The Ideal of Beauty in the Period of Romanticism

• Thesis title in Czech: Ideál krásy v době romantismu
• Thesis title in English: The Ideal of Beauty in the Period of Romanticism
• Key words: romantismus, Lyrické balady, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, krásno, vznešeno
• English key words: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Romanticism, the beautiful, the sublime
• Academic year of topic announcement: 2013/2014
• Thesis type: Bachelor's thesis
• Thesis language: angličtina
• Department: Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (21-UALK)
• Supervisor: prof. PhDr. Martin Procházka, CSc.
• Author: hidden - assigned and confirmed by the Study Dept.
• Date of registration: 09.10.2013
• Date of assignment: 09.10.2013
• Administrator's approval: not processed yet
• Confirmed by Study dept. on: 21.10.2013
• Date and time of defence: 02.02.2016 09:00
• Date of electronic submission: 09.01.2016
• Date of proceeded defence: 02.02.2016
• Submitted/finalized: committed by student and finalized
• Opponents: Mgr. Miroslava Horová, Ph.D.

Guidelines

The aim of the thesis is to study the ideal of beauty in the period of Romanticism. The study will be concerned mainly with the Romantic poets and their visions of beautiful in relation to the aesthetics of the sublime. It will focus on the development of what was perceived as beautiful in the periods preceding Romanticism and how this vision changed for the Romantics. The thesis will be based on the study of the Romantic period focusing on Romantic Britain and her poets.
The main focus of the thesis will be the discrepancy between the beautiful, on the one hand, and the sublime or the grotesque, on the other, both in perceiving the nature and human beings. The Romantics have several similar features as well as the vision of the beautiful, whether they praise women or men or nature, whether they deal with the beauty inside or the surface. Similarities between those will be considered as well. The reflexion of aesthetics of the beautiful and the sublime will be drawn from Edmund Burke’s The Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.What the Romantics introduced to poetry was the vision of sublime and beautiful, related one to the other or even united. Is there for the Romantics any diference between those two? Is their ideal of beauty any similar to the present one? How their vision influenced literature that came after? Did they enrich it or did writers returned to the old beautiful?
CHAPTERS
1) Introduction
- history of beauty drawn from Umberto Eco’s books
- the beautiful and the sublime according to Edmund Burke
2) The Lyrical Ballads
Coleridge’sThe Rime of the Ancient Mariner – the sublime: self-preservation, terror, light (Sun), power of the sea, sound and loudness caused by the sea, difficulty on his voyage
Wordsworth’s poems: The Nightingale, A Conversational Poem (melancholy caused by its song – sublime); Lines Written in Early Spring (men in comparison with nature: animals flowers); The Idiot Boy (grotesque, love for an idiot boy)
+? The Thorn (beauty of the new life against the old thorn), Mad Mother (unusual portrayal of a mother), The Female Vagrant (marriage vs. solitude, pain and pleasure, joy and grief), Lines Left Upon a seat in a Yew-Tree (solitude)
3) Shelley
Prometheus Unbound – both sublime and beautiful (pain, delight, power, infinity, magnificence, difficulty, sympathy, grace and more)
On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery (delight from viewing the terryfiying Medusa, obscure but still beautiful)
Hymn to Intellectual Beauty
Mont Blanc (přechod k Byronovu Manfredovi)
4) Byron
Manfred
- Nature of the Alps as viewed in Manfred (connected to society in the valley, the highest peaks are pure, solitary, because not many people go up there)
- The humans (sympathy) vs. the spirits (magnificent, powerful, infinite, eternal, obscure)
- The character of Manfred (society vs Manfred’s solitude, guilt over his past, ambitious, seeks power, pain, darkness)
She walks in Beauty (grace, beauty, light, innocence)
5) Conclusion

References

Works Cited:
1. Baldick, Chris. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.
2. Procházka, Martin. Literary Theory: A Historical Introduction. Prague: Karolinum, 2008.
3. Abrams, Meyer Howard. The Mirror and the Lamp. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971.
4.Shaw, Philip. The Sublime. London ; New York : Routledge, 2007.
5. Eco, Umberto. Dějiny krásy. Prague: Argo, 2005.
6. Eco, Umberto. Dějiny ošklivosti. Prague: Argo, 2007.
7. Burke, Edmund. Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. London: F. and C. Rivington, 1801.
8. Procházka, Martin, and Zdeněk Hrbata. Romantismus a romantismy: Pojmy, proud, kontexty. Prague: Karolinum, 2005.
9. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. London: Oxford University Press, 1952.
10. Lord Byron, George Gordon. The Poetical Works of Lord Byron. London: Oxford University Press, 1921.
11. Jakckson, Noel. “The Time of Beauty” in Studies in Romanticism Vol. 50.2., ProQuest. ProQuest, Studies in Romanticism. Boston: Boston University, Sumer 2011. 20^th May 2013.

12. Wordsworth, William, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads. London: Oxford University Press, 1924.

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13. Keats, John. The Complete Poems. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1978.
14. Wordsworth, William. The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. London: George Routledge and Sons, 1858.
15. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1912.
16. Blake, William. The Complete Writings. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966.