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Giveaway Contest: To celebrate 2020, we’re giving away twenty paperback classics featuring Truman Capote, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, John Steinbeck, Agatha Christie, and others! Won’t this collection look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will choose a random winner on February 29, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, we’ll ship to any country. Easy, right? Good luck!

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me: *gets touched by random wave of sadness*

me: so, this is what poets of Romanticism felt

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“orphic”

— (ˈɔr fɪk), adjective | Categorized as something deeply mysterious, orphic encompasses anything which is enchanting, subliminal and beyond human comprehension. (via niimph)

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Giveaway Contest: We’re giving away fifteen paperback classics that were hand-picked by you! Won’t this collection look lovely on your shelf? :D To win these classics, you must: 1) be following macrolit on Tumblr (yes, we will check. :P), and 2) reblog this post. We will choose a random winner on December 29, at which time we’ll start a new giveaway. And yes, we’ll ship to any country. Easy, right? Good luck!

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literature meme [2/8 plays]

Doctor Faustus (The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus), Christopher Marlowe

Faustus is a brilliant but embittered scholar who has exhausted the confines of human knowledge. Frustrated with the futility of his academic pursuits he is desperate for a deeper understanding of the universe. Therefore, he conjures the demon Mephistopheles and asks him to strike a deal with the Devil. Faustus gets twenty-four years of infinite knowledge and power in exchange for his soul, which will spend an eternity in hell once his time is up.

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The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli

“She was there, lifeless and inanimate, thrown across the bed, her head hanging down, and her pale and distorted features half covered by hair.”

 - Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

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Romanticist Literature

A reaction to rationalism and the mechanist impersonality of the industrial revolution. 

Logic is servant, not master, claims that under neo-classicism “The mind is reduced to state of almost savage torpor” (William Wordsworth)

Ideals:

Imagination, intuition, freedom, exuberance, spontaneity, nature, the individual, ancient, exotic and spirituality. 

Condemns the establishment - antiestablishment (religion, aristocracy, patriarchy)

Passion, progressivism, imagination, vision, nature, the sublime, subjectivity, emotion, idealised views

Revolting against classical and neo-classical ideals.

Embrace the ordinary, but pursue the sublime. 

Liberalism and radicalism.

Carpe Diem (seize the day)

Sensibility “the quality of being able to appreciate and respond to complex emotional or aesthetic influence”

Jean Jaques Rosseau (father of romanticism) 

Promoted: Passion, spontaneity, natural development and fair treatment of those less fortunate within society.

Opposed: Rules of social politeness, acquisition of property and domination of man.

The Big Five Romanticist Poets John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, William Blake and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Examples

Holy Thursday, Songs of Innocence, by William Blake

Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley

“Holy Thursday”, by progressive protest poet William Blake and “Ozymandias”, by Romanticist poet Percy Bysshe Shelley both condemn the neoclassical ideals of elitism, power and the Establishment, whilst Ozymandias also reflects the Romantic ideals of emotional expression and the portrayal of the natural sublime.

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shakespeare plays: Othello

So will I turn her virtue into pitch, And out of her own goodness make the net That shall enmesh them all. 

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I am not what I am

William Shakespeare, Othello

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O, by aspiring pride and insolence, For which God threw him from the face of heaven

Christopher Marlow, Doctor Faustus

The dramatic tragedy convention of hamartia, first appearing in Aristotle’s Poetics, is also known as a character’s fatal flaw, the turning point which leads to the downfall of their previously good fortune. Like Icarus who flew too close to the sun, and Lucifer, who would not bow to mankind, Faustus’ excessive pride in the face of powers too great for him to understand was his ultimate downfall.

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It would be easy to be clever And tell the stones: Men hate to die And have stopped dying now forever. I think they would believe the lie.

Robert Frost, In a Disused Graveyard 

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William Blake utilises religious imagery to demonstrate the consequences of children standing together with a single voice. “They raise to heaven the voice of song / Or like harmonious thunderings the seat of heaven among”. The speaker establishes the immense, potential power of the young and weak if they were to stand together and “sing” as one, as enough to rise them to heaven above.

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Each morning they will launder, for their sin sheets soiled by other bodies, and at night angels will wrestle them with brutish vigour.

Gwen Harwood, Home of Mercy

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'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

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⎨Literature Edits⎬→ The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson 

“Man is not truly one, but truly two.” 

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And further still at an unearthly height, One luminary clock against the sky Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.

Robert Frost, Acquainted With The Night

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It’s how I fill the time when nothing’s happening. Thinking too much, flirting with melancholy.

Tim Winton, Breath