CULTURE. 18 TH CENTURY
Fashion and clothes
Rococo Period: 1690 -1770 The beginning of the 18 th century showed promise of many changes in fashion and lifestyle of the English. By this time, the beginning of the Age of Enlightenment, people were veering away from the ponderous though magnificent clothing of the Classical Baroque era and towards a more proletariat stance. The traditions of the classical eras --- the time of the ancient Greeks and Romans --- were much admired by the new free-thinking generation, and influenced their way of dress. Clothes became more relaxed, with a less rigid structure and an emphasis on the natural flow of line and figure.
As English literature headed towards the realms of sentimentality and sensibility, women's fashion reflected the softening of harsh religious and social standards. Gone were the darker, serious colors and whale-bone rigidity; instead, women wore clothing that emphasized "softness, prettiness, and delicacy. " Colors reflected the natural world in soft pastel shades of rose, yellows, pale greens, and light blues. Decorative embroidery and frills served to enhance the lines of the body and soften edges of the dresses.
Art
There was a strong movement during the course of the 18 th century towards a national school - a desire for academies of art where the latent English genius could be nurtured. Until the middle of the century, the walls of the Foundling Hospital supplied a limited venue for artists to exhibit their works, and the Vauxhall pleasure gardens provided another audience. The artists themselves founded the Society of Artists in 1760, which began to hold annual exhibitions open to the public, and in 1768 a breakaway group of artists from this society obtained royal approval for a Royal Academy, which would provide, not only annual exhibitions, but also a school of art.
Literature
In Lyrical Ballads (1798 and 1800), a watershed in literary history, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge presented and illustrated a liberating aesthetic: poetry should express an experience as filtered through personal emotion and imagination; the truest experience was to be found in nature. The concept of the Sublime (возвышенное) strengthened this turn to nature, because in wild countrysides the power of the sublime could be felt most immediately. Wordsworth's romanticism is probably most fully realized in his great autobiographical poem, "The Prelude" (1805– 50). In search of sublime moments, romantic poets wrote about the marvelous and supernatural, the exotic, and the medieval. But they also found beauty in the lives of simple rural people and aspects of the everyday world.
William Wordsworth Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The second generation of romantic poets included John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and George Gordon, Lord Byron. In Keats's great odes, intellectual and emotional sensibility merge in language of great power and beauty. Shelley, who combined soaring lyricism with an apocalyptic political vision, sought more extreme effects and occasionally achieved them. His wife, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, wrote the greatest of the Gothic romances, Frankenstein (1818).
The romantic era was also rich in literary criticism and other nonfictional prose.
Although the great novelist Jane Austen wrote during the romantic era, her work defies classification. With insight, grace, and irony she delineated human relationships within the context of English country life. Sir Walter Scott, Scottish nationalist and romantic, made the genre of the historical novel widely popular. Other novelists of the period were Maria Edgeworth, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, and Thomas Love Peacock, the latter noted for his eccentric novels satirizing the romantics.
Thank you for attention!