Duncan Wu and I had a thunderous falling out the past couple days, but we're back in cahoots since this morning. He's not so bad when there's coffee, pillows, and sunshine involved.
--"International conflict, the threat of invasion by Napoleon, social and political discontent--the writers in this book lived with these things, and were shaped by them" (xxxiv).
--"important development: the rise of the media" (xxxiv).
--"bulletins were now available to the poor and illiterate...Groups of men would club together and buy a single copy, which would be read aloud" (xxxv).
--"Not only were these writers shaped by their historical moment--they shaped it" (xxxvii).
--Rise of media also meant a "new-found appetite for scandal" and the rise of celebrity (Byron being the most notable.) (xxxvii)
--Importance of theater
--Extreme poverty and lack of education
--Instability of the monarchy
--George III deemed banana-boat crazy in 1811 and had a lot more control than the monarch today. (Without his consent, laws could not be passed)
--Power hungry son, go figure.
--"They were products of their time in believing in a more just world than that in which they lived" (xxxviii).
--The belief was, "if philosophy could generate revolution, so too could poetry" (xxxviii). POETRY!
--"It is not just their capacity for optimism that distinguished them, but the kind of belief to which they clung. Where earlier generations looked to an afterlife, the Romantics tended to reject formalized religion" (xxxix).
--Church of England had a great deal of political power.
--"Instead, they thought they could create, through their writing, a promised land in which property was of no consequence and people would live in harmony. It lay neither in the distant future nor in the abstract; to them it was attainable, imminently, in the here and now" (xxxix). They would love my yoga classes.
--Redemption through self-realization. --"Redemptive potential of the mind" (xxxix).
--"Frustration with the restrictions of our earthly state permeates [Byron's] poetry, compelling him to aspire to a level of existence beyond the merely human" (xli). So, like Eliot's graph?
--Byronic hero archetype--something I should know. Hmm. I might like Byron based on pg. xli: "He seeks to understand the random and the everyday in all its meaningless variety. He studies human behavior, marvels at the follies and foibles of his characters, and addresses his reader in disarmingly familiar style, as if he were speaking from an armchair holding a glass of hock." Hock is booze? Hock a loogie? Glass of loogie?
--Revolution as apocalypse=Blake
--And then he goes into the obligatory section on Women. Congratulations, Wu. Gender equality, good job.
--"International conflict, the threat of invasion by Napoleon, social and political discontent--the writers in this book lived with these things, and were shaped by them" (xxxiv).
--"important development: the rise of the media" (xxxiv).
--"bulletins were now available to the poor and illiterate...Groups of men would club together and buy a single copy, which would be read aloud" (xxxv).
--"Not only were these writers shaped by their historical moment--they shaped it" (xxxvii).
--Rise of media also meant a "new-found appetite for scandal" and the rise of celebrity (Byron being the most notable.) (xxxvii)
--Importance of theater
--Extreme poverty and lack of education
--Instability of the monarchy
--George III deemed banana-boat crazy in 1811 and had a lot more control than the monarch today. (Without his consent, laws could not be passed)
--Power hungry son, go figure.
--"They were products of their time in believing in a more just world than that in which they lived" (xxxviii).
--The belief was, "if philosophy could generate revolution, so too could poetry" (xxxviii). POETRY!
--"It is not just their capacity for optimism that distinguished them, but the kind of belief to which they clung. Where earlier generations looked to an afterlife, the Romantics tended to reject formalized religion" (xxxix).
--Church of England had a great deal of political power.
--"Instead, they thought they could create, through their writing, a promised land in which property was of no consequence and people would live in harmony. It lay neither in the distant future nor in the abstract; to them it was attainable, imminently, in the here and now" (xxxix). They would love my yoga classes.
--Redemption through self-realization. --"Redemptive potential of the mind" (xxxix).
--"Frustration with the restrictions of our earthly state permeates [Byron's] poetry, compelling him to aspire to a level of existence beyond the merely human" (xli). So, like Eliot's graph?
--Byronic hero archetype--something I should know. Hmm. I might like Byron based on pg. xli: "He seeks to understand the random and the everyday in all its meaningless variety. He studies human behavior, marvels at the follies and foibles of his characters, and addresses his reader in disarmingly familiar style, as if he were speaking from an armchair holding a glass of hock." Hock is booze? Hock a loogie? Glass of loogie?
--Revolution as apocalypse=Blake
--And then he goes into the obligatory section on Women. Congratulations, Wu. Gender equality, good job.
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