Lecture 15.

Romanticism literature

LESSON PLAN

Topic: Romanticism literature

Level: advanced
Objectives: to give information on Theoretical foundations and peculiarities of romanticism,
sources and forms of romanticism in German literature. The works of the Brothers Grimm and
Goffman. The role of Byron and Shelley in English Romanticism. The issue of individual
freedom and the freedom of the people in Byron's work. The work of V. Hugo and J. Sand in
French literature. The theme of national liberation in the works of V. Hugo. American
Romanticism Literature. F. Cooper is the founder of the historical novel. The reflection of
romanticism on a historical basis. The importance of romanticism in world literature.

Time: 80 minute
Materials: Text book handouts, board and a computer, video-projector
Pre-stage.
Warm up:
Objectives: to prepare students for the lesson, to build interest in the topic of the
lesson and activate Students’ background knowledge
Time: 10 minutes
Materials: text –book ,board and the chalk
Mode of interaction: whole class
While-stage.
Objective: To present the material of the lecture by power point presentation.
Time: 50 minutes.
Materials: Video-projector, board.
Mode of interaction: Whole class.
Post-stage.
Objectives: To check the students’ understanding of the lecture material.
Time: 15 minutes
Material: Video-projector, board
Mode of interaction: whole class.
Summary.
Time: 5 minutes
The teacher gives the tasks to prepare for the upcoming seminar.

Key words and word combinations:

Romanticism
a movement in the arts and literature that originated in the late 18th century, emphasizing
inspiration, subjectivity, and the primacy of the individual.
Vernacular
(of language) spoken as one's mother tongue; not learned or imposed as a second language.
rationalism.
In philosophy, rationalism is the epistemological view that "regards reason as the chief source
and test of knowledge" or "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or
justification".
Pseudonym
a fictitious name, especially one used by an author.
Decorum
behaviour in keeping with good taste and propriety.
Manuscript
a book, document, or piece of music written by hand rather than typed or printed.
theology
the study of religious faith, practice, and experience especially : the study of God and of God's
relation to the world.

Lecture-15
Romanticism (also the Romantic era or the Romantic period) is an artistic, literary, and
intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century and was at its
peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850.
Romanticism is characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism as well as
glorification of all the past and nature, preferring the medieval rather than the classical. It is a
reaction to the ideas of the Industrial Revolution, the aristocratic social and political norms of the
Age of Enlightenment, and the scientific rationalization of nature.
The meaning of romanticism has changed with time. In the 17th century, “romantic” meant
imaginative or fictitious due to the birth of a new literary genre : the novel. Novels, that is to say
texts of fiction, were written in vernacular (romance languages), as opposed to religious texts
written in Latin.
In the 18th century, romanticism is eclipsed by the Age of Enlightenment, where everything is
perceived through the prism of science and reason.
In the 19th century, “romantic” means sentimental : lyricism and the expression of personal
emotions are emphasized. Feelings and sentiments are very much present in romantic works.
Thus, so many things are called romantic that it is difficult to see the common points between the
novels by Victor Hugo, the paintings by Eugène Delacroix or the music by Ludwig Von
Beethoven.
The early years of German Romanticism have been aptly termed the theoretical phase of a
movement whose origin can be traced back to the Sturm und Drang era and, beyond Germany
itself, to the French philosopher and writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau. An interest in individual
liberty and in nature as a source of poetic inspiration is a common thread in the sequence of the
movements Sturm und Drang, Weimar Classicism, and Romanticism, which from one
perspective can be regarded as separate phases in a single literary development. Within this
framework, the German Romantics forged a distinctive new synthesis of poetry, philosophy, and
science. Two generations of Romantic writers are usually distinguished: the older group,
composed in part of Ludwig Tieck, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Novalis, Friedrich
Schleiermacher, and Friedrich and August Wilhelm von Schlegel; and the younger group,
comprising Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, Joseph Eichendorff, Wilhelm and Jakob
Grimm, and the painter Philipp Otto Runge.
Arguably, German literature holds less than its deserved status in world literature in part because
the lyrical qualities...
The French Revolution (1787–99) had had a decisive impact on German Romantic writers and
thinkers. The Napoleonic Wars, beginning in 1792 and ending with the Congress of Vienna in
1814–15, brought much suffering and ultimately led to a major restructuring of Germany. The
upheavals of this period gave rise to a new desire for a uniquely German cultural movement that
would explicitly oppose French rationalism.
German Idealist philosophy played an important role in the genesis of Romanticism, which saw
itself as grappling with a crisis in human subjectivity and laying the foundation for a new
synthesis of mental and physical reality. The first step was taken by Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s
Wissenschaftslehre (1794; “Science of Knowledge”), which defined the subject (“Ich,” or “I”) in
terms of its relation to the object-world (“Nicht-Ich,” or “Not-I”). Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von
Schelling’s Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur (1797; Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature)
posited a reciprocal relationship between nature and mind: his famous formulation “Nature is
unconscious mind, mind is unconscious nature” forms the groundwork for a great deal of
German Romantic literature. Friedrich von Schlegel’s philosophical writings continued this line
of thinking by reevaluating the role of creative imagination in human life. Poetry—the
Romantics’ term for all forms of creative writing—was an anticipation of a future harmony in
which all forms of conflict would be resolved in a vast productive unity. Adapting Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s dialectic (a posited interaction of opposite ideas leading to a
synthesis), Schlegel developed his key concept of “irony,” by which he meant a form of thinking
or writing that included its own self-reflection and self-critique. Ironic poetry, in Schlegel’s
view, was a two-track form of literature in which a naive or immediate perception of reality is
accompanied by a more sophisticated critical reflection upon it.
The Romantic writer Novalis (the pseudonym of Friedrich Leopold, Baron von Hardenberg) put
Schlegel’s theory of irony into practice in his unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802;
Henry of Ofterdingen), which depicts the development of a naive young man who is destined to
become a poet. Heinrich’s untutored responses to experience are juxtaposed with a sequence of
inset narratives that culminate in an allegorical “fairy tale” that was to be followed, according to
the author’s notes, by the depiction of an “astral” counterreality. Each successive stage of the
novel was to move toward a higher and more complex understanding of the world.
Many of the German Romantics drew heavily on contemporary science, notably on Gotthilf
Heinrich Schubert’s Ansichten von der Nachtseite der Naturwissenschaften (1808; “Views about
the Night Side of Science”). In contrast to the Enlightenment, the Romantic Movement
reevaluated the power of rational thinking, preferring instead more intuitive modes of thought
such as dreams (in Schubert’s terms, the “night side” as opposed to the “day side” of reality). In
many ways, the German Romantics can be seen as anticipating Sigmund Freud in their emphasis
on the pervasive influence of the unconscious in human motivation. Characteristic Romantic
motifs such as night, moonlight, dreams, hallucinations, inchoate longings, and a melancholic
sense of lack or loss are direct reflections of this interest in the unconscious.
According to the Romantics, some minds are particularly adapted to discern the hidden workings
of nature. Poets, they believed, possess the faculty of hearing the “voice of nature” and
transposing it into human language. Lyric poetry was a dominant genre throughout the period,
with Ludwig Tieck, Joseph Eichendorff, and Clemens Brentano as its major practitioners. Folk
traditions such as the fairy tale, ballad, and folk song were also seen as ways of gaining access to
preconscious modes of thought. Fairy tales and folk poetry were the object of quasi-scholarly
collections such as the Kinder- und Hausmärchen (1812–15; “Children’s and Household
Stories,” commonly known as Grimm’s Fairy Tales), assembled by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm,
and the poetry anthology Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1805–08; “The Boy’s Magic Horn”), edited
by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano. At the same time, these genres were also much
imitated, as in Ludwig Tieck’s sophisticated “art fairy tale” Der blonde Eckbert (1797; “Blond
Eckbert”). The Romantics were also intensely interested in the Middle Ages, which they saw as a
simpler and more integrated time that could become a model for the new political, social, and
religious unity they were seeking. Novalis’s essay “Die Christenheit oder Europa” (1799;
“Christendom or Europe”) expressed this view.
As the Romantic Movement unfolded, its writers became increasingly aware of the tenuous
nature of the synthesis they were attempting to establish, and they felt wracked by a sense of
irreconcilable dualism. Later Romanticism is perhaps best exemplified by E.T.A. Hoffmann,
whose best-known tales, such as Der goldne Topf (1814; The Golden Pot) and Der Sandmann
(1816; The Sandman), turn upon a tension between an everyday or philistine world and the
seemingly crazed mental projections of creative genius. The poetry of Heinrich Heine, with its
simultaneous expression and critique of Romantic sentiment, is also characteristic of this later
phase of the movement; indeed, Heine is best seen as a transitional figure who emerged from late
Romanticism but had his most decisive influence during the 1830s. His essay “Die Romantische
Schule” (1833–35; “The Romantic School”) presented a critique of Romanticism’s tendency to
look to the medieval past.
As a term to cover the most distinctive writers who flourished in the last years of the 18th
century and the first decades of the 19th, “Romantic” is indispensable but also a little
misleading: there was no self-styled “Romantic movement” at the time, and the great writers of
the period did not call themselves Romantics. Not until August Wilhelm von Schlegel’s Vienna
lectures of 1808–09 was a clear distinction established between the “organic,” “plastic” qualities
of Romantic art and the “mechanical” character of Classicism.
Many of the age’s foremost writers thought that something new was happening in the world’s
affairs, nevertheless. William Blake’s affirmation in 1793 that “a new heaven is begun” was
matched a generation later by Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “The world’s great age begins anew.”
“These, these will give the world another heart, / And other pulses,” wrote John Keats, referring
to Leigh Hunt and William Wordsworth. Fresh ideals came to the fore; in particular, the ideal of
freedom, long cherished in England, was being extended to every range of human endeavour. As
that ideal swept through Europe, it became natural to believe that the age of tyrants might soon
end.
The most notable feature of the poetry of the time is the new role of individual thought and
personal feeling. Where the main trend of 18th-century poetics had been to praise the general, to
see the poet as a spokesman of society addressing a cultivated and homogeneous audience and
having as his end the conveyance of “truth,” the Romantics found the source of poetry in the
particular, unique experience. Blake’s marginal comment on Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Discourses
expresses the position with characteristic vehemence: “To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To
Particularize is the alone Distinction of Merit.” The poet was seen as an individual distinguished
from his fellows by the intensity of his perceptions, taking as his basic subject matter the
workings of his own mind. Poetry was regarded as conveying its own truth; sincerity was the
criterion by which it was to be judged.
The emphasis on feeling—seen perhaps at its finest in the poems of Robert Burns—was in some
ways a continuation of the earlier “cult of sensibility”; and it is worth remembering that
Alexander Pope praised his father as having known no language but the language of the heart.
But feeling had begun to receive particular emphasis and is found in most of the Romantic
definitions of poetry. Wordsworth called poetry “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,”
and in 1833 John Stuart Mill defined poetry as “feeling itself, employing thought only as the
medium of its utterance.” It followed that the best poetry was that in which the greatest intensity
of feeling was expressed, and hence a new importance was attached to the lyric. Another key
quality of Romantic writing was its shift from the mimetic, or imitative, assumptions of the
Neoclassical era to a new stress on imagination. Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw the imagination as
the supreme poetic quality, a quasi-divine creative force that made the poet a godlike being.
Samuel Johnson had seen the components of poetry as “invention, imagination and judgement,”
but Blake wrote: “One Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination, the Divine Vision.” The poets of
this period accordingly placed great emphasis on the workings of the unconscious mind, on
dreams and reveries, on the supernatural, and on the childlike or primitive view of the world, this
last being regarded as valuable because its clarity and intensity had not been overlaid by the
restrictions of civilized “reason.” Rousseau’s sentimental conception of the “noble savage” was
often invoked, and often by those who were ignorant that the phrase is Dryden’s or that the type
was adumbrated in the “poor Indian” of Pope’s An Essay on Man. A further sign of the
diminished stress placed on judgment is the Romantic attitude to form: if poetry must be
spontaneous, sincere, intense, it should be fashioned primarily according to the dictates of the
creative imagination. Wordsworth advised a young poet, “You feel strongly; trust to those
feelings, and your poem will take its shape and proportions as a tree does from the vital principle
that actuates it.” This organic view of poetry is opposed to the classical theory of “genres,” each
with its own linguistic decorum; and it led to the feeling that poetic sublimity was unattainable
except in short passages.
Hand in hand with the new conception of poetry and the insistence on a new subject matter went
a demand for new ways of writing. Wordsworth and his followers, particularly Keats, found the
prevailing poetic diction of the late 18th century stale and stilted, or “gaudy and inane,” and
totally unsuited to the expression of their perceptions. It could not be, for them, the language of
feeling, and Wordsworth accordingly sought to bring the language of poetry back to that of
common speech. Wordsworth’s own diction, however, often differs from his theory.
Nevertheless, when he published his preface to Lyrical Ballads in 1800, the time was ripe for a
change: the flexible diction of earlier 18th-century poetry had hardened into a merely
conventional language.
Poetry
Blake, Wordsworth, and Coleridge
Useful as it is to trace the common elements in Romantic poetry, there was little conformity
among the poets themselves. It is misleading to read the poetry of the first Romantics as if it had
been written primarily to express their feelings. Their concern was rather to change the
intellectual climate of the age. William Blake had been dissatisfied since boyhood with the
current state of poetry and what he considered the irreligious drabness of contemporary thought.
His early development of a protective shield of mocking humour with which to face a world in
which science had become trifling and art inconsequential is visible in the satirical An Island in
the Moon (written c. 1784–85); he then took the bolder step of setting aside sophistication in the
visionary Songs of Innocence (1789). His desire for renewal encouraged him to view the
outbreak of the French Revolution as a momentous event. In works such as The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell (1790–93) and Songs of Experience (1794), he attacked the hypocrisies of the
age and the impersonal cruelties resulting from the dominance of analytic reason in
contemporary thought. As it became clear that the ideals of the Revolution were not likely to be
realized in his time, he renewed his efforts to revise his contemporaries’ view of the universe and
to construct a new mythology centred not in the God of the Bible but in Urizen, a repressive
figure of reason and law whom he believed to be the deity actually worshipped by his
contemporaries. The story of Urizen’s rise was set out in The First Book of Urizen (1794) and
then, more ambitiously, in the unfinished manuscript Vala (later redrafted as The Four Zoas),
written from about 1796 to about 1807.
Pity by William Blake
Pity by William Blake
Pity, colour print finished in pen and watercolour by William Blake, 1795; in the Tate Gallery,
London.
Tate Gallery, London/Art Resource, New York
Blake developed these ideas in the visionary narratives of Milton (1804–08) and Jerusalem
(1804–20). Here, still using his own mythological characters, he portrayed the imaginative artist
as the hero of society and suggested the possibility of redemption from the fallen (or Urizenic)
condition.
William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, meanwhile, were also exploring the
implications of the French Revolution. Wordsworth, who lived in France in 1791–92 and
fathered an illegitimate child there, was distressed when, soon after his return, Britain declared
war on the republic, dividing his allegiance. For the rest of his career, he was to brood on those
events, trying to develop a view of humanity that would be faithful to his twin sense of the
pathos of individual human fates and the unrealized potentialities in humanity as a whole. The
first factor emerges in his early manuscript poems “The Ruined Cottage” and “The Pedlar” (both
to form part of the later Excursion); the second was developed from 1797, when he and his sister,
Dorothy, with whom he was living in the west of England, were in close contact with Coleridge.
Stirred simultaneously by Dorothy’s immediacy of feeling, manifested everywhere in her
Journals (written 1798–1803, published 1897), and by Coleridge’s imaginative and speculative
genius, he produced the poems collected in Lyrical Ballads (1798). The volume began with
Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” continued with poems displaying delight in the
powers of nature and the humane instincts of ordinary people, and concluded with the meditative
“Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth’s attempt to set out his mature
faith in nature and humanity.
His investigation of the relationship between nature and the human mind continued in the long
autobiographical poem addressed to Coleridge and later titled The Prelude (1798–99 in two
books; 1804 in five books; 1805 in 13 books; revised continuously and published posthumously,
1850). Here he traced the value for a poet of having been a child “fostered alike by beauty and
by fear” by an upbringing in sublime surroundings. The Prelude constitutes the most significant
English expression of the Romantic discovery of the self as a topic for art and literature. The
poem also makes much of the work of memory, a theme explored as well in the “Ode:
Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.” In poems such as “Michael”
and “The Brothers,” by contrast, written for the second volume of Lyrical Ballads (1800),
Wordsworth dwelt on the pathos and potentialities of ordinary lives.
Coleridge’s poetic development during these years paralleled Wordsworth’s. Having briefly
brought together images of nature and the mind in “The Eolian Harp” (1796), he devoted himself
to more-public concerns in poems of political and social prophecy, such as “Religious Musings”
and “The Destiny of Nations.” Becoming disillusioned in 1798 with his earlier politics, however,
and encouraged by Wordsworth, he turned back to the relationship between nature and the
human mind. Poems such as “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison,” “The Nightingale,” and “Frost
at Midnight” (now sometimes called the “conversation poems” but collected by Coleridge
himself as “Meditative Poems in Blank Verse”) combine sensitive descriptions of nature with
subtlety of psychological comment. “Kubla Khan” (1797 or 1798, published 1816), a poem that
Coleridge said came to him in “a kind of Reverie,” represented a new kind of exotic writing,
which he also exploited in the supernaturalism of “The Ancient Mariner” and the unfinished
“Christabel.” After his visit to Germany in 1798–99, he renewed attention to the links between
the subtler forces in nature and the human psyche; this attention bore fruit in letters, notebooks,
literary criticism, theology, and philosophy. Simultaneously, his poetic output became sporadic.
“Dejection: An Ode” (1802), another meditative poem, which first took shape as a verse letter to
Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth’s sister-in-law, memorably describes the suspension of his
“shaping spirit of Imagination.”
The work of both poets was directed back to national affairs during these years by the rise of
Napoleon. In 1802 Wordsworth dedicated a number of sonnets to the patriotic cause. The death
in 1805 of his brother John, who was a captain in the merchant navy, was a grim reminder that,
while he had been living in retirement as a poet, others had been willing to sacrifice themselves.
From this time the theme of duty was to be prominent in his poetry. His political essay
Concerning the Relations of Great Britain, Spain and Portugal…as Affected by the Convention
of Cintra (1809) agreed with Coleridge’s periodical The Friend (1809–10) in deploring the
decline of principle among statesmen. When The Excursion appeared in 1814 (the time of
Napoleon’s first exile), Wordsworth announced the poem as the central section of a longer
projected work, The Recluse, “a philosophical Poem, containing views of Man, Nature, and
Society.” The plan was not fulfilled, however, and The Excursion was left to stand in its own
right as a poem of moral and religious consolation for those who had been disappointed by the
failure of French revolutionary ideals.
Both Wordsworth and Coleridge benefited from the advent in 1811 of the Regency, which
brought a renewed interest in the arts. Coleridge’s lectures on Shakespeare became fashionable,
his play Remorse was briefly produced, and his volume of poems Christabel; Kubla Khan: A
Vision; The Pains of Sleep was published in 1816. Biographia Literaria (1817), an account of his
own development, combined philosophy and literary criticism in a new way and made an
enduring and important contribution to literary theory. Coleridge settled at Highgate in 1816, and
he was sought there as “the most impressive talker of his age” (in the words of the essayist
William Hazlitt). His later religious writings made a considerable impact on Victorian readers.
Other poets of the early Romantic period
In his own lifetime, Blake’s poetry was scarcely known. Sir Walter Scott, by contrast, was
thought of as a major poet for his vigorous and evocative verse narratives The Lay of the Last
Minstrel (1805) and Marmion (1808). Other verse writers were also highly esteemed. The
Elegiac Sonnets (1784) of Charlotte Smith and the Fourteen Sonnets (1789) of William Lisle
Bowles were received with enthusiasm by Coleridge. Thomas Campbell is now chiefly
remembered for his patriotic lyrics such as “Ye Mariners of England” and “The Battle of
Hohenlinden” (1807) and for the critical preface to his Specimens of the British Poets (1819);
Samuel Rogers was known for his brilliant table talk (published 1856, after his death, as
Recollections of the Table-Talk of Samuel Rogers), as well as for his exquisite but exiguous
poetry. Another admired poet of the day was Thomas Moore, whose Irish Melodies began to
appear in 1808. His highly coloured narrative Lalla Rookh: An Oriental Romance (1817) and his
satirical poetry were also immensely popular. Charlotte Smith was not the only significant
woman poet in this period. Helen Maria Williams’s Poems (1786), Ann Batten Cristall’s Poetical
Sketches (1795), Mary Robinson’s Sappho and Phaon (1796), and Mary Tighe’s Psyche (1805)
all contain notable work.
Robert Southey was closely associated with Wordsworth and Coleridge and was looked upon as
a prominent member, with them, of the “Lake school” of poetry. His originality is best seen in
his ballads and his nine “English Eclogues,” three of which were first published in the 1799
volume of his Poems with a prologue explaining that these verse sketches of contemporary life
bore “no resemblance to any poems in our language.” His “Oriental” narrative poems Thalaba
the Destroyer (1801) and The Curse of Kehama (1810) were successful in their own time, but his
fame is based on his prose work—the Life of Nelson (1813), the History of the Peninsular War
(1823–32), and his classic formulation of the children’s tale “The Three Bears.”
George Crabbe wrote poetry of another kind: his sensibility, his values, much of his diction, and
his heroic couplet verse form belong to the 18th century. He differs from the earlier Augustans,
however, in his subject matter, concentrating on realistic, unsentimental accounts of the life of
the poor and the middle classes. He shows considerable narrative gifts in his collections of verse
tales (in which he anticipates many short-story techniques) and great powers of description. His
antipastoral The Village appeared in 1783. After a long silence, he returned to poetry with The
Parish Register (1807), The Borough (1810), Tales in Verse (1812), and Tales of the Hall (1819),
which gained him great popularity in the early 19th century.
The later Romantics: Shelley, Keats, and Byron
The poets of the next generation shared their predecessors’ passion for liberty (now set in a new
perspective by the Napoleonic Wars) and were in a position to learn from their experiments.
Percy Bysshe Shelley in particular was deeply interested in politics, coming early under the spell
of the anarchist views of William Godwin, whose Enquiry Concerning Political Justice had
appeared in 1793. Shelley’s revolutionary ardour caused him to claim in his critical essay “A
Defence of Poetry” (1821, published 1840) that “the most unfailing herald, companion, and
follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution,
is poetry,” and that poets are “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” This fervour burns
throughout the early Queen Mab (1813), the long Laon and Cythna (retitled The Revolt of Islam,
1818), and the lyrical drama Prometheus Unbound (1820). Shelley saw himself at once as poet
and prophet, as the fine “Ode to the West Wind” (1819) makes clear. Despite his grasp of
practical politics, however, it is a mistake to look for concreteness in his poetry, where his
concern is with subtleties of perception and with the underlying forces of nature: his most
characteristic images are of sky and weather, of lights and fires. His poetic stance invites the
reader to respond with similar outgoing aspiration. It adheres to the Rousseauistic belief in an
underlying spirit in individuals, one truer to human nature itself than the behaviour evinced and
approved by society. In that sense his material is transcendental and cosmic and his expression
thoroughly appropriate. Possessed of great technical brilliance, he is, at his best, a poet of
excitement and power.
John Keats, by contrast, was a poet so sensuous and physically specific that his early work, such
as Endymion (1818), could produce an over-luxuriant, cloying effect. As the program set out in
his early poem “Sleep and Poetry” shows, however, Keats was determined to discipline himself:
even before February 1820, when he first began to cough blood, he may have known that he had
not long to live, and he devoted himself to the expression of his vision with feverish intensity. He
experimented with many kinds of poems: “Isabella” (published 1820), an adaptation of a tale by
Giovanni Boccaccio, is a tour de force of craftsmanship in its attempt to reproduce a medieval
atmosphere and at the same time a poem involved in contemporary politics. His epic fragment
Hyperion (begun in 1818 and abandoned, published 1820; later begun again and published
posthumously as The Fall of Hyperion in 1856) has a new spareness of imagery, but Keats soon
found the style too Miltonic and decided to give himself up to what he called “other sensations.”
Some of these “other sensations” are found in the poems of 1819, Keats’s annus mirabilis: “The
Eve of St. Agnes” and the great odes “To a Nightingale,” “On a Grecian Urn,” and “To
Autumn.” These, with the Hyperion poems, represent the summit of Keats’s achievement,
showing what has been called “the disciplining of sensation into symbolic meaning,” the
complex themes being handled with a concrete richness of detail. His superb letters show the full
range of the intelligence at work in his poetry.
George Gordon, Lord Byron, who differed from Shelley and Keats in themes and manner, was at
one with them in reflecting their shift toward “Mediterranean” topics. Having thrown down the
gauntlet in his early poem English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (1809), in which he directed
particular scorn at poets of sensibility and declared his own allegiance to Milton, Dryden, and
Pope, he developed a poetry of dash and flair, in many cases with a striking hero. His two
longest poems, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–18) and Don Juan (1819–24), his masterpiece,
provided alternative personae for himself, the one a bitter and melancholy exile among the
historic sites of Europe, the other a picaresque adventurer enjoying a series of amorous
adventures. The gloomy and misanthropic vein was further mined in dramatic poems such as
Manfred (1817) and Cain (1821), which helped to secure his reputation in Europe, but he is now
remembered best for witty, ironic, and less portentous writings, such as Beppo (1818), in which
he first used the ottava rima form. The easy, nonchalant, biting style developed there became a
formidable device in Don Juan and in his satire on Southey, The Vision of Judgment (1822).
Other poets of the later period
John Clare, a Northamptonshire man of humble background, achieved early success with Poems
Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery (1820), The Village Minstrel (1821), and The Shepherd’s
Calendar (1827). Both his reputation and his mental health collapsed in the late 1830s. He spent
the later years of his life in an asylum in Northampton; the poetry he wrote there was
rediscovered in the 20th century. His natural simplicity and lucidity of diction, his intent
observation, his almost Classical poise, and the unassuming dignity of his attitude to life make
him one of the most quietly moving of English poets. Thomas Lovell Beddoes, whose violent
imagery and obsession with death and the macabre recall the Jacobean dramatists, represents an
imagination at the opposite pole; metrical virtuosity is displayed in the songs and lyrical
passages from his over-sensational tragedy Death’s Jest-Book (begun 1825; published
posthumously, 1850). Another minor writer who found inspiration in the 17th century was
George Darley, some of whose songs from Nepenthe (1835) keep their place in anthologies. The
comic writer Thomas Hood also wrote poems of social protest, such as “The Song of the Shirt”
(1843) and “The Bridge of Sighs,” as well as the graceful Plea of the Midsummer Fairies (1827).
Felicia Hemans’s best-remembered poem, “Casabianca,” appeared in her volume The Forest
Sanctuary (1825). This was followed in 1828 by the more substantial Records of Woman.
The novel: from the Gothic novel to Austen and Scott
Flourishing as a form of entertainment during the Romantic period, the novel underwent several
important developments in this period. One was the invention of the Gothic novel. Another was
the appearance of a politically engaged fiction in the years immediately before the French
Revolution. A third was the rise of women writers to prominence in prose fiction.
The sentimental tradition of Richardson and Sterne persisted until the 1790s with Henry
Brooke’s The Fool of Quality (1765–70), Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771), and
Charles Lamb’s A Tale of Rosamund Gray and Old Blind Margaret (1798). Novels of this kind
were, however, increasingly mocked by critics in the later years of the 18th century.
The comic realism of Fielding and Smollett continued in a more sporadic way. John Moore gave
a cosmopolitan flavour to the worldly wisdom of his predecessors in Zeluco (1786) and
Mordaunt (1800). Fanny Burney carried the comic realist manner into the field of female
experience with the novels Evelina (1778), Cecilia (1782), and Camilla (1796). Her discovery of
the comic and didactic potential of a plot charting a woman’s progress from the nursery to the
altar would be important for several generations of female novelists.
More striking than these continuations of previous modes, however, was Horace Walpole’s
invention, in The Castle of Otranto (1764), of what became known as the Gothic novel.
Walpole’s intention was to “blend” the fantastic plot of “ancient romance” with the realistic
characterization of “modern” (or novel) romance. Characters would respond with terror to
extraordinary events, and readers would vicariously participate. Walpole’s innovation was not
significantly imitated until the 1790s, when—perhaps because the violence of the French
Revolution created a taste for a correspondingly extreme mode of fiction—a torrent of such
works appeared.
The most important writer of these stories was Ann Radcliffe, who distinguished between
“terror” and “horror.” Terror “expands the soul” by its use of “uncertainty and obscurity.”
Horror, on the other hand, is actual and specific. Radcliffe’s own novels, especially The
Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and The Italian (1797), were examples of the fiction of terror.
Vulnerable heroines, trapped in ruined castles, are terrified by supernatural perils that prove to be
illusions.
Matthew Lewis, by contrast, wrote the fiction of horror. In The Monk (1796) the hero commits
both murder and incest, and the repugnant details include a woman’s imprisonment in a vault full
of rotting human corpses. Some later examples of Gothic fiction have more-sophisticated
agendas. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818) is a novel of ideas
that anticipates science fiction. James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a
Justified Sinner (1824) is a subtle study of religious mania and split personality. Even in its
more-vulgar examples, however, Gothic fiction can symbolically address serious political and
psychological issues.
By the 1790s, realistic fiction had acquired a polemical role, reflecting the ideas of the French
Revolution, though sacrificing much of its comic power in the process. One practitioner of this
type of fiction, Robert Bage, is best remembered for Hermsprong; or, Man as He Is Not (1796),
in which a “natural” hero rejects the conventions of contemporary society. The radical Thomas
Holcroft published two novels, Anna St. Ives (1792) and The Adventures of Hugh Trevor
(1794), influenced by the ideas of William Godwin. Godwin himself produced the best example
of this political fiction in Things as They Are; or, The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794),
borrowing techniques from the Gothic novel to enliven a narrative of social oppression.
Women novelists contributed extensively to this ideological debate. Radicals such as Mary
Wollstonecraft (Mary, 1788; Maria; or, The Wrongs of Woman, 1798), Elizabeth Inchbald
(Nature and Art, 1796), and Mary Hays (Memoirs of Emma Courtney, 1796) celebrated the
rights of the individual. Anti-Jacobin novelists such as Jane West (A Gossip’s Story, 1796; A
Tale of the Times, 1799), Amelia Opie (Adeline Mowbray, 1804), and Mary Brunton (Self-
Control, 1811) stressed the dangers of social change. Some writers were more bipartisan, notably
Elizabeth Hamilton (Memoirs of Modern Philosophers, 1800) and Maria Edgeworth, whose
long, varied, and distinguished career extended from Letters for Literary Ladies (1795) to Helen
(1834). Her pioneering regional novel Castle Rackrent (1800), an affectionately comic portrait of
life in 18th-century Ireland, influenced the subsequent work of Scott.
Jane Austen stands on the conservative side of this battle of ideas, though in novels that
incorporate their anti-Jacobin and anti-Romantic views so subtly into love stories that many
readers are unaware of them. Three of her novels—Sense and Sensibility (first published in
1811; originally titled “Elinor and Marianne”), Pride and Prejudice (1813; originally “First
Impressions”), and Northanger Abbey (published posthumously in 1817)—were drafted in the
late 1790s. Three more novels—Mansfield Park (1814), Emma (1815), and Persuasion (1817,
together with Northanger Abbey)—were written between 1811 and 1817. Austen uses,
essentially, two standard plots. In one of these a right-minded but neglected heroine is gradually
acknowledged to be correct by characters who have previously looked down on her (such as
Fanny Price in Mansfield Park and Anne Elliot in Persuasion). In the other an attractive but self-
deceived heroine (such as Emma Woodhouse in Emma or Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and
Prejudice) belatedly recovers from her condition of error and is rewarded with the partner she
had previously despised or overlooked. On this slight framework, Austen constructs a powerful
case for the superiority of the Augustan virtues of common sense, empiricism, and rationality to
the new “Romantic” values of imagination, egotism, and subjectivity. With Austen the comic
brilliance and exquisite narrative construction of Fielding return to the English novel, in
conjunction with a distinctive and deadly irony.
Thomas Love Peacock is another witty novelist who combined an intimate knowledge of
Romantic ideas with a satirical attitude toward them, though in comic debates rather than
conventional narratives. Headlong Hall (1816), Melincourt (1817), and Nightmare Abbey (1818)
are sharp accounts of contemporary intellectual and cultural fashions, as are the two much later
fictions in which Peacock reused this successful formula, Crotchet Castle (1831) and Gryll
Grange (1860–61).
Sir Walter Scott is the English writer who can in the fullest sense be called a Romantic novelist.
After a successful career as a poet, Scott switched to prose fiction in 1814 with the first of the
“Waverley novels.” In the first phase of his work as a novelist, Scott wrote about the Scotland of
the 17th and 18th centuries, charting its gradual transition from the feudal era into the modern
world in a series of vivid human dramas. Waverley (1814), Guy Mannering (1815), The
Antiquary (1816), Old Mortality (1816), Rob Roy (1817), and The Heart of Midlothian (1818)
are the masterpieces of this period. In a second phase, beginning with Ivanhoe in 1819, Scott
turned to stories set in medieval England. Finally, with Quentin Durward in 1823, he added
European settings to his historical repertoire. Scott combines a capacity for comic social
observation with a Romantic sense of landscape and an epic grandeur, enlarging the scope of the
novel in ways that equip it to become the dominant literary form of the later 19th century.
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Discursive prose
The French Revolution prompted a fierce debate about social and political principles, a debate
conducted in impassioned and often eloquent polemical prose. Richard Price’s Discourse on the
Love of Our Country (1789) was answered by Edmund Burke’s conservative Reflections on the
Revolution in France (1790) and by Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790)
and A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the latter of which is an important early
statement of feminist issues that gained greater recognition in the next century.
Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and
Moral Subjects
Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and
Moral Subjects
Title page of the 1792 American edition of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects. The facing page contains an inscription
by woman suffragist Susan B. Anthony.
Library of Congress Rare Book and Special Collections Division Washington, D.C. 20540 USA
The Romantic emphasis on individualism is reflected in much of the prose of the period,
particularly in criticism and the familiar essay. Among the most vigorous writing is that of
William Hazlitt, a forthright and subjective critic whose most characteristic work is seen in his
collections of lectures On the English Poets (1818) and On the English Comic Writers (1819)
and in The Spirit of the Age (1825), a series of valuable portraits of his contemporaries. In The
Essays of Elia (1823) and The Last Essays of Elia (1833), Charles Lamb, an even more personal
essayist, projects with apparent artlessness a carefully managed portrait of himself—charming,
whimsical, witty, sentimental, and nostalgic. As his fine Letters show, however, he could on
occasion produce mordant satire. Mary Russell Mitford’s Our Village (1832) is another example
of the charm and humour of the familiar essay in this period. Thomas De Quincey appealed to
the new interest in writing about the self, producing a colourful account of his early experiences
in Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821, revised and enlarged in 1856). His unusual gift
of evoking states of dream and nightmare is best seen in essays such as “The English Mail
Coach” and “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth”; his essay “On Murder Considered as
One of the Fine Arts” (1827; extended in 1839 and 1854) is an important anticipation of the
Victorian Aesthetic movement. Walter Savage Landor’s detached, lapidary style is seen at its
best in some brief lyrics and in a series of erudite Imaginary Conversations, which began to
appear in 1824.
The critical discourse of the era was dominated by the Whig quarterly The Edinburgh Review
(begun 1802), edited by Francis Jeffrey, and its Tory rivals The Quarterly Review (begun 1809)
and the monthly Blackwood’s Magazine (begun 1817). Though their attacks on contemporary
writers could be savagely partisan, they set a notable standard of fearless and independent
journalism. Similar independence was shown by Leigh Hunt, whose outspoken journalism,
particularly in his Examiner (begun 1808), was of wide influence, and by William Cobbett,
whose Rural Rides (collected in 1830 from his Political Register) gives a telling picture, in
forceful and clear prose, of the English countryside of his day.
Drama
This was a great era of English theatre, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble, Sarah
Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of
playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”)
theatres created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire
continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when
commissioning new texts, legitimate theatres were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-
verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular
modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.
This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith and
Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.” But
despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the
work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem,
1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791),
Frederic Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and
Thomas Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the
1790s from the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his
controversial Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.
By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most
important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction
(1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot,
and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the
latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the
emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences
of the “illegitimate” theatres. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre
(first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of
the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His
Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic
melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker,
The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to
revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and
television of a later period.
Legitimate drama, performed at patent theatres, is best represented by the work of James
Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic
(Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write
tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse)
at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers
(1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained
unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the
general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for
reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of
his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theatre (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the
’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished
the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly
disappeared.
Self-consciousness was the quality that John Stuart Mill identified, in 1838, as “the daemon of
the men of genius of our time.” Introspection was inevitable in the literature of an immediately
Post-Romantic period, and the age itself was as prone to self-analysis as were its individual
authors. Hazlitt’s essays in The Spirit of the Age (1825) were echoed by Mill’s articles of the
same title in 1831, by Thomas Carlyle’s essays “Signs of the Times” (1829) and
“Characteristics” (1831), and by Richard Henry Horne’s New Spirit of the Age in 1844.
This persistent scrutiny was the product of an acute sense of change. Britain had emerged from
the long war with France (1793–1815) as a great power and as the world’s predominant
economy. Visiting England in 1847, the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson observed of the
English that “the modern world is theirs. They have made and make it day by day.”
This new status as the world’s first urban and industrialized society was responsible for the
extraordinary wealth, vitality, and self-confidence of the period. Abroad these energies expressed
themselves in the growth of the British Empire. At home they were accompanied by rapid social
change and fierce intellectual controversy.
The juxtaposition of this new industrial wealth with a new kind of urban poverty is only one of
the paradoxes that characterize this long and diverse period. In religion the climax of the
Evangelical revival coincided with an unprecedentedly severe set of challenges to faith. The
idealism and transcendentalism of Romantic thought were challenged by the growing prestige of
empirical science and utilitarian moral philosophy, a process that encouraged more-objective
modes in literature. Realism would be one of the great artistic movements of the era. In politics a
widespread commitment to economic and personal freedom was, nonetheless, accompanied by a
steady growth in the power of the state. The prudery for which the Victorian Age is notorious in
fact went hand in hand with an equally violent immoralism, seen, for example, in Algernon
Charles Swinburne’s poetry or the writings of the Decadents. Most fundamentally of all, the
rapid change that many writers interpreted as progress inspired in others a fierce nostalgia.
Enthusiastic rediscoveries of ancient Greece, Elizabethan England, and, especially, the Middle
Ages by writers, artists, architects, and designers made this age of change simultaneously an age
of active and determined historicism.
John Stuart Mill caught this contradictory quality, with characteristic acuteness, in his essays on
Jeremy Bentham (1838) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1840). Every contemporary thinker, he
argued, was indebted to these two “seminal minds.” Yet Bentham, as the enduring voice of the
Enlightenment, and Coleridge, as the chief English example of the Romantic reaction against it,
held diametrically opposed views.
A similar sense of sharp controversy is given by Carlyle in Sartor Resartus (1833–34). An
eccentric philosophical fiction in the tradition of Swift and Sterne, the book argues for a new
mode of spirituality in an age that Carlyle himself suggests to be one of mechanism. Carlyle’s
choice of the novel form and the book’s humour, generic flexibility, and political engagement
point forward to distinctive characteristics of Victorian literature.
In general, full-blown Romanticism in France developed later than in Germany or Britain, with a
particular flavour that comes from the impact on French writers’ sensibilities of revolutionary
turmoil and the Napoleonic odyssey. Acutely conscious of being products of a very particular
time and place, French writers wrote into their work their obsession with the burden of history
and their subjection to time and change. The terms mal du siècle and enfant du siècle (literally
“child of the century”) capture their distress. Alfred de Musset took the latter phrase for his
autobiography, La Confession d’un enfant du siècle (1836; The Confession of a Child of the
Century). Most French Romantics, whether they adopted a liberal or conservative attitude or
whether they tried to ignore the weight of history and politics, asserted that their century was
sick. Romantics often retained the encyclopaedic ambitions of their predecessors, but faith in any
simple notion of progress was shaken. Some distinction can be made between the generation of
1820, whose members wrote, often from an aristocratic viewpoint, about exhaustion, emptiness,
loss, and ennui, and the generation of 1830, whose members spoke of dynamism—though often
in the form of frustrated dynamism.
Foreign influences
When the émigrés who had fled from the effects of the Revolution trickled back to France, they
brought with them some of the cultural colouring acquired abroad (mainly in Britain and
Germany), and this partially explains the paradox of aristocratic and politically conservative
writers fostering new approaches to literature. Mme de Staël, as a liberal exile under Napoleon,
was an exception. Travel had broadened intellectual horizons and had opened up the European
cultural hegemony of France to other worlds and other sensibilities. From England the influence
of Lord Byron’s poetry and of the Byronic legend was particularly strong. Byron provided a
model of poetic sensibility, cynicism, and despair, and his death in the Greek War of
Independence reinforced the image of the noble and generous but doomed Romantic hero. Italy
and Spain, too, exercised an influence, though, with the exception of Dante, it was not their
literature that attracted so much as the models for violent emotion and exotic fantasy that these
countries offered: French writing suffered a proliferation of gypsies, bandits, poisonings, and
revenge tales.
The poetry of the Romantics
The new climate was especially evident in poetry. The salon of Charles Nodier became one of
the first of the literary groups known as the cénacles (“clubs”); later groups were to centre on
Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve, who is remembered chiefly as a literary critic. The outstanding
poets of the period were surrounded by a host of minor talents, and the way was opened for a
variety of new voices, from the melancholic lyricism of Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, giving
frustrated desire a distinctive feminine expression (and bringing politics into poetry, writing
ardent socialist polemic), to the frenetic extravagance of Petrus Borel. For a time, about 1830,
there was a marked possibility that French Romantic poetry might veer toward radical politics
and the socialism of utopian writers such as Henri de Saint-Simon rather than in the direction of
l’art pour l’art, or art for art’s sake. The popularity of the songs of Pierre-Jean de Béranger is a
reminder of the existence of another strand, political and satiric, that is entwined with the
intimate lyricism and aesthetic preoccupations of Romantic verse.
Lamartine
Alphonse de Lamartine made an enormous impact as a poet with his Méditations poétiques
(1820; Poetical Meditations). Using a restricted Neoclassical vocabulary and remaining
unadventurous in versification, he nevertheless succeeded in creating through the musicality of
his verse and his vaporous landscapes a sense of great longings unfulfilled. This soft-centred
elegiac tone is tempered by occasional deep despair and Byronic revolt. The Harmonies
poétiques et religieuses (1830; “Poetic and Religious Harmonies”; Eng. trans. in A Biographical
Sketch), with their religious emotion, reinforce the quest for serenity, which remains threatened
by unease and disquiet. Jocelyn (1836; Eng. trans. Jocelyn) and La Chute d’un ange (1838; “The
Fall of an Angel”) are intermittently successful attempts at epic. An undercurrent in Lamartine’s
poetry is the preoccupation with politics; during the 1848 revolution he took a leading role in the
provisional government.
The early poetry of Hugo
It was also in the 1820s that the powerful and versatile genius of Victor Hugo emerged. In his
first poems he was a supporter of the monarchy and the church. Conservative Roman Catholic
legitimism is a common strand in the poetic generation of 1820, and the debt to Chateaubriand’s
The Genius of Christianity is evident. These early poems lack the mellifluous quality of
Lamartine’s Poetical Meditations, but by the time of the Odes et ballades (1826) there are
already hints of the Hugoesque mixture: intimate poetry, speaking of family relationships and
problems of the ego, a prophetic and visionary tone, and an eagerness to explore a wide range of
poetic techniques. Hugo called his Les Orientales (1829; “Eastern Poems”) a useless book of
pure poetry. It can be linked with Théophile Gautier’s l’art pour l’art movement, concentrating
on the exotic and the visual, combined with verbal and formal inventiveness. Hugo published
four further important collections in the 1830s, in which poetry of nature, love, and family life is
interwoven with a solitary, hesitant, but never quite despairing exploration of poetic
consciousness. The poetry moves from the personal to the visionary and the prophetic,
prefiguring in the lyric mode the epic sweep of much of his later work.
In contrast to Hugo’s scope, the poetry of Alfred-Victor, comte de Vigny, was more limited and
controlled. In common with Hugo and many other Romantic poets, however, he proposed the
poet as prophet and seer. For Vigny the poet is essentially a dignified, moralizing philosopher,
using the symbol less as a vehicle for emotion than as an intense expression of his thought.
Broadly pessimistic in tone, emphasizing suffering and noble stoicism, his work focuses on
figures of victimhood and sacrifice, with the poet-philosopher as quintessential victim. His Les
Destinées (1864; “The Fates”), composed between 1838 and his death in 1863, exemplifies the
high spiritual aspiration that represents one aspect of the Romantic ideal. The control and
concentration of expression is in contrast to the verbal flood of much Romantic writing.
Musset
The young, brilliantly gifted Alfred de Musset quickly established his reputation with his Contes
d’Espagne et d’Italie (1830; “Tales of Spain and Italy”). His exuberant sense of humour led him
to use extravagant Romantic effects and at the same time treat them ironically. Later, a trajectory
from dandyism through debauchery to a sense of emptiness and futility, sustained only
intermittently by the linking of suffering with love, resulted in a radical dislocation of the sense
of self. The Nuits (“Nights”) poems (“La Nuit de mai,” “La Nuit de décembre,” “La Nuit
d’août,” “La Nuit d’octobre,” 1835–37) express the purifying power of suffering in verse of
sustained sincerity, purged of all the early showiness.
Nerval
For a long while Gérard de Nerval was seen as the translator of German literature (notably
Goethe’s Faust) and as a charming minor Romantic. Later critics have seen as his real
contribution to poetry the 12 sonnets of Les Chimères (The Chimeras), composed between about
1844 and 1854, and the prose poems added to the spiritual odyssey Aurélia (1853–54; Eng. trans.
Aurelia). The dense symbolic allusiveness of these latter works is the poetic transcription of an
anguished, mystical quest that draws on the most diverse religious myths and all manner of
literary, historical, occult, and esoteric knowledge. They represent one of the peaks of
achievement of that side of the Romantic Movement that sought in the mystical a key to the
spiritual reintegration of the divided postrevolutionary self. His formal experiments with the
prose poem and his use of symbol link up with the poetry of Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane
Mallarmé.
Romantic theatre
Some critics have been tempted to call Romantic theatre in France a failure. Few plays from that
time remain in the active repertory, though the theatre was perceived throughout the period to be
the dominant literary form. Quarrels about the theatre, often physically engaging audiences,
provided some of the most celebrated battles of Romanticism against Classicism.
Hugo
The first performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani (1830; Eng. trans. Hernani) was one such battle,
and Romanticism won an important symbolic victory. Hernani followed Stendhal’s call in the
pamphlets Racine et Shakespeare (1823, 1825) for theatre that would appeal to a contemporary
public and Hugo’s own major theoretical statement, in the preface to his play Cromwell (1827;
Eng. trans. Cromwell). In the preface, Hugo called for a drama of action—which he saw as
appropriate to modern man, the battleground of matter and spirit—that could transcend Classical
categories and mix the sublime and the grotesque. Hernani also benefited from the production in
Paris of several Shakespearean and historical dramas—in particular, a sustained and triumphal
season in 1827 by an English troupe playing Shakespeare.
Hernani drew on popular melodrama for its effects, exploited the historical and geographic local
colour of an imagined 16th-century Spain, and had a tragic hero with whom young Romantics
eagerly identified. These elements are fused in Hugo’s lyric poetry to produce a dramatic
spectacle close to that of Romantic opera. Ruy Blas (1838; Eng. trans. Ruy Blas), in a similar
vein, mixes poetry, comedy, and tragedy with strong antithetical effects to provide the mingling
of dramatic genres that the preface to Cromwell had declared the essence of Romantic drama.
The failure of Hugo’s Les Burgraves (1843; “The Commanders”), an overinflated epic
melodrama, is commonly seen as the beginning of the end of Romantic theatre.
Vigny
Whereas Hugo’s verse dramas tended to the lyrical and the spectacular, Vigny’s most famous
play, Chatterton (1835; Eng. trans. Chatterton), in its concentrated simplicity, has many
analogies with Classical theatre. It is, however, a bourgeois drama of the sort called for by
Diderot, focusing on the suicide of the young poet Thomas Chatterton as a symbolic figure of
poetic idealism misunderstood and rejected by a materialistic society—a typical Romantic
estrangement.
Musset
Alfred de Musset did not have public performance primarily in mind when writing most of his
plays, and yet, ironically, he is the one playwright of this period whose works have continued to
be regularly performed. In the 1830s he wrote a series of short comedies and proverbes—almost
charades—in which lighthearted fantasy and the delicate hesitations of young love, rather in the
manner of Marivaux, are contrasted with ironic pieces expressing underlying disillusionment.
The larger-scale Lorenzaccio (1834; Eng. trans. Lorenzaccio) is the one indisputable masterpiece
of Romantic theatre. A drama set in Renaissance Florence but with clear links to the
disillusionment of post-1830 France is combined with a brilliant psychological study of a once
pure but now debauched hero almost paralyzed by doubt. The world of wasted youth and lost
illusions and the powerlessness of men to overthrow corruption are evoked in a prose that at
times resembles lyric poetry. The showy historical colour and the bluster typical of Romantic
melodrama are replaced here by a real feeling for the movement of individuals and crowds of
which real history is made and a deep sense of tragic poetry that stand comparison with
Shakespeare.
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The novel from Constant to Balzac
The novel was the most rapidly developing literary form in postrevolutionary France, its
enormous range allowing authors great flexibility in examining the changing relationships of the
individual to society. The Romantic undergrowth encouraged the flourishing of such subspecies
as the Gothic novel and the terrifying or the fantastic tale—the latter influenced in many cases by
the translation from German of the works of E.T.A. Hoffmann—works that, when they are not
simply ridiculous, seem to be straining to provide a fictional equivalent for the subconscious or
an intuition of the mystical.
Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe (1816; Eng. trans. Adolphe), presented as a fictional
autobiography, belongs to an important strand in the tradition of the French novel—namely, the
novel of concentrated psychological analysis of an individual—which runs from the 17th century
to the present day. In that tradition, Adolphe has about it a Classical intensity and simplicity of
line. However, in its moral ambiguity, the hesitations of the hero and his confessions of
weakness, lies its modernity, responding to the contemporary sense of moral sickness. In spite of
the difference of style, there is a clear link with the themes of Chateaubriand’s René and Étienne
Pivert de Senancour’s Oberman (1804; Eng. trans. Obermann).
The historical novel
The acute consciousness of a changed world after the Revolution and hence of difference
between historical periods led novelists to a new interest in re-creating the specificity of the past
or, more accurately, reconstituting it in the light of their own present preoccupations, with a
distinct preference for the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Until about 1820 the Middle Ages
had generally been regarded as a period of barbarism between Classical antiquity and the
neoclassical 17th and 18th centuries. Chateaubriand’s lyrical evocation of Gothic ruins—the
relics of the age of religious faith—and young royalist writers’ attraction to a certain vision of
feudalism provided a different evaluation of the period. The vogue for historical novels was at its
strongest in the 1820s and was given impetus by the immense influence of the French
translations of Sir Walter Scott (though Madame de Genlis claimed strenuously that her own
historical novels had established the vogue long before). The best example of the picturesque
historical novel is Hugo’s Notre-Dame de Paris (1831; The Hunchback of Notre Dame). In it
Hugo re-created an atmosphere of vivid, colourful, and intense 15th-century life, associating
with it a plea for the preservation of Gothic architecture as the bearer, before the coming of the
book, of the cultural heritage and sensibilities of the nation.
A deeper reading of Scott’s novels is implicit in some of Honoré de Balzac’s works. Balzac’s
writing not only evoked the surface or the atmosphere of a precise period but also examined the
processes of historical, social, and political transformation. Scott’s studies of the aftereffects of
the Jacobite rising can be paralleled by Balzac’s analysis of the Breton counterrevolution in Les
Chouans (1829; “The Screech Owls,” a name given to any of a number of bands of peasants [see
Chouan]). The historical novel ultimately became the staple of the popular novel, as in Les Trois
Mousquetaires (1844; The Three Musketeers) by Alexandre Dumas père.
Stendhal
The works of Stendhal (Henri Beyle), deeply concerned with the nature of individuality, the
claims of the self, and the search for happiness, represent an effort to define an aesthetic for
prose fiction and to establish a distinctive, personal voice. His autobiographical sketches, such as
his Vie de Henri Brulard (The Life of Henry Brulard) and Souvenirs d’égotisme (published
posthumously in 1890 and 1892, respectively; Memoirs of Egotism), give a fascinating insight
into a highly critical intelligence trying to organize his experience into a rational philosophy
while remaining aware that the claims of emotion will often undermine whatever system he
creates. In many ways Stendhal is an 18th-century rationalist with a 19th-century sensibility.
He came to the novel form relatively late in life. Le Rouge et le noir (1830; The Red and the
Black) and La Chartreuse de Parme (1839; The Charterhouse of Parma) are his finest works.
Both present a young would-be Napoleonic hero grappling with the decidedly nonheroic social
and political environment inherited by the post-Napoleonic generation. The Red and the Black, a
masterpiece of ironic realism both in its characterization and its language, focuses on France in
the late 1820s. The Charterhouse of Parma, both love story and political satire, situated in
Stendhal’s beloved Italy (where he lived for much of his adult life), often reflects a vision of the
Italy of the Renaissance as much as that of the 19th century. His work had a quicksilver style,
capable of embracing in rapid succession different emotions, ideas, and points of view and
creating a sense of immediacy and spontaneity. He had a genius for precise and witty
understatement, combined with an ironic vision that was simultaneously cynical and tender. All
these qualities, along with his capacity for placing his floundering, aspiring heroes, with a few
brushstrokes, in a multilayered evocation of the world in which they must struggle to survive,
make of him one of the most individual, humane, and perpetually contemporary of novelists.
Sand
George Sand (Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dudevant) was a dominant figure in the literary life of
the 19th century, and her work, much-published and much-serialized throughout Europe, was of
major importance in the spread of feminist consciousness. For a long while after her death, her
literary reputation rested on works such as La Mare au diable (1846; The Enchanted Lake) and
La Petite Fadette (1849; Little Fadette), sentimental stories of country life tinged with realistic
elements, of little artistic value. More interesting are the works modeling the subordinate
position of women in the 19th-century family, such as Indiana (1832; Eng. trans. Indiana), in
which a wife struggles for independence, or novels creating new images of heroic femininity,
such as Lélia (1833 and 1839; Eng. trans. Lelia), whose heroine, beautiful, powerful, and
tormented, founds a community to educate a new generation of independent women. Sand’s
novel Mauprat (1837; Eng. trans. Mauprat) is immensely readable, with its lyrical alliance of
woman, peasant, and reformed aristocracy effecting a bloodless transformation of the world by
love. From the later 1830s, influenced by the socialists Félicité de Lamennais, the former abbé,
and Pierre Leroux, she developed an interest in humanitarian socialism, an idealism tinged with
mysticism, reflected in works such as Spiridion (1839), Le Compagnon du tour de France (1840;
The Journeyman Joiner; or, The Companion of the Tour of France), and Consuelo (1842; Eng.
trans. Consuelo). She is an excellent example of the sentimental socialists involved in the
Revolution of 1848—her record rather marred by her reluctance to associate herself closely with
the rising groups of women engaged in their own struggle for civil and political rights. A
different perspective on contemporary feminism emerges in the vigorous and outspoken travel
writings and journal of the socialist and feminist activist Flora Tristan, notable for Promenades
dans Londres (1840; The London Journal of Flora Tristan) and Le Tour de France: journal inédit
(written 1844, published 1973; “The Tour of France: Unpublished Journal”).
Nodier, Mérimée, and the conte
Charles Nodier and Prosper Mérimée both exploited the short story and the novella. Nodier
specialized in the conte fantastique (“fantastic tale”) to explore dream worlds or various forms of
madness, as in La Fée aux miettes (1832; “The Crumb Fairy”), suggesting the importance of the
role of the unconscious in human beliefs and conduct. Mérimée also used inexplicable
phenomena, as in La Vénus d’Ille (1837; “The Venus of Ille”), to hint at repressed aspects of the
psyche or the irrational power of passion. More commonly, combining a Classical analytic style
with Romantic themes, he directed a cool, ironic look at violent emotions. Short stories such as
Mateo Falcone (1829) and Carmen (1845; Eng. trans. Carmen) are peaks of this art.
Balzac
Honoré de Balzac is best known for his Comédie humaine (“The Human Comedy”), the general
title of a vast series of more than 90 novels and short stories published between 1829 and 1847.
In these works he concentrated mainly on an examination of French society from the Revolution
of 1789 to the eve of the Revolution of 1848, organically linking realistic observation and
visionary intuition while at the same time seeking to analyze the underlying principles of this
new world. He ranged back and forth, often within the same novel, from the philosophical to the
social, the economic, and the legal; from Paris to the provinces; and from the summit of society
to the petite bourgeoisie, studying the destructive power of what he called thought or passion or
vital energy. By using techniques such as the recurrence of characters in several novels, Balzac
gave a temporal density and dynamism to his works. The frustrated ambitions of his young
heroes (Rastignac in Le Père Goriot [1835; Old Goriot]; Lucien de Rubempré, failed writer
turned journalist, in Illusions perdues [1837–43; Lost Illusions]) and the subjection of women,
particularly in marriage, are used as eloquent markers of the moral impasse into which bourgeois
liberalism led the French Revolution. Most presciently, he emphasized the paradox of money—
its dissolving power and its dynamic force—and of the every-man-for-himself individualism
unleashed by the Revolution, at once condemning and celebrating the raw energies of a nascent
capitalism. Vautrin, the master criminal whose disguises carry him across the frontiers of
Europe, and Madame de Beauséant, the doyenne of old aristocracy, are the two faces of the
powers that dominate this world, gatekeepers of the two futures offered to its young inheritors.
American Romanticism: A Webliography
(1820-1865)
Description:
Like other terms describing literary movements, the term Romanticism defies simple definition
for a number of reasons. It was a movement that arose gradually, evolved in many ways from
where it began, went through so many phases and was practiced by so many disparate writers
that any simple definition is "slippery" at best. In addition, the terms we use to describe literary
movements are really terms that are much broader and vaster, reflecting large scale thinking in
the arts, in general, philosophy, religion, politics, etc.
American Romanticism, like other literary movements, developed on the heels of romantic
movements in Europe. Its beginnings can be traced back to the eighteenth century there. In
America, it dominated the literary scene from around 1820 to the end of the Civil War and the
rise of Realism. It arose as a reaction to the formal orthodoxy and Neoclassicism of the
preceding period. It is marked by a freedom from the authority, forms, and conventions typical
in Neoclassical literature. It replaced the neoclassic emphasis on reason with its own emphasis
on the imagination and emotions, and the neoclassic emphasis on authority with an emphasis on
individuality, which places the individual at the center of all life. See the list of themes and
elements below for a clearer description of the elements of Romanticism.
Major Writers Representative Works
Name & Genres
Charles Brockden Brown, novels Wieland, Edgar Huntley

Washington Irving, essays, sketches, satire The Sketchbook, The Knickerbocker Tales,
"Legend of Sleepy
Hollow," "Rip Van Winkle"

James Fenimore Cooper, novels The Pioneers, The Prairie, Last of the Mohicans,
The Deerslayer

William Cullen Bryant, poetry "Thanatopsis," "To A Waterfowl,"

Nathaniel Hawthorne, fiction The Scarlet Letter, House of Seven Gables,

"Rappacini's Daughter,"

"Young Goodman Brown

Edgar Allen Poe, poetry, fiction, criticism "The Philosophy of Composition," "The
Raven," "Ligeia," "The Fall of

the House of Usher"

Herman Melville, fiction Moby Dick, "Benito Cereno"

Ralph Waldo Emerson, essays "Self-Reliance," "The American Scholar,"

"Nature" "The Divinity School
Address"

"The Poet," "The Over-Soul," "Hamatreya,"

"Uriel," "The Rhodora"

Henry David Thoreau, journals and essays Walden, Maine Woods, A Week on the
Concord & Merrimac
Margaret Fuller, essays, "Woman in the Nineteenth Century," "American
Literature; Its Position in the Present
Time, and Prospects for the Future"

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, poetry "My Lost Youth," "Mezzo Cammin,"

John Greenleaf Whittier, poetry "Snowbound"

Oliver Wendell Holmes, poetry "Old Ironsides," "The Last Leaf," "The
Chambered Nautilus," "The
Deacon's Masterpiece"

James Russell Lowell, poetry "To the Dandelion," "A Fable for Critics"
Harriet Beecher Stowe, fiction Uncle Tom's Cabin
Abraham Lincoln, speeches
Frederick Douglas, autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas, an
American Slave
Harriet Ann Jacobs, autobiograhy Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Lydia Maria Child, poetry, fiction, essays "Slavery's Pleasant Homes" (1843) , Appeal in
Favor of That Class

of Americans Called Africans

Sidney Lanier, poetry Poems of Sidney Lanier "The Symphony," "Song

of the Chattahoochee,"

"The Marshes of Glynn"

Emily Dickinson, poetry

Walt Whitman, poetry Leaves of Grass

Common Themes and Elements in Romanticism
Expansive Idealism
Humanitarianism and democracy
Equality
Abolition
Utopian ideals
The noble savage
Dignity of common man
Primitivism
The nature of good or evil
Conflict between spirit and body
Mysticism, Pantheism, Transcendentalism
Gothicism
abnormal psychology
Exotic settings--time and place
Nature as symbol of Divine
Faith vs, Doubt
Organic unity
Individual soul as as part of the greater soul of God
Great Chain of Being
Ways of Knowing--Reason/Imagination, spirit/senses, mind/external reality
Individualism
Conformity vs. nonconformity
Sentimentalism, sensibility, and melancholy
Manifest Destiny
native history
Call for American literary geniuses, themes, style, subject matter
Freedom in terms of form and convention