The Romantic Period in English Literature

Norton pages 1-21

Typically Romantic Period described as falling between 1785-1830

Social Background: Revolution and Reaction

Revolution in France, America - conservative reaction at home, fear of working class uprisings, influence of revolutionary ideas

  • At home : A turbulent period of change from a primarily agricultural society with land and wealth in the hands of the land-owning aristocracy, to a modern industrial nation, balance of power shifts to large-scale employers and an increasingly frustrated working class
  • Abroad: French Revolution - enthusiastic support from English Liberals at first, then horror at the Reign of Terror, Robespierre, guillotining, French invasion of Germany and the Netherlands, offer to help any country overthrow its government, Napoleon’s emergence as a dictator, then emperor
  • England’s ongoing war with France ends with the defeat of Napoleon at the battle of Waterloo 1815

At home:

  • fear of revolution perhaps - harsh repressive measures,
  • rise of industrialism - mill towns in central and north England (cotton from plantations), new laboring population- factories and pollution
  • enclosures - open fields subdivided - hedge, stone walls
  • laissez-faire government - two class: rich and poor - exploitation of working class
  • landed classes, industrialists, merchants became very rich
  • British Empire most powerful colonial presence in the world
  • Regency Period (1811-1820) lavish display and moral laxity

Women

  • few rights, but first era in which women rivalled men as writers
  • Mary Wollstencroft A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1790)
  • Reform Bill 1832 extended the right to vote - not to women or the working class

Literary Background: Romantic Poets and Novelists

Not self-described Romantics

The Lake School - Wordsworth,Coleridge, Southey

The Cockney School - Hunt, Hazlitt,Keats

The Satanic School - Byron, Shelley etc.

sense of new energy, experimentation, creativity, new ideas inspired by French Revolution

importance of the common man, the emotions, the imagination, new sense of individualism

Poetic Theory

Described by Wordsworth and Coleridge in the Preface to the Lyrical Ballads.

The concept of poetry and the poet

18th c. poetry primarily an imitation of human life.

Wordsworth describes poetry as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”

The source of the poem is not usually in the outer world, but in the individual poets

not external events, but the inner feelings of the author

Lyric poem - expression of poet’s own feelings, written in the first person, became a major romantic form

Poetic Spontaneity and Freedom

poetic spontaneity and freedom - rather than excellence at following rules

emphasis on the free activity of the imagination

the essential role of instinct, intuition, and the feelings of the heart, not just the head.

Coleridge: “Deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep feeling, and all truth is a species of revelation.”

Romantic Nature Poetry

Importance of nature as an impulse to meditation.

Romantic poems habitually endow the landscape with human life, passion and expressiveness – the “objective correlative”

The Glorification of the Ordinary

“to choose incidents and situations from common life”

to use a “selection of language really spoken by men.”

the source and model is “humble and rustic life.”

The supernatural and strangeness in Beauthy

medieval revival

interest in unusual modes of experience

Individualism, infinite striving and nonconformity

high estimation of human potential and power

great 18th century writers typically dealt with men and women as members of an organized and usually an urban society.

Romantic writers often deliberately isolated themselves from society to give scope to their individual vision.

The solitary Romantic nonconformist was sometimes represented as also a great sinner

The Novel

The Gothic Novel

set in gloomy castles of the Middle Ages,

plots based on mystery, terror, supernatural phenomena, sexual persecution

themes: dark, irrational side of human nature beneath controlled conscious mind

Most famous novelists often women: Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Austen, Mary Shelley

Austen’s Northanger Abbey is “mock gothic”

Later 19th Century Gothic: Dracula by Bram Stoker, Oscar Wilde “The Picture of Dorian Gray” R.L. Stevenson Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

The novel of education

Traces the maturation of the key character

Emma, Pride and Prejudice – most of Austen; Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

The political/historical novel

Set in the past, often deals with contemporary political and social problems

Sir Walter Scott: Ivanhoe, The Heart of Midlothian