Romantic Period and Its Key Themes

Romantic Period

• Romanticism period: 1798-1832
• Literature that emphasized emotion, imagination, intuition, freedom, personal experience, and natural beauty
• Rejected 18th-century focus on reason, instead embraced imagination and naturalness

Age of Romanticism

• Emphasis on expressing emotions instead of satire, wit, and reason
• Turning to an innocent and magical world as a response to the industrial world

Individual

• Celebrated individuality
• Deepest artistic impulses unique with nature as a source of spirituality

Imagination

• Imagining and emotion more important than reason and formal rules.
• A gateway to a transcendent experience and truth.

Intuition

• Intuition and reliance on natural feelings as a guide to conduct are valued over controlled rationality

Wordsworth

• Considered a major English Romantic poet
• Co-launched the Romantic age in literature with Samuel Taylor Coleridge through their collaborative publication, Lyrical Ballads (1798).
• Praised as the "poet of humanity"
• Attended Hawkshead Grammar School in 1778 and studied at St. John's College, Cambridge in 1787

Romantic Literature

• Love for nature highlighted
• Respect for primitivism valued
• The common person and idealized country life valued

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

• William Wordsworth's poem
• Praised as a lyrical ballad
• Features of speech and explanation of each stanza.
• First stanza: the poet compares himself to a cloud wandering aimlessly. The poet uses alliteration in the phrase "that floats on high" and "beside the lake".
• Second stanza: the poet compares the daffodils to stars in the sky. The poet uses personification, comparing the daffodils to humans dancing, and the waves to humans dancing. The poet uses alliteration in lines like "beside them danced," and "but they outdid".

Linear vs Non-Linear Text

• Linear Text: words arranged in a sequential manner, typically printed on paper, and includes novels, poems, short stories, letters, and educational texts.
• Non-Linear Text: doesn't require sequential reading, and includes texts with visuals like charts and graphs.

Different Types of Charts and Graphs

• Concept Diagrams: highlight relationships between concepts.
• Pie Charts: illustrate proportions of items.
• Line Graphs: display trends using connected data points.
• Bar Graphs: show values using bars of different lengths.
• Histograms: display distributions of numerical data.
• Flow Charts: represent sequences or processes.
• Venn Diagrams: graphically represent commonalities and differences.

Faulty Logic

• Logical Fallacies: common errors in reasoning that can weaken arguments.
• Overgeneralization: drawing broad conclusions from limited evidence
• Circular Reasoning: using the conclusion as evidence for your premises.
• False Causality: assuming a correlation automatically proves a cause-and-effect relationship

Elements of Literary Drama

• Characters: people in the play.
• Protagonist: the central character faces conflict.
• Antagonist: the opposition against which the protagonist must contend to resolve the conflict.
• Static Characters: do not evolve or change throughout the story.
• Dynamic Characters: evolve or change over time.
• Flat Characters: recognizable for a single trait.
• Plot: series of actions—storyline.
• Theme: main idea or meaning
• Dialogue: spoken words in the play.
• Soliloquy: a character speaking alone to reveal inner thoughts.
• Aside: speech to the audience but not heard by other characters.
• Genre: the type of play.
• Scenic Design (Scenery): includes elements in a stage play.
• Costumes: costumes worn by actors
• Props (Properties): other objects on the stage.
• Lights: lighting used in the production
• Sounds: sound effects used in the production
• Makeup: makeup used by actors
• Tenses of Verbs includes the different types of tenses, from simple to perfect and progressive and tenses used in sentences.

Fiction vs Non-Fiction

• Fiction is writing in an ordinary, non-metrical language, which communicates facts or opinions as in a reality.

• Non-Fiction can be based in history, biography, and can offer commentary and ponder philosophical questions and is usually not a fictionalized story.

Participles/Infinitives

• Participle: part of speech that acts as an adjective
• Infinitive: acts as a noun, adjective, or adverb and is preceded by the word "to".

Gerunds

• Gerunds are a verb that function as a noun

Bias and Prejudice

• Bias: systematic error in judgment based on specific thoughts and thinking
• Prejudice: when a person prejudges someone based on characteristics like ethnicity or gender.