Romantics, The: Complete Series

Synopsis

A compilation of three programmes exploring ‘The Romantics’.

FROM REVOLUTION TO NATURE - This film traces the ‘birth’ of the individual in modern society. It begins with Jean Jacques Rousseau who understood that civilisation had corrupted people’s morals and that government systems had suppressed the liberty of individuals. His words were seen as a threat to the long-established monarchies of Europe. His books were burned in France and he fled to London, where he was ridiculed. But Rousseau’s single thought had set a powerful idea in motion. It inspired the writer Thomas Paine, whose pamphlet Common Sense roused the people of the New World. The idea spread and went on to inspire writers like William Blake, Williams Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge to champion individual liberty, protest and democracy in Europe.

FROM NATURE TO TRANSCENDENCE - Looks at how the modern notion of Nature developed. After the chaos of the French Revolution, the concept of liberty became associated with the natural world rather than political events. And Jean Jacques Rousseau’s theories about Nature dismissed earlier ‘civilised’ trends of picturesque vistas and landscaped parks. The Romantics were fascinated by the power of wild nature. The work of German painter Caspar David Friedrich portrayed a world of lonely figures, wandering over mountains shrouded in mists. And Wordsworth and the painter Turner conveyed the sublime power of the natural world in their studies of the Lake District. But as industry and science sought to harness that same power, the ideas of the child, nature and scientific progress would collide in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. A Romantic manifesto, the novel declares that children are sacred and need unconditional love. It also warns that nature is not to be trifled with or corrupted by science.

FROM TRANSCENDENCE TO OBLIVION - As the Romantic period blossomed, there was great progress in medical science, with a new understanding of the central nervous system, and of digestion and respiration. But the scientists treated the human body as a mechanism while the Romantics were interested in the spirit; the ghost in the machine. In seeking to transcend the ordinary world, poets and painters explored the landscape of the human mind with results that were decades ahead of the scientific researchers. Taking ever more daring journeys to the limits of the human imagination, some of the Romantics succumbed to addiction Coleridge’s dream of Kubla Khan, for instance, was induced by Opium. Other artists were the first to explore the relationship between genius and madness. Goya and Gericault painted the inmates of lunatic asylums, and the poet John Clare wrote some of his greatest works while he was an inmate at an asylum. For a whole new generation, the Romantic idea of transcendence became a religion in itself. Lord Byron’s celebrity gave him a mythological status in his own lifetime, which continues to some extent to this day. Percy Shelley was expelled from Oxford University for writing a paper on Atheism, and the desire to shed matter and form and to reach a state of pure sprit. After the tragic death of his young friend John Keats, he wrote Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats in which he describes the poet’s sensitive spirit, too fragile for earthly existence. Shelley himself died in a sailing accident three years later. His friend Lord Byron burnt his body on an Italian beach but his heart wouldn’t burn the poet had finally taken on true Romantic form. His wife Mary kept the heart and at her death, it was discovered in a box, wrapped in a manuscript of Adonais.

Language

English

Country

Great Britain

Year of release

2006

Year of production

2006

Subjects

Arts and Humanities; History; Philosophy

Keywords

Blake, William; Clare, John; Coleridge, Samuel Taylor; history of medicine; individuality; literature; Romantic movement; Rousseau, Jean-Jacques; social history; Wordsworth, William (1770-1850); nature

Credits

Contributor

Peter Ackroyd

Distribution Formats

Type

DVD

Format

Region 2 PAL

Price

£15.00

Availability

Sale

Duration/Size

180 minutes

Year

2012

Type

VHS

Format

PAL

Price

£34.99

Availability

Sale

Duration/Size

180 minutes

Year

2006

Production Company

Name

Open University Production Centre

Distributor

Name

Open University Worldwide

Web

http://www.ouw.co.uk External site opens in new window

Phone

+44 (0) 1908 274066

Address

Walton Hall
Milton Keynes
MK7 6AA

Notes

NB. As of May 2016 Open University Worldwide are no longer distributing DVDs. They have posted this message on their website: ‘Unfortunately Open University Worldwide Limited has decided that product sales are no longer viable given the reduced funding to Higher Education institutions and diminishing demand for the products we have traditionally stocked. At present the Open University Students Association (OUSA) will continue to sell the "Good Study Guide", and we are in discussion with other possible distributors to continue to make The Open University’s products available for purchase. As soon as we have any information on other channels of distribution we will update this notice’. Some products are still available via second hand dealers on Amazon.co.uk