Hannah Rebecca Mechler

Student ID: 1469198

BA Anglistik Oral Exam

Prof. Dr. Caroline Lusin

11.09.2017

Thesis Paper
Romanticism
William Blake

1. In The Garden of Love, Blake criticises the repression of sexuality and love through the dogmatic rules of
the Church.
2. Blake utilises poetry as a means for social criticism in poems like London and Chimney Sweeper which
address what he perceives to be problematic aspects of the industrial era.

John Keats

3. In Ode To A Nightingale, Keats speaker expresses the Romantic longing for creative imagination and
transcendence.
4. La Belle Dame Sans Merci is an example for the Romantic conception of the supernatural femme fatale.

Mary Robinson
5. In A Letter to the Women of England, on the Injustice of Mental Subordination Robinson expresses her
critical views on the institution of marriage and the role of women in society.
6. In The Haunted Beach, Robinson creates an ambiguous narrative by using Gothic elements such as the
sublime and the uncanny.

Decadence and Aestheticism

Walter Pater

1. In Studies in the History of the Renaissance, Pater argues for the autonomy of art, thereby creating a key text
for the notion of art for arts sake.

Oscar Wilde

2. In the introduction to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Wilde challenges Victorian aesthetics, claiming that there
is no such thing as a moral or immoral book. Books are well written or badly written.
3. Despite claiming that no work of art ever puts forward views, the rebellion against Victorian moralism
and values evident in works such as The Importance of Being Earnest or The Ballad of Reading Gaol
inevitably creates alternative suggestions beneath the layers of irony, exaggeration and artificial language.

Algernon Swinburne

4. Swinburne combined lyrical language and themes not commonly seen as aesthetically pleasing, such as
necrophilia in The Leper or explicit sexuality in Love and Sleep and Anactoria, to create morally
ambiguous poetry challenging the Victorian notion of didacticism as a primary purpose of art and literature.

Ernest Dowson

5. In Amor Profanus, Dowson portrays the disparity between the beauty of an ideal moment, love in this
case, and the despair of its inevitable loss.
6. Further echoing Paters notion of a world of fleeting impressions, Dowsons dichotomized nature imagery
emphasises the contrast between the ideal moment and the lost ideal in poems like Transitions.
References
Campbell, Elizabeth. Before Victoria: Extraordinary Women of the British Romantic Era . Columbia: Columbia
University Press, 2005. 2-21. Print.

Burdett, Carolyn. Aestheticism and Decadence. 15 May 2014. British Library. Discovering Literature: Romantics and
Victorians. 10 September 2017.

Day, Aidan. Romanticism. London: Routledge, 2012. Print.

Denisoff, Dennis. Decadence and Aestheticism. Marshall, Gail. The Cambridge Companion to the Fin de Sicle.
Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 2007. 31-52. Print.

Fox, Paul. Decadences: Morality and Aesthetics in British Literature. Stuttgart: ibidem-Verlag, 2006. Print.

Shiner Wilson, Carol and Joel Haefner. Re-Visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers 1776-1837. Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Print.

Teich, Mikulas and Roy Porter. Fin De Sicle and Its Legacy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Print.