"So, what do you do exactly? You study what?"

I kind of freaked out today about exactly what the Eighteenth Century and Romanticism (my two primary periods) had to do with each other. I want to focus on aesthetics, but I was (and am) having a lot of trouble trying to put together the more Augustan ideas about art (say, Addison) and how that could possibly transition to what seems like hyper-political conceptions of art in the Romantic period (e.g., from my dubious assessment, art in the eighteenth century art is about experiencing pleasure, while for the Romantics, it's like being on LSD. I can explain that better).

Part of the problem, I realized, was that the "transitional period" seemed very vague to me--by 1790, everyone was in a big hoopla about the French Revolution, but that must have come FROM somewhere (and I don't just mean the poverty of the French peasants). I couldn't think of what had been written from say 1770-1790, and when I looked through all my books, it turns out I had SERIOUS misconceptions about who wrote what when. In part, because it's legitimately confusing--Edmund Burke, say, is hardly even contemporary with HIMSELF: Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful, 1757; Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790. What was he doing all that time? Something political, I think.

Anyway, as you can see, I ended up making a timeline. This isn't my "Lists" as such, because on those we usually list all works by one author together. But this timeline, for me at least, is quite enlightening.

Some years of interest, mostly because they amused me:

1784: Samuel Johnson dies; Diderot dies; Charlotte Smith writes like the most ridiculously sad poetry ever, the Elegiac Sonnets (you have to read them to see what I mean). Seems like a sad year all around.

1798: Lyrical Ballads, super important, etc.

1814: Who knew that this year would have so much stuff in it??

Also, the major swell in the 1790s is quite interesting. I like the graphic elements of the timeline (is this something like that thing Moretti does that gets everyone upset?)

And yes, Keats did write basically everything in 1819.


Timeline, 1750-1825

1750: Johnson, beginning of Rambler; Diderot, beginning of Encyclopedie
1751: Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”
1752: Johnson, end of Rambler
1753
1754: Lennox, Female Quixote
1755: Johnson’s Dictionary
1756
1757: Burke, Sublime and Beautiful; Hume, Standard of Taste; Diderot, Entretiens; Blake born
1758: Johnson, beginning of Idler
1759: Sterne, Tristram Shandy; Johnson, Rasselas; Diderot, beginning of Salons
1760: Johnson, end of Idler
1761: Rousseau, Julie ou la nouvelle Heloise
1762
1763
1764: Walpole, Castle of Otranto
1765: Diderot, end of Encyclopedie
1766: Lessing, Laocoon
1767
1768: Sterne, Sentimental Journey; Sterne dies
1769: Reynolds, first of Discourses on Art
1770: Gilpin, Observations River Wye; Goldsmith, The Deserted Village; Wordsworth born
1771: Smollett, Humphrey Clinker
1772: Coleridge born
1773
1774: Goethe, Sorrows of Young Werther
1775
1776: Hume dies
1777
1778: Burney, Evelina; Rousseau dies
1779: Johnson, Lives of the Poets (first part)
1780
1781: Johnson, Lives of the Poets (second part); Diderot, end of Salons
1782: Burney, Cecelia
1783
1784: Johnson dies; Diderot dies; Smith, Elegiac Sonnets
1785: Sade, 120 Days of Sodom; Cowper, The Task
1786: Reynolds, thirteenth of Discourses on Art; Burns, “To a Mouse”, “To a Louse”
1787
1788: Byron born
1789: Burns, “Holy Willie’s Prayer”
1790: Burke, Revolution in France; Kant, Critique of Judgment
1791: Sade, Justine; Inchbald, Simple Story; Radcliffe, Romance of the Forest; Boswell, Johnson
1792: Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman; Shelley born
1793: Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Visions of Daughters of Albion
1794: Radcliffe, Udolpho; Godwin, Caleb Williams; Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience
1795: Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom; Schiller, Aesthetic Education of Man, On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry: Keats born; Boswell dies
1796: Burney, Camilla; Lewis, The Monk
1797: Radcliffe, The Italian; Schlegel, Critical Fragments/Lyceum Fragments; Burke dies; Burns, “A Red, Red Rose”
1798: Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads; Schlegel, beginning of Athenaeum Fragments
1799: Austen, Northanger Abbey (written);
1800: Schlegel, end of Athenaeum Fragments: Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads
1801: Edgeworth, Belinda
1802
1803
1804
1805: Wordsworth, Prelude
1806
1807: Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind
1808: Goethe, first part of Faust
1809
1810
1811: Austen, Sense and Sensibility
1812: Byron, beginning of Childe Harold
1813
1814: Burney, The Wanderer; Austen, Mansfield Park; Wordsworth, The Excursion; Scott, Waverley; Byron, The Corsair, Lara
1815
1816: Austen, Emma; Coleridge, Statesman’s Manual; Shelley, Alastor, “Mont Blanc”
1817: Coleridge, Biographia Literaria; Byron, Manfred
1818: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Byron, end of Childe Harold; Keats, Endymion
1819: Byron, beginning of Don Juan; Keats, Basically Everything
1820: Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, “Ode to the West Wind”; Hegel, Philosophy of Fine Art
1821: De Quincey, Confessions; Shelley, Defence of Poetry (written); Keats dies
1822: Shelley dies
1823
1824: Byron, end of Don Juan; Byron dies
1825