Marxism Vs Neoclassicism

The beginning of the 18th century was marked by the Act of Union in 1707 which brought about tremendous changes in the British society. During this period, crucial changes happened that have modeled and are still influencing the today’s world. Two major parties, the Tories and the Whigs, were shaping the British political scene. The Tories were a party that defended the already established social and ecclesiastical norms. They are known as conservatives, defenders of landownership, while the Whigs are known to be the ones who supported and eventually enabled the foundation of banks, stock markets and credit systems. England became the first country with capitalist economy. The industrial and commercial revolution had deeply affected the British

However, the poets of the time did not call for radical and violent destruction of the current social, political and moral establishment; instead, they led a quiet revolution for promoting the imaginative nature of men.
Through their poetic outbursts, poets provoked feelings of romantic love and mystery, highlighting imagination as a passage through which one must pass in order to find spiritual truth. As for the choice of heroes, the Romantic authors invented more complex characters, each with a unique individuality - quite different from the typical universal types used by the Neoclassical authors.
The order from the Neoclassical period was viewed upon as something which had been artificially imposed to the world. Romanticists perceived world as a chaotic place which may gain its order only by employment of individual imagination. Thus, the world had as many “orders” as there were enthusiastic attempts to employ imagination for the stated cause. To adopt someone else’s order meant failure in the individual imaginative

The “double-ness” of the Byronic hero, his ambitious rise and shameful fall has been used over and over again by modern and post-modern authors. In the well-known story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for example, Robert Louis Stevenson creates a character that is extremely rich and well educated yet insecure and needs to be accepted among high-society in order to boost his ego. His personality, however, being split in two deprives him of the “right” to be happy, because this other persona has extensive sex urges and wishes to live an oblivious and vicious