Department of English

Second year LMD/Groups 6 and 7

Anglophone Literatures 2021-2022
Ms. Dahman Romanticism

Romanticism as a literary movement lasted from 1798, with the publication of Lyrical Ballads to some time between the passage of
the first Reform Bill of 1832 and the death of Wordsworth in 1850. With political revolution on the Continent and the industrial
revolution underway, the period witnessed the breakdown of rigid ideas about the structure and purpose of society and the known
world. During this period, emphasis shifted to the importance of the individual’s experience in the world and one’s subjective
interpretation of that experience, rather than interpretations handed down by the church or tradition.
Romantic literature is characterized by several features. It emphasized the dream, or inner, world of the individual and
visionary, fantastic, or drug-induced imagery. There was a growing suspicion of the established church and a turn toward pantheism
(the belief that God is a part of the created world rather than separate from it). Romantic literature emphasized the individual self and
the value of the individual’s experience. The concept of ‘‘the sublime’’ (a thrilling emotional experience that combines awe,
magnificence, and horror) was introduced. Feeling and emotion were viewed as superior to logic and analysis.
For the romantics, poetry was believed to be the highest form of literature, and novels were regarded as a lower form, often as
sensationalistic and titillating, even by those most addicted to reading them. Most novels of the time were written by women and were
therefore widely regarded as a threat to serious, intellectual culture. Despite this, some of the most famous British novelists wrote
during this period, including Jane Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, and Sir Walter Scott. In addition, this period saw the
flowering of some of the greatest poets in the English language: the first generation of William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and
William Wordsworth, followed by Byron, Shelley, and Keats.

REPRESENTATIVE AUTHORS

Jane Austen (1775–1817)

Jane Austen was born December 16, 1775, in Steventon, Hampshire, England, the youngest daughter of a clergyman. Her six novels
were set in the provincial world in which she lived, that of the comfortable, rural middle class, and were often based on her
observations of people she knew and her assessments of human nature.
The novels depict young women entering society, many of whom make mistakes or become confused but ultimately find their way to
a happy marriage.
Austen began writing as a teenager and initially shared her writing only with family and friends. When she eventually
published, she did so anonymously. Not well known in her own time, she soon garnered a reputation for her precision, irony, and
delicate touch. Her best-known works are Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and Prejudice (1813), and Emma (1816). She
influenced many later writers, including Charles Dickens, W. M. Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope, as well as George Eliot and
Elizabeth Gaskell. Austen’s books have endured into the twenty-first century as some of the few classics widely read for pleasure. She
died from illness on July 18, 1817, in Winchester, England.

William Blake (1757–1827)

Artist and visionary poet William Blake, born November 28, 1757, in London, England, to a hosier, was apprenticed at age fifteen to
the engraver James Basire, for whom Blake made drawings at Westminster Abbey. In 1783, Blake’s Poetical Sketches were printed,
and in 1789, he engraved Thel and The Songs of Innocence. The increasing turmoil caused by the French Revolution and the war
between Britain and France influenced Blake to engrave America (1793) and The Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793). In the
following year, he produced the combined Songs of Innocence and Experience, as well as Europe and The First Book of Urizen.
In 1803, Blake was accused of sedition (inciting resistance or insurrection against lawful authority). He was tried in 1804 but
acquitted of the charge. During this time, he finished Milton and began Jerusalem. However, for the next two decades he was
increasingly despairing, povertystricken, and obscure. He was regarded as insane by some observers and eked out a living by
illustrating a pottery catalog and selling his print collection. However, late in his life he found supporters and patrons, and in 1820
Jerusalem was finally engraved. He died August 12, 1827, in London. While he was known primarily as an artist and engraver during
his lifetime, Blake came to be known as a leading romantic poet and philosopher, influencing other poets such as William Butler
Yeats.

REPRESENTATIVE WORKS

Frankenstein
Mary Shelley’s novel, published between 1816 and 1818, is classically romantic in its emphasis on feelings over intellect and the
dangers of relying exclusively on intellect; the frightening, awe-inspiring nature of the sublime; the loneliness of the sensitive hero;
and the sadness inherent in the human ability to corrupt what should be naturally good. In the novel, arrogant scientist Victor
Frankenstein creates a man using dead bodies, and animates him.
The childlike monster wants only to be loved, but horrifies everyone who sees him.
Shelley subtitled the novel ‘‘A Modern Prometheus,’’ linking Frankenstein to the Titan who stole fire from the gods and gave it
to humans. Prometheus was ultimately punished by Zeus for meddling in this way. Shelley makes the point that, in taking the power
to create life for himself, Frankenstein is heading for a fall. He loses touch with other people and with all human feelings. By the end
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Department of English
Second year LMD/Groups 6 and 7
Anglophone Literatures 2021-2022
Ms. Dahman Romanticism

of the book Frankenstein is even more alienated than the monster he created. The idea of a protagonist whose ambition defiantly
knows no bounds was attractive to other romantic writers, including Shelley’s husband Percy Bysshe Shelley, Coleridge, and Byron.
Frankenstein shocked readers of its time, who were horrified by the idea of digging up the dead and reanimating them. Many
initial reviewers attacked the book. However, the book was immediately famous with the general populace, despite its shocking
nature. The first stage adaptation of it occurred in 1823, the first film was made in 1910, and adaptations continued being made
through the twentieth century into the twenty-first. In Exploring Novels, George V. Griffith wrote, ‘‘Frankenstein lives well beyond
its young author’s modest intentions to write an entertaining gothic tale to pass some time indoors on a cold Swiss summer evening.’’

Pride and Prejudice

Austen’s 1813 novel, which she originally published anonymously, is her second and best known work. She wrote it for her family’s
amusement, but readers everywhere have enjoyed its wit, amusing dialogue, and insightful characterizations. It is a ‘‘novel of
manners’’; in other words, it portrays comfortable middle-class rural people and dramatizes the complex web of customs and manners
holding everyone in their social places. Anyone who transgresses this code is destined for a fall. The novel, like all of Austen’s books,
shows a young woman learning how society and human nature operate. Throughout the book, Austen shows the results of improper
behavior; some characters learn from their mistakes, while others do not. But as for a mate, each character gets the partner he or she
deserves.
Although Austen was not well known during her lifetime, her books influenced later writers, including Charles Dickens, W. M.
Thackeray, and Anthony Trollope, as well as George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell. In addition, she helped to raise the novel to a
respected art form and paved the way for other women to write even when they did not share the extensive education that was then
reserved for men. Despite her relative obscurity during her lifetime, Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice has sold more than 20million
copies since its original publication and has never been out of print.

MAIN CHARACTERISTICS

The Self
During the romantic period, for the first time in history, people became aware that there were parts of each individual’s personality
beyond the access of ordinary consciousness. This idea was further developed during the twentieth century as part of modern
psychological theory, but at the time of the romantics it was a novelty. The romantics were fascinated with self-exploration and with
the particulars of the individual’s experience in the world. Previous writers had focused on politics, business, trade, and the lives of
royalty or other famous people. The lives of ordinary people had been deemed unworthy of general interest. However, the romantics
were influenced by the events of the American and French revolutions and their underlying political theories, and like the
revolutionaries they believed the ordinary individual had the same rights and worth as any leader. This sociopolitical theory inspired
writers to consider the worth of the individual in their work and to focus more on the experiences of ordinary people.

Emotion and Feeling

In keeping with an emphasis on the individual self, the romantics valued emotion, intuition, and feeling over logic. They sought ‘‘the
sublime,’’ a state of being in which a person was simultaneously awed, frightened, and filled with a sense of majesty and wonder. A
poet’s response to a wild, remote, and grandiose place in nature often invoked the sublime, as did the immense night sky, gigantic
geological upheavals, and rivers. They appreciated the ruins of cathedrals and ancient religious sites. Romantics also relied on their
intuitive sense of things—as opposed to physical facts—to interpret the world. If a writer sensed the presence of the divine in a natural
spot, for example, the reality of this presence was not questioned, but accepted as a given because the person had felt it.

Rejection of Rigid Poetic Forms

In keeping with their glorification of the unlimited freedom and potential of the individual, the romantics rejected old poetic
conventions—such as the heroic couplet used by Alexander Pope—and asserted the value of the language spoken by ordinary people.
They believed that the form of a verse should be shaped by the subject matter, in contrast to the neoclassicists before them, who used
rigid forms and shaped their material to fit them.

Emphasis on Poetry
An interesting aspect of the romantic period was the emphasis on poetry. Most of the great romantic writers were poets instead of
novelists, as novels were widely regarded as inherently inferior to poetry. Critics have offered various reasons for this prejudice.
Some suggest it arose from the fact that most novelists were female, and because women were devalued during the romantic period,
their work was discounted. Others note that many novels were of poor quality, giving the entire genre a bad reputation. In addition, as
Bradford K. Mudge notes in his foreword in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, the poets themselves, notably Wordsworth and
Coleridge, campaigned against the spread of popular fiction, claiming it would lower the tastes of the reading public and lead them
away from poetry. According to Mudge, Wordsworth wrote that newspapers, novels, plays, and even some poetry, would ‘‘encourage
mental lethargy’’ and reduce readers to ‘‘a savage, uncivilized state.’’
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Department of English
Second year LMD/Groups 6 and 7
Anglophone Literatures 2021-2022
Ms. Dahman Romanticism

AMERICAN ROMANTICISM

In the Emerson Society Quarterly, James E. Miller Jr. writes, ‘‘America has traditionally incarnated the romantic in almost every
sense,’’ and that ‘‘The American adventure, the great democratic experiment . . . are the essence of Romanticism.’’ Romanticism in
the United States flourished between 1812 and the years of the Civil War. Like English Romanticism, its writers emphasized the
dignity and freedom of the individual; rebellion against restrictions, whether political, cultural, or social; the importance of emotion
over intellect; and the need for a personal relationship with God as provided by and in the natural world.
American Romanticism differed from the English movement in so far as it was shaped by factors unique to U.S. history,
culture, and geography. Americans, unlike the English, lived in a more directly democratic society in which the ordinary individual
had political power and was free from the dictates of a king, the aristocracy, and an established, landed upper class. In addition,
rebellion and freedom of all kinds were encouraged, at least among white people, by the presence of an apparently limitless supply of
land; if whites felt restricted, they would simply move farther west, where there was less social restriction and seemingly more
opportunity. In small, insular England, this feeling of personal freedom and the lure of ‘‘the open road’’ were experienced differently.
The romantic poets were great walkers. Indeed, Wordsworth’ long poem, The Prelude begins with the speaker heading out of London
on foot, intent on walking north toward the Lake District.
Because the United States was a new country, it did not have a separate set of literary forms, traditions, and masters. This lack
of a creative structure or ceiling encouraged writers to experiment with new forms, genres, and styles. Americans felt a certain rivalry
with Britain and wanted to prove that they, like the British, could create works of lasting merit that reflected the uniqueness of the
American character. Thus, American romantic writers focused on American settings and themes. In addition, the vast and largely
unspoiled beauty of the American landscape provided perfect material for romantic musings on nature and spirituality.
Writers considered part of the American Romantic Movement include Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman. According to Mark Bevir in the English Historical Review, these
writers differed from their British counterparts in their ‘‘close relationship to both Unitarianism and frontier individualism.’’
Unitarians opposed the concept of a divine Trinity and believed that God had a single personality or manifestation. They
rejected the concepts of damnation and eternal hell, the innate sinfulness of humanity, and the belief that Jesus had atoned for human
sins. Bevir notes these beliefs ‘‘readily opened the way to a belief in a single spiritual deity existing within nature, rather than a
transcendent God standing outside nature.’’ He comments that although English romantics believed nature could inspire or renew
people, American romantics typically believed God and nature were one and that God’s purpose was achieved through the action of
natural forces.
Many romantics in England and the United States looked to the past for inspiration. In England, Coleridge believed that a
national church could provide stability and balance against the onward forces of social progress, and art critic John Ruskin was
interested in reviving the medieval importance of trade guilds and craft skills. However, American romantics such as Emerson,
Thoreau, and Whitman were inspired by the democratic ideals of U.S. presidents Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. American
romantics emphasized material simplicity, living close to nature, and the honest manual labor of the self-sufficient farmer and frontier
dweller. Thoreau—perhaps the greatest proponent of the simple, self-sufficient life—lived alone in a cabin by Walden Pond, trying to
simplify his lifestyle so he would be able to time away from work for contemplation, the study of nature, and his writings.

Transcendentalism
Like Romanticism, Transcendentalism shares many of the same characteristic attitudes: a deep appreciation of nature; a preference of
emotion over reason; a belief in the self and the potential of the individual; a predilection for the artist in particular and the creative
spirit in general; and a distrust of classical forms and traditions.
The difference is that Transcendentalism arose out of the crucible of the American experience. Transcendentalism shared the
same values as nineteenth-century Americans, especially in its optimism, faith in the individual, and belief in democracy. A central
tenet of Transcendentalism was the conviction that human beings could elevate themselves beyond their baser animal instincts, attain
a higher consciousness, and take part in the spirit of the divine. Transcendentalism was also democratic in its principles.
Transcendentalists believed that all people were equal in the eyes of God, and all had sufficient spiritual power to intuit God in their
daily lives. Until 1860, there was no reason for the collective body of Americans to disbelieve such higher views of humankind.
America was making such great progress economically, politically, technologically, culturally that it seemed to many that the
direction and destiny of America was obviously toward a higher evolution of humankind.