms town” were constructed to house the workers
near the factories.

Industrial cities lacked elementary public services, the air and water were polluted
by smoke and filth and the houses were overcrowded. Women and children were
highly prized by employers because they could be paid less and were easier to
control; the fact that the children were si small meant they could move easily in
mines.
Industrial labour imposed new work patterns, which were determinated by the
mechanised regularity of the machine and a rational division of labour.
Long working hours, discipline and monotony caracterized the work of labourers.

A NEW SENSIBILITY
In the second half of the middle age a new sensibility emerged; a new generation of
poets established new trends, but they did not lay down a precise programme of
rules.
While the early poets had dealt with impersonal material with noble eloquence, the
later poets
tended to use subjective and autobiographical material moving towards the
expression of a lyrical and personal experience of life.
They were less intellectual and more intimatley emotional.
The poetry was esentially reflective, it dealt with experiences presented for
generalised reflection.
Many factors produced this change: the noisy activity of the industrial town was
compared negatively with the simple serenity of the countryside.
There was a growing interest in humble and everyday life in opposition to elevated
subjects of Augustan poetry; there was an interest in melancholy associeted with
meditation on the suffering of the poor and death; a new taste for the desolate, the
love of ruins, graveyards, ancient castles and abbeys.

There was also a revolution in the concept of nature.

The classical view of nature as an abstract concept and a set of divine laws and
principles established by God was slowly replaced by the view of nature as a real
and living being.
The higher value placed on sensibility led to the need to elaborate a new aesthetic
theory built on individual consciousness rather than on the imitation of the
precepts of nature or the classics.
In Edmund Burke’s work he gave supremacy to the sublime over the beautiful.

The distinction between the beautiful and the sublime became a main theme of the
18th century aesthetics. For burke the sublime is whatever provoke emotions like
terror and pain or exite the ideas of pain and danger. He argued that terror and pain
are the strongest emotions and that there is an inherent pleasure in such feelings.

EARLY ROMANTIC POETRY

An inluential group of poets is known as the “Graveyard School” because of their
melancholy tone and the choice of cemeteries, ruins and stormy landscape as the
setting of their poems; the tomb became a symbol eliciting contemplation of death
ans immortality.

William Blake can be regarded as a forerunner of Romanticism poetry because of his

interest in social problems and his unique use of symbols.

THE GOTHIC NOVEL

In the second half of 18th century an increasing interest in individual consciousness
revealed itself in fiction.
It was marked by: a taste for the strange and the mysterious; an impulse for
freedom and escape from the ugly world; the fear of the triumph of evil and chaos
over good and order.
The interest in Gothic Novel was common to all social classes, also thanks to the
circulating libraries.
The adjective “Gothic” was first applied to architecture before it connoted to
literature. The writer Horace Walpole was the first to establisha link between the
two: his obsession with his miniature castle at Strawberry Hill was the inspiration for
“The castle of otranto” and its subtitle was “a gothic story”.

Gothic novels intended to arouse fear in the reader whith the threat of realising all
the potentialities of the mind beyond the reason.
The nature of this fear seemed to reflect the historical moment, characterised by
the increasing disillusionment with Enlightment and by the bloody revolutions.
The settings was influenced by the concept of the sublime, it includes ancient
settings, isolated castles and mysterious abbeys.
The most important events take place during the night because darkness is a
powerful element used to create an atmosphere of gloom and mystery.
All the characters moving in such settings percieve the world around them as hostile.
The Gothic Hero is usually isolated either voluntarily or involuntarily, and the
heroine is both afflicted with unreal terrors and persecuted by a villain.
The wanderer is the symbol of isolation as he wanders the earth in perpetual exile,
usually as a divine punishment.
The plots are often complicated by embedded narratives and supernatural beings,
which increase the suspence and mystery.
First novel of this kind: The Castle of Otranto.

ROMANTIC POETRY
At the end of 18th century and the beginning of 19th century, English Romanticism
saw the prevalence of poetry, which best suited the need to give expression to
emotional experience and individual feelings.
Imagination gained a primary role in the process of poetic composition. Thanks to
the imagination, romantic poets could see beyond surface reality and discover a
truth beyond the powers of reason; imagination allowed the poet to re-create and
modify the external world of experience.
The poet was seen as a visionary prophet or teacher whose task was to mediate
between man and nature, to point out the evils of society, to give voice to the ideals
of freedom, beauty and truth.

There was a serious interest about the experience and insights of childhood.
To the Augustan Age, a child was important only in so far as he would become an
adult; childhood was considered a necessary stage in the process leading to
adulthood.
To a Romantic, a child was purer than an adult because he was unspoilt by
civilisation. His uncorrupted sensitiveness meant that he was closer to God,
therefore childhood was a state to be admired and cultivated.

There was new emphasis on the significance of the individual.

The Augustans had seen man as a social animal; The Romantics instead saw him in a
solitary state, and stressed the special qualities of each individual’s mind, they
exalted the atypical.
The current of thought represented by Rousseau stated that the conventions of
civilization represented intolerable restrictions on the individual personality and
produced every kind of corruption and evil.
Therefore natural behaviour is good in contrast to behaviour which is governed by
reason and by the rules and customs of society.
The savage may appear primitive, but he has an instinctive knowledge of himself;
concept of the noble savage.

Rousseau theories also influences the “cult of the exotic”, which is the veneration of
what is far away both in space and time.

The Romantic poets also regarded nature as a living force an as the expression of
God in the universe. Nature became a main source of inspiration, a source of
comfort and joy.

As regards poetic technique, breaking fre from models and rules, the Romantic
poets searched for new, individual style through the choice of a language and
subject suitable to poetry.
The problem of poetic diction was a central issue in romantic aesthetics.
Symbols and Images assumed a vital role as the vehicles of the inner visionary
perception.

The English Romantic poets are grouped into two generation.

The first generation, with Wordsworth and Coleridge, were characterised by the
attempt to theorise about poetry.
Wordsworth would write about the beauty of nature and ordinary things with the
aim of making them interesting for the reader; Coleridge should deal with visionary
topics, the supernatural and the mystery.
The poets of the second generation, Byron, Shelley and Keats, experienced political
disillusionment which is reflected in their poetry trought the clash between the
ideal and the real.
Individualism and escapism were stronger in this generation and found expression in
the differents attitudes of the three poets.