THE CITY AS A FIGURE OF SADNESS, DARKNESS AND STRESS FROM GEORGIANS TO POST-MODERNISM

 

1.     INTRODUCTION à Carmina Peiró Domenech

  1. ROMANTICISM à Romina Prieto Gilabert

 

3. DARK ROMANTICISM

 

Dark Romanticism is a literary subgenre that emerged from the Transcendental philosophical movement popular in 19th century America. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_romanticism)

 

The term “Dark Romanticism” comes from both the pessimistic nature of the subgenre’s literature and the influence it derives from the earlier Romantic literary movement. Dark Romanticism’s birth, however, was a mid 19th century reaction to the American Transcendental movement. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_romanticism)

 

Related to its features, we have to say that Dark Romantics are much less confident about the notion  that perfection is an innate quality of mankind, as believed the Transcendentalists. Subsequently, Dark Romantics present individuals as prone to sin and self-destruction, not as inherently possessing divinity and wisdom.

Moreover, for these Dark Romantics, the natural world is dark, decaying, and mysterious; when it does reveal truth to man, its revelations are evil and hellish.

Finally, works of Dark Romanticism frequently show individuals failing in their attempts to make change for the better. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_romanticism)

 

         The key figures if Dark Romanticism included Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. (http://hem.passagen.se/hehe/what_is_dark_romanticism.htm)

 

To sum up, Dark Romanticism is a movement in literature, music, movies…towards the unfettered expression of the decadent natural world and the obscure supernatural world.

(http:// hem.passagen.se/hehe/what_is_dark_romanticism.htm)

 

4. ANALYSIS FROM WWI POETRY TO POST-MODERNISM

         4.1. GEORGIANS vs ROMANTICISM à Carmen Bernabeu Sanvictorino

4.2. WWWI POETRY vs ROMANTICISM à Romina Prieto Gilabert

          

 

4.3. MODERNISM vs ROMANTICISM

 

Modernist poetry in English is generally considered to have emerged in the early years of the 20th century with the appearance of the Imagist Poets. In common with many other modernists, these poets were writing in reaction to what they saw as the excesses of Victorian poetry, with its emphasis on traditional formalism and overly flowery poetic diction. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernist_poetry_in_English)

The same happened with Romanticism, which apeared in Europe during the late 18th and early 19th centuries as a rejection of the classic rules. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism)

 

         Related to the features of Modernism, we have to say that there was a great attraction towards all the original and all the unusual. The poets felt an absolutely necessity of escaping towards idyllic paradises and they also felt a big yearning of the mythic and legendary past. These feelings were accompanied firstly with a worship of the beauty and the exotic and, secondly, with a rejection of the real world. (http://www.monografias.com/trabajos16/modernismo-literario/modernismo-literario.shtml)

It’s clear that there was a relation between Modernism and Romanticism, because romantic poets also idealized love, imagination, the exotic things, freedom… (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism)

 

         Romantic poets strongly believed in freedom and in nature, because of that they rejected the life in cities. Romantics saw the cities as a sing of sadness, of stress, of darkness… So, for them living in a city was like living in the hell. That is because they idealized nature, I mean, they believed in the pleasures of intact places. Moreover, in that kind of place there weren’t rules, there was freedom, one of the most important things for them. Because of that, the cities were so bad, because for them in the cities you couldn’t be free, all was dark and sad (maybe because of pollution) and all was stress (maybe because of the big amount of people living in them).

If we try to relate this feature of Romanticism with Modernism, we can find that Modernist poets felt more or less the same because, as we have said before, they felt an absolutely necessity of escaping towards idyllic paradises. Moreover, they also idealized the beauty and the exotic. These idyllic and exotic paradises are not the cosmopolitan and big cities, in which all is stressful, dark and sad.

 

         4.4. POST-MODERNISM vs ROMANTICISM à Xavi Moreno Estruch

5. CONCLUSIONà Carmina Peiro Domenech