Lecture 9 (1)

1.

Senior lecturer: Sartbayeva E.K.

2.

Lecture 9
• 1. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Poems.
• 2.Creative activities of G. G. Byron
• 2.1. Byron’s poem “Child Harold’s Pilgrimage”: genre, plot,
Byronic character, style.
• 3. Creative activities of Jane Austen (1775-1817)
The main concepts: revolutionary romanticism, Byronic hero

3.

Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley, (born Aug. 4,
1792, Field Place,
near Horsham, Sussex, Eng.—died July
8, 1822, at sea off Livorno, Tuscany
[Italy]), English Romantic poet whose
passionate search for personal love
and social justice was gradually
channeled from overt actions into poems
that rank with the greatest in the English
language.

4.

Percy Bysshe Shelley was one of the important English
romantic lyric poets. He remains a central role in English
Romanticism. The doctrine of free love and sexual equality
have particularly attracted commentary on the poet are super
romantic. Romanticism’s original thoughts are expressed
clearly in his work. The poets have a lifetime of setbacks and
frustrations. They make constant resistance to injustice,
tyranny and darkness of society. But Shelley adopts poetical
works as arms and horns to scatter his revolutionary ideas and
appeal to the populace to rise up against the sordid life and
predicts the ideal future of mankind. The imagery of Shelley’s
works gives reader a chance to experience the unique
experience of his life.

5.

Shelley is one of the supreme lyrical poets of England. The lyrical
rapture in all his works is unique. The spontaneous utterance of his
passion and emotion and the rich melody of his poetry are an
abiding contribution to English lyric poetry. He achieved an easy
flexibility of rhythm that is quite astonishing in every form of verse
he wrote.

6.

Shelley wrote dramas when he was in Italy. Prometheus Unbound
(1818-1819), published (1820) is a wonderful combination of the lyric
and the drama. It shows Shelley's aspiring soul yearning for freedom. It
has the sweep and soar of audacious poetry. The Cenci (1819) is a
formal drama dealing with a grim and sordid family affair. It is in the
vein of Elizabethan melodrama. It has the lack of subtlety in its
character drawing and the inadequacy of its dramatic action. It retells in
dramatic form the terrible story of Beatrice who, the victim of a father's
lust takes his life in revenge. Hellas is another drama. Shelley's Critical
writing in prose A Defence of Poetry was published in 1820.

7.

Literary Works of Shelley
Queen Mab (1813). His earliest/effort of
any note is Queen Mab. The poem is
clearly immature; it is lengthy, and
contains much of Shelley’s cruder atheism.
It is written in the irregular unrhymed
meter that was made; popular by Southey.
The beginning is worth quoting, for
already it reveals a touch of the any music
that was to distinguish his later work.

8.

The Cenci (1819). “In The Cenci Shelley started to write formal
drama. In this play, he seen deliberately to have set upon himself
the restraints that he defied in Prometheus Unbound. The plot is
not of the sky and the sea; it is a grim and sordid family affair: in
style, is neither fervent, nor ornate, but bleak and austere. Yet
behind this reticence of the concluding stanzas of Adonais are the
most sublime expression of Shelley’s philosophy of life and death,
and of the immortality of the soul.

9.

Mary Shelley and her Frankenstein
Mary Shelley (1797–1851), Percy’s wife, is remembered as the
author of Frankenstein (1818). Mary met the famous young poet
Percy Shelley when she was only sixteen, and they went to
Europe together. In 1816 they met the exciting poet Lord Byron.
They stayed at his villa in Switzerland to write. They all wrote
frightening, supernatural tales which created the literary vampire
genre. Mary’s story was Frankenstein. Mary was only eighteen
when she wrote it. The plot of the story is said to have come from
a nightmare she had, following a conversation about galvanism
and the feasibility of returning a corpse or assembled body parts
to life. Sitting around a log fire at Byron's villa, the company also
amused themselves by reading German ghost stories.
Frankenstein was about a lonely, unhappy monster. A young
student called Frankenstein created this monster. The monster
wanted the student to love him, but he couldn’t. So the monster
got furious and started to kill people. Mary’s life was unhappy,
too. Her mother, sister, and her two children died young. Then
Percy died in 1822, when Mary was only 24. She lived until she
was 53.

10.

George Gordon Byron
Lord Byron, in full George Gordon
Byron, 6th Baron Byron, (born January
22, 1788, London, England—died April
19, 1824, Missolonghi, Greece),
British Romantic poet and satirist
whose poetry and personality captured the
imagination of Europe. Renowned as the
“gloomy egoist” of his autobiographical
poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–
18) in the 19th century, he is now more
generally esteemed for the
satiric realism of Don Juan (1819–24).

11.

• In all his poetry there is a current of gloom and pessimism. The reason
for this gloom and sorrow may be found in social and political events of his
day. The industrial revolution in England and the invention of new
machines which supplanted workers brought misery to thousands of
laborers. Wars, economic and political oppression of common people, all
these facts gave rise to his discontent with social and political life. So he
raised his voice to condemn them.
• After graduating from Cambridge University, Byron started on a tour
through Portugal, Spain, Greece, Turkey and Albania. He returned home in
1811. A trip to Europe resulted in the first two cantos of Childe Harold's
Pilgrimage ['tʃaild 'hӕrəldz 'pilgrimidʒ] (1812), a mock-heroic epic of a
young man's adventures in Europe, but also a sharp satire against London
society. The poem contains elements thought to be autobiographical, as
Byron generated some of the storyline from experience gained during his
European journey.

12.

The most flamboyant and notorious of the major English Romantic
poets, George Gordon, Lord Byron, was likewise the most fashionable
poet of the early 1800s. He created an immensely popular Romantic
hero—defiant, melancholy, haunted by secret guilt—for which, to many,
he seemed the model. He is also a Romantic paradox: a leader of the
era’s poetic revolution, he named Alexander Pope as his master; a
worshiper of the ideal, he never lost touch with reality; a deist and
freethinker, he retained from his youth a Calvinist sense of original sin;
a peer of the realm, he championed liberty in his works and deeds,
giving money, time, energy, and finally his life to the Greek war of
independence.

13.

While not at school or college, Byron lived at his mother's
residence, Burgage Manor in Southwell, Nottinghamshire. While
there, he cultivated friendships with Elizabeth Bridget Pigot and
her brother John, with whom he staged two plays for the
entertainment of the community. During this time, with the help of
Elizabeth Pigot, who copied many of his rough drafts, he was
encouraged to write his first volumes of poetry. Fugitive
Pieces was printed by Ridge of Newark, which contained poems
written when Byron was only 17. However, it was promptly
recalled and burned on the advice of his friend the Reverend J. T.
Becher, on account of its more amorous verses, particularly the
poem To Mary.

14.

After the publication of the first two cantos of Childe Harold's
Pilgrimage (1812), Byron became a celebrity. "He rapidly became
the most brilliant star in the dazzling world of Regency London.
He was sought after at every society venue, elected to several
exclusive clubs, and frequented the most fashionable London
drawing-rooms."During this period in England he produced many
works, including The Giaour, The Bride of
Abydos (1813), Parisina, and The Siege of Corinth (1815). On the
initiative of the composer Isaac Nathan, he produced in 1814–1815
the Hebrew Melodies (including what became some of his bestknown lyrics, such as "She Walks in Beauty" and "The Destruction
of Sennacherib").

15.

• The main character, Childe Harold by name, came from an
old aristocratic family. His ancestors were men of great
courage and heroism. Harold’s life was very different from
theirs, it is full of pleasure and entertainment. But then he
only feels weariness and discontent. He lost faith in
friendship and was disappointed in the world of lies in which
he found himself. Hoping to find Good in other countries he
left England.

16.

Jane Austen (1775-1817)
• Jane Austen ['ɒstin] was born into a
wealthy family in 1775. Austen was
born in a small English village. Her
family was typically large as was
customary at that time in order to
counter the possibility of early death
by producing many offspring. She
had six brothers and a sister. Jane
Austen's plots, though fundamentally
comic, highlight the dependence of
women on marriage to secure social
standing and economic security.

17.

• Austen brings to light the hardships women faced, who usually did not
inherit money, could not work and their only chance in life depended on the
man they married. She reveals not only the difficulties a woman faced in
her day, but also what was expected of men and of the careers they had to
follow.
• This she does with wit and humour and with endings where all characters,
good or bad, receive exactly what they deserve. Her work brought her little
personal fame and only a few positive reviews during her lifetime, but the
publication in 1869 of her nephew's A Memoir of Jane Austen introduced
her to a wider public, and by the 1940s she had become accepted as a
major writer. Austen's works include Pride and Prejudice (1813), Sense
and Sensibility (1811), and Emma.