Revival of Romanticism features in Shelley and Byron

Name: Bhatt Dhara

Roll No: 02

M.A. SEM II

Assignment topic: Revival of Romantic Features in Shelley and Byron

Submitted to: Mr. Jay Mehta

Department of English,

Bhavnagar University,

Bhavnagar.

v Revival of romantic feature Shelley and Byron

ü Introduction

·        The romantic revival:-

No label can accurately describe a period so rich and varied in achievement as the fifty years following the death of Johnson. Romanticism generally speaking is the expression in terms of art of sharpened sensibilities, heightened imagination point of view that has influenced many art forms and has left its mark also philosophy and history.

The supreme romantic movement in English letters was the renalsence. It had transformed not only English but European life ; but like every great impulse in art and life . it had been followed by a period of reaction. The great romanticism were , as I have said, also always generates a certain tendency to exaggeration and aloofness from the condition of ordinary life.

The romantic revival was the result of no one cause .broadly speaking, it was the inevitable corollary of the renascence and reformation. the dignity and importance of man as man, the glries of the world of nature ,-these ideas of which we hear so much at the close of the eighteenth century were born centuries before and had been gradually working in men’s minds through all the political unrest of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The first flowering of romanticism in England the bloody horrors of the French revolution the kindling of a new idealistic philosophy in germony under kant and hegek. The political upheaval in American all these things were but varying symptoms of a general ferment that had lasted on from the fifteenth century.

It is well to remember this for although the social theories of rousseau roughly embodies in the familiar phrase the “return to nature” did materially affect dootrinaires like William godwin and through godwin Shelley ; and although the battle-cry of the revolutionaries.

“Liberty equality and fraternity”impressed itself on the youthful imagination of words worth and Coleridge the general characteristics of the revival suggested above were collateral with the revolution not derived from it.

Emerson’s spiritual asceticism thoreau’s “reduction of life to its lowest terms” and his sylvan solitudes; the open-air democratic fervor of whitmen are offshoots of romanticism ; while the absorption by Byron and Shelley of certain aspects of the French revolution the glorification of liberty the vindication of the natural instincts these matters that merged into the great stream of humanitarian sentiment which swept through our life and literature and literature in the early years of nineteenth century had their source and inspiration in the revival of romance.

(our Victorian literature) the chief thing to remember is that the Fresh air was badly wanted ; our literature needed a vivifying and expanding influence. This the writers of the time achieved our Victorian literature had ben far less rich in concrete beutifuties in intellectual constructiveness in sanity and strength without even the untrained and riotous splendor that gave dynamic power to the men and women of the romantic revival.

v Lord Byron:à

ü Byron - the great poet of freedom and liberty:à

Byron was one of the proudest revolutionary poets and the poets of freedom and liberty that England has ever produced. He was a born rebel and the fire of liberty and hatred for tyolannyburntfurioutsly in his veins.

Buron has been from childhood days a great fighter and he stood vigorously against all forms of tyrannies and oppressions. He attacked all the conventional all the hypocrisies all the moral commonplace of English society in his poetry.

ü Byron – the great champion of the outcast-byron:

Byron was the great advocate of the out-cast and down-trodden people and always stood the defense of liberty and freedom .this love for freedom was not a theoretical principle with him but a practical beacon of life. He cried against the powers of tyranny in the following words:

“What shall revolting thralldom be the patched up idol of enlightened days” 

ü Byron stood for both personal and nation liberty:à

He stood for personal liberty and the liberty of nation. His views were determined by a powerful and positive bilief in the work individual man. He fought for the cause of liberty and went to Greece to support the Greeks in their struggle against tyranny. “his conception of liberty” as bowra observes “was more instructive than intellectual if he something followed mere whims and impulses if some of his ambitions were no more than affectation he was not without guiding principles and his death at rissolonghi shows that he was not an actor but soldier a man of affairs and a master of man”

This love of liberty is well-marked in Byron;s works. He wrote the ‘prisoner of chillon’ in the defense of liberty and the here bonnivard is a votary of liberty like Byron himself the whole oppressed Europe looked to him for salvation and he became the trumpet voice of freedom with Byron liberty became the ruling passion and he considered it his birth right to fight against all tyranny;

“for I will rack if possible the stars to rise against earth’s tyrants”

ü Both Byron and Shelley attacked tyrants:à

This love of liberty is expressed in the denunciation of tyrants such as nepolean and the duke of wellington “best of cut throats” and in denouncing czar and evil-agents. In this connection it is better to compare Shelley and Byron. Shelley thought of the future and was inspired by an ideal future Byron attacked tyrants wherever they existed and pleaded the cause of oppressed humanity Byron accused his own country men of arraying their strength in the side of tyranny and stated that freedom could be possible whwn the powerful obstacles thrones and courts were removed.

ü Byron – a true follower of the principles of the French revolution:à

Byron remained more than other romantics a true follower of the principles of the revolution.

“much more than wordsworth and Coleridge who after their first enthusiasm for the revolution surrendered to caution and seepticism more even than heats whose love of liberty was hardly developed to its full range Byron wished to be free and wished the other men must be free too ”

Byron was equally revolutionary in his attitude towards the evils and vices of his age. He was social revolutionary and ruthlessly exposed and attacked as in ‘danjuan’ the philistinism of upper English class the artistocracy and monarchy. He exposed the hypocrisy the senseless cruelty the snobbery the fraud the cant and the indolence of the upper classes in society.

He may have felt scornful of the saceharine joys of romanticism but the had a sweet tooth and yielded to its blandishments on the whole Byron was more interesting as a person a personality than writer because of his complex nature and of his picturesaue setting in the social condition of his time.

The second generation of romantics with the exception of heats who lived in an ivory tower of his own crated by his love of beauty carried on a revolt against the social structure kings and unjust laws. though the first generation of the romantics gave up their revolutionary enthusiasm yet the romantic revolt went on, the romantic movement began as a conscious protest and never lost the attitude of rebellioum Byron had a grudge against society and without knowing much of it he satirized bourgeois life.

v PERCY BYSSHE  SHELLEY (1792-1822)

The poet Shelley was the eldest own son of narrow minded representative of an old country family the shelleys of field place Sussex where this “brilliant wayward ill-fated youth” was born on august 4,1792

ü A lover of liberty and freedom:à

Shelley had certain inherent tendencies of character which ultimately made him a rebel and reformer a prophet and an idealist in his life. He was from his eton days a lover of liberty and freedom and his soul revolted against all forms of tyranny and oppression shelley’s humanitarianism his love of liberty and hatred of oppression turned him in to a rebel against all  those established institutions,political,religious and social which meant to suppress mankind in any part of the world. The practice of sham religious and morals prevailing in the contempory society often excite his fragile exterior in pury and revolt.

·        His work:à

Shelley exhaled verse as a flower exhales fragrance and just as the fragrance of a blossom varies in quality and power, so did Shelley’s verse vary in poetics merit.

One other thing distinguish Shelley from his contemporaries. He is a reformer as well as a poet little interested in the past mindful only of the present when it jarred on his social idealism his eyes are fixed intensely on the future. To renovate the world to bring about utopia that his constant aim and for this reason we may regard Shelley as emphatically the poet of eagar sensitive youth not the animal youth of Byron but the spiritual youth of the visionary and reformer. The revolution Shelley was much more than a political upheaval it was a spiritual awakening. The beginning of a new life. Master yourself he cries and external freedom will enable you to realize your utmost capabilities. Love is to reign supreme for only in an atmosphere of love can liberty efficiently work love is with Shelley a transcendentital force kinding all things into beauty.

ü “the ode to the west wind”:à

The ode to the west wind is not greater artistically that were impossible but is has an intellectual and human interest designedly absent from the shorter piece

The logical development of imaginative idea is so admirable that it deserves the fullest attention weakingalongthe banks of the arno the poet has seen from the wood hard by the rising autumnal storm carrying with its freight of leaves surging along comes this beneficent destroyer scattering the black , scarlet , and fellow leaves far and wide:

“Yellow and black and pale and hectic red pestilence stricken multitudes: o thou who chariotest to dark wintry bed.

The winged seeds where they lie cold and low each like a corpse within its grave until thine azure sister of the spring shall blow

Her clarieon o’er the dreming earth and fill (driving sweest buds like flocks to feed in air) with living hues and odours plain and hill:

Wild spirit which art anoving everywhere destroyer and preserver hear o hear ”

The “wild spirit” is then both “a destroyer and preserver”

With each variation of the priginal thought the poet given us a flood of superb imagery strengthening the main theme never weakening by far fetched conceits we pass in turn over earth sky and sea the music growing fuller and more majestic as the poem sweeps on “o life me as wave a leaf a cloud” find as in visible world so in the poet’s soul the wind is both destroyer and preserve:

“Drive my dead thoughts over the universe like withered leaves to auicken a new birth”

Then from the individual the poem passes to the universal. The old world must go a new world must come with the spiringladen with fresh sweest promises for suffering humanity:

“O, wind if winter comes can spring be far behind?”

Thus does this wonderful lyrics end there is no greater lyric in our language.

ü Shelley’s method of reformation :à

Shelley’s method of reformation was to direct the attention of the reformers to an idealized picture of the world. He pointed out in ‘promethus unbound’

“My purpose has hither to been simply to familiarize the highly refined imagination of more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealism of moral excellence.”

Shelley made his appeal of reform not to the masses of the people but to the highly refined imagination of the select poetical readers.he sought to usher in an order of society in which equality, liberty and justice would be the watchwords of sociall life. He planned a society based on liberty and love, brotherhood ofmankind and the victory of good over evil. In short shelley’s reformed world of ideal happiness for all humanbeings.

ü Shelley was ahead of his times:à

Though Shelley could not bring the about reform that he strove to introduce through his poetry in his life time yet during the Victorian age his unheard voice sought to be captured in new idealistic fervor for reform thet followed in the wake of the reform bills. What Shelley sounded in queen mab and revolt of islam became the guiding principles of reformers during the victoirian age and earned the praise in our times of such Fabian socialists as George Bernard shaw. To day Shelley is considered a prophet and an idealist a man for in advance of his times in reformative zeal and if the poet had been alive to day he would have been honoured and admired for he had in him the seeds of a true reformer.

Time and space in The Shadow Lines

Assignment:

Assignment paper: 2

Topic: Time and space in The Shadow Lines

Student name: Bhatt Dhara

Roll no.: 02

Paper no.: 2979:VII-EC-202

Sem.:2

Batch:2011

Submitted to: Devershi Mehta

Department of English

Time and space in The Shadow Lines

     Preface

The shadow Lines is a stunning book –amusing, sad, wise and international in scope. It chronicles the story of two familiar, one in Calcutta London from the outbreak of world War ii to modern times.Inter-alia, The shadow Lines is also a book about the prodigious imagination of its narrator who is the chronicler of the lives around him and presents the events with amazing insight, sometimes skipping from city to city in the same breaths and recreating events that happened before he was born with marvelous accuracy and about the lines and borders that are being drawn world over to divided and isolate one man from the other .

      One of the chief features of The Shadow Lines is that it is not written sequentially. The novel moves back and forth with little regard to the chronology of times and distance.

       In this novel the shadow Lines is a highly invocation, complex and celebrated novel of Amitav Gosh in the 1988, it received the following year not only not only literary critics but also some noted literature have acclaimed it for what it has been able to achieve as a work of art .Its focus is a fact of history ,the post partition scenario of violence;butist overall form is a subtle interweaving of fact ,fiction and reminiscence.

It is a novel in which Amitav Ghosh has been able to realize conception through an art form which is cohesive .However, it   remains somewhat inaccessible to some readers; they are particularly, mystified by its non linear mode .The volume of critical essays on the shadow Lines is being presented in hope that it will enable the reader to gain on insight into the meaning and structure of insight into the meaning and structure of the novel.

        In the first part of the book, the contributory bring out the various aspects of the novel.

        In the second part of his essays which look at the novel form some current critical perspective feminist, post colonial and historicist but the emphasis of these essays in upon practice and not theory .the idea is that the reader learns about a specific approach by seeing it applied to the shadow Lines .The Third has a single but significant essay The shadow Lines in context which related the novel to Ghosh other works ,both fiction and nonfiction.

       Content                 

Part one

1 the shadow lines as a memory novel

    Manuela saxena

2 The narrator and the chronicling of self in The shadow Lines.

      Premindha Bannejee

4 Nation as Identity in The shadow Lines

Alta kumara

         Amitav Ghosh’s the shadow lines more important of time and space. Thus The poet says “the shadow Lines “ was memrory novel.

       Time and space

The shadow lines is a challenge to be overcome by the use of imagination and desire until space melts time and space coalesce in a seamless continuity. Both Triadic and the narrator are engaged in the creation of the world as it comes alive to them or to their powerful imagination .Tribe’s idea of romantic love in place without history, without a past is magnificent .It is this continuation that his ideal becomes the story of man who fell in love with a women across of the sacs.                  

“The formal logic of the clock “

In “shadow lines” first time and space here we can say that important of time and place.

Distance and time are shadows in the novel therefore illusory .Time and distance have been blended harmoniously and does not cause fiction .These two challenge in the novel to be overcome by reader’s fine since of imagination like that of narrator’s Triadic had told him of the desire that could carry one beyond the limits accommodate the happenings of the shadow Lines.

 The story in the shadow lines primarily runs in flashback though there are interruption at times .It covers the two extreme points on the globe, Calcutta and London and covers up the story of two families of close acquaintance.

Triadic gets his initial memories of war time the place again but the experience and the stories the he pulled out there served as a reservoir for a long time to come and he entertains the narrator especially ,with them and they become the magical talismans for him to be endowed with realize later. The flash breaks now and then to give an insight the lives of characters. the novel trotting be sahib,treawesen.IIa or Maya devi and such distance had got to be covered fast or else it would pose a hardtop the smooth sailing of the plot.

 The narrator had described all the events in fact narrated the whole story in year’s time when he had gone to England or a year’s research to collection material from India office liberty where all the colonial records were kept for the PhD thesis on the textile trade between India and England 19^th century.

Glimpses of three generations of princes,Tha’mma nationalists Zeal ,shippers of second world war ,death of triadic in Dhaka and Calcutta ,Mu-i-Mubarak  episode in Kashmir all these shreds are blended amicably without giving a feeling of bumpy ride .And this has been possible only been so closely interwoven discarded at times in the novel that seem to be seamless continuity.

    Sometimes ago there was article in The Indian Expresses called

“Crossing all boundaries the end of geography “

In this quote highghtened all the boundaries of imagination, time, place memory, dream all the aspects are highly used by poets.

 In shadow lines exist all the boundaries of human to reach in Amitav Ghost most described time and space. In the shadow Lines, Amitav Ghosh says that this novel was one way

         “Recollection of his memory”

The words lines and borers something used limitation of human mind Amitav Ghosh used most of philosophical ideas in this novel. In novel suggest Diasporas feeling of the novel.

The narrator’s knowledge of war time London was not gained from books but from it Uncle Tribe’s experience, Tridib taught him how to use his imagination.

Removal of the boundaries or the bordered so that the earth becomes but one country and mankind its citizen or to talk In more practical terms ,formation of world government or at least peaceful co-existence without losing the culture identity seems to be the message of the shadow lines.               

Literary presentation of complex human nature in Middlemarch

Assignment: Literary presentation of complex human nature in Middlemarch

Assignment paper: 4

Topic: Literary presentation of complex human nature in Middlemarch

Student name: Bhatt Dhara

Roll no.: 02

Paper no.: 2981-IX-EC-204

Sem.:2

Batch:2011

Submitted to: Ruchira Dudharejia

Department of English

 Literary presentation of complex human nature in Middlemarch

       Complex human nature in Middlemarch

       Views of critics

George Eliot’s views human nature is pessimistic, and that the provincial life she had depicted is mean and petty. In the view of such critics, the novel is a terrible indictment of provincial life.

 Introduction

        In her novel “Middlemarch”, George Eliot described a culture and era which was for her original readers, recent and familiar. Although is  a work of Victorian era artistic conscience, Middlemarch ‘s focus is in fact on the epoch .immediately preceding Victorian’s ,and details in panorama the subtle shifts British social life. The novel is defined by a constant dialogue of dichotomous actions and reaction and how they might manifest and conflict in forms individual and communal.

      “There must be a systole and diastole in all inquiry.”    

     Pronounces Dr  Tetris Lad gate, one of Eliot’s protagonists, and his medical metaphor identifies .Eliot’s own method of contemplating the human world, whether observable in the clash between private ambition and social role, emotional passion and restraining roles, settled custom and new possibilities ,and a multitude of other oppositions. These forces work upon each other within the psychology of Eliot’s heroes, and the field of Middlemarch socity,always resolving with complex ,often costly ,but also necessary compromises .

    

   Realism solidity and complexity of Eliot’s picture

    In order words the central theme of the novel is a melancholy one and it has been illustrated through the twin stories of Dorothy and Lydgate .she has given a wonderfully fresh and varied picture of country life lived in and around Middlemarch as the novelists’ object was to show.

“The paralysis and the misleading diversion from its natural course, which a blunt and unsympathetic world prepares for the noblest identity of feeling that is not in sympathy with it”

    It was essential for her to give such a solidity and complexity to her hero’s and heroin’s  and heroine’s idealism was to be more or less tested and  party subjugated ,as would justify the impression that she understood fully the character or the struggle.

  “we doubt if any other novelist who ever wrote could have succeeded equally well is this melancholy design, could have framed as complete a picture of English country and country town society, with all its thorough good nature, stereotyped habits of thought ,and very limited accessibility to higher class ideas ,and have threaded all these pictures together by a story ,if not of the deepest intrest,still admirable fitted for peculiar of showing hoe unpleastic in such an age as ours to the glowing emotion of an ideal purpose.”

 The good and the happy         

        There is love affair, which eventually prospers well, running through the tale; and the only characters of any movements which are left in a certain cheerless solitude at the close, are the those of young surgeon who has married the women of the mistakes for himself, and of the middle aged fare brother ,who shoes too much more advantage in giving up his love than he could have shown in urging it, and who is made the occasion of giving us perhaps, the only really satisfying emotion which story excites.

Mean of opportunity: its frustrating Impact

     Both Dorothea Casaubon and Lydgate Rosamond stories are pessimistic in their intention and design. Trough the story of Dorothy the novelist has shown the maladaptation of a disinterensted,and spiritual minded girl, to the world into which she is born .she has shown that instead of giving her a full natural channel for enthusiasm, and opening to her a career as large as her heart and mind it, for a time at least, absorbed her great quality in fertile and fruitless efforts which left hardly anyone but herself the betters for  them; that it made the one man living in her neighborhood and in circles where they frequently crossed each other paths. Whom she could have to something great and noble, and left her even at close, in no position better adapted to her rare qualities than that of wife of a clever, me curial ,petulant, young political, not without good in him, but without any need of such a women as this, a women who as his wife came to be know in a certain circle as a wife and a mother.

Dorothy’s desire to devote herself wiser and dipper than herself idea her into marrying the Rev adwardcasauban ,a middle  aged, reseed, vain and dry clergy man, given to allegories researches into a somewhat which  he does not possess the adequate oriental learning , nor even access to the German authorities who made that learning their own. He acts upon Dorothy as a mere moral sponge to absorb all the finer juices of her nature without being of happiness of or the better for them rather perhaps the more irritable and the worse.

“This very frustrating impact of meanness of opportunity; of a narrow and a confined provincial world incapable of appreciating any spiritual or intellectual of loftiness is future illustrated and universalized by the life and career of legate .”

His earnest though parley intellectual thirst for scientific thrust is far more completely defeated and subjugated by the meanness of opportunity than dorothea’s thirst for goodness, no doubt because it is purely intellectual, and because his moral nature, though manly and generous has no particular exalted aims.

     There are no scenes in English literature so full of the sort of power from the excess of which almost shrink as these in which Rosamond’s thin, unyielding, inexpressible 

Selfness and wordless of nature encounters and defeats the story,masculine,magnanimous ,generous struggle of Lydgate to overcome the difficulties caused by an improvident marriage, and to hold fast to his resolve of developing his life to the higher scientific aims of physiological study and not merely to winning his bread as a medical specialists.

   Not an unrelieved pessimism-way of amelioration

 “In short, the whole picture of provincial life is wonderfully vivid in its illustration of the pettiness and meanness of not an unrelieved one. There are also noble nature’s echo rise above this meanness and pettiness.”

   For example, there is Mr. Fare brother, kindly and generous; who renounces his own love rises above pettiness and meanness to bring about the union of freed band Mary. He is noble and grand in his willing self sacrifice. Then there are the garths, not motivated by any loft idealism, but guided in life by piratical virtue and by a noble philosophy of work. George Eliot claimed that she was a ameliorated or improved by patient discharge of one’s duty, in whatever sphere of life one is called upon to work.          

Flashes of humors

“Futher,there are occasional flashes of human provides mostly by Mr. Brooke and Mrs. cad wader which illuminate the gloom of the novel and provide refreshing dramatic relief.”

   The novel may be pessimistic, in conception and design, but it is certainly not an unrelieved pessimism .George Eliot‘s ethical depth and purity of mind were too profound for a complete loss of faith in the essential goodness of human nature. Noble characters like fare brother and garths are living testimonies to her faith in human nature, in the spiritual virtues of purity and self scarce.

Historical nature

    The historical nature of Eliot’s enquiry is repeatedly noted, through phrases like “in those days” and in “those ante reform times “The landed class depicted through figures like Tory Stalwart Sir James Chet team, dithering  Mr. Brooke ,a would be reform candidate for parliament who neglected his tenants, and eccentric old peter Featherstone  ,who neglects his tenants ,and eccentric old peter Featherstone, who uses money to taunt and goad relative and yet finally leaves it all to an illegitimate son, is still enshrined as the essential power base, a hegemony the bill promises to at least partly shake, in favor of manufacturing and mercantile forces, which have already begun to take up  mantle in local governance as ,embodies by Mr. Vince.

This social landscape

         Within this social landscape individual human dramas are defined by the constant push and pull of aspiration and actuality and the way one can alter the other.

       “It is the way community that preserves an inherited wisdom about the human condition. It is the medium in which the individual  lives, and shapes its density” R.T.Jones put it in his 1970 survey of Eliot’s work, and “Middlemarch” is define contrapuntal reflection between the acts of hero and the reaction of social choruses.

              Thus, will young man with a free ranging artistic ,political ,philosophy ,is rigidly dismissive to the leery offered him steaming from disrepute business dealings ,and courtly in the extreme towards his forbidden object of the desire ,Diarrhea ,with her fulsome ambition to  work for social good and intellectual fulfillment .In initial expresses her longing and channels them into religious ,dogmatism, maintains a determination to live up to her choice.

      Middlemarch is also a vicinity of ironies and hypocrisies .Mr. broke, genial pro-reform independent politely candidates is a tightwad about maintaining his property and tenants. Balustrade, apostle and artier, made his dubious deals and can contemplate man manslaughter to protest his reputation.

    Conclusion

   As “Middlemarch” narratives draws to a close ,of her major protagonist ,some find fulfillment ,other propriety but  the two are not necessarily mutual .The immediate story concludes with the rejection of the reform Bill, whilst Legate and Rosamond ,Mr. and Mrs. Bulstrode ,and will and Dorothea all must leave Middlemarch ,the medium nature of which is suggest by its very name :it is the centre, the core ,the given ,the banal and the essential .himself a failure will is elected to parliament and become a man of note ,at the expense of Dorothea ‘s  shrinkage to mere social appendage.

     In Dorothy, most clearly awareness of humanity as a shared state seining,

     “The largeness of the world and the manifold of men to labor and endurance that involuntary, palpitating life”

   Rather than as a net of limitations, a new reality awakens, and all these were skirmishes in an ongoing struggle for society and the self.