Websearch: British Romanticism
The Romantic period in British Literature (roughly 1780-1832) stands at the nexus of the Enlightenment's promotion of commerce, reason, and liberty and the Victorian experience of industrialization and empire. Romanticism, as embodied in both artistic production and cultural reception, elevated aesthetic practice to an almost divine activity, a realm wherein the individual might forge his or her very self as an ethical, political, and creative being.
In recent decades, the field of Romantic studies has consistently produced some of the most influential and wide-ranging theoretical models for literary analysis and remains a vibrant and ever-progressing area of study. Our own work in the department has produced explorations of theatricality, museums, collections, nationalism, and the unique contribution of women writers from the period. (link)
Some scholars point to the publication of "Lyrical Ballads," in 1798, as the start of the Romantic period, while others say the period started earlier (around 1785) with Blake's "Songs of Innocence" and other works by Charles Lamb, Jane Austen, and Sir Walter Scott. (link)
British Romanticism (1780-1850)
Country: England, Britain, Europe.
Article contributed by
Stuart Sillars, University of Bergen
Romanticism is the name given to a variety of thought, writing and general artistic world view that became dominant in Europe from the later eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth. Some date its beginnings in England from the French Revolution of 1789 and the radical poetry published by William Blake between 1789 and 1795, others to the publication in 1798 of the Lyrical Ballads by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but its origins are probably earlier. Certainly the concept of the “Romantick” is found already in the 1730s. Its ending is generally considered to be some time in the 1830s, with the political changes created by the extension of the franchise in 1832, or the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837. The Romantic novel, perhaps because of developments in printing and distribution of the form, flourished somewhat later, arguably beginning with Walter Scott in 1813 and ending with the Brontës around 1850. However, both the start and the end of the period generally considered “Romantic”, as well as its major constituent features, are subject to debate.
The ideas of the French writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau (published 1750-1778) that stress the importance of following nature and human instincts, were developed in England in the cult of sensibility or sensibilité, emphasising feeling in response to contact with people or the natural world, and expounded and to some degree satirised in Henry Mackenzie’s very popular novel The Man of Feeling (1771). At around the same time, William Gilpin embarked upon a series of writings that began the movement known as the Picturesque, which rested on representing and reorganising physical landscape in a manner most pleasing to the beholder. His Essay upon Prints: Containing Remarks upon the Principles of Picturesque Beauty (1768) was significant in stressing the importance of expression in visual art, and his later writings, chronicling a series of “Picturesque Tours”, introduced the exchange between inner and outer, each functioning as a metaphor of the other, that underlies a great deal of English Romantic writing and visual art, with which it is very closely linked.
The relation between the natural world and the beholder, with the consequent states of feeling that are aroused and reflected, is a central element of British Romanticisim, but it is not the only one, nor is it always independent of other strong features. Political elements are featured quite prominently in much Romantic writing, growing from a sense of the injustice of eighteenth-century political and social structures; and this makes itself apparent in the structures of poetry and the novel, which move away from the formality of earlier organisations, especially the rhyming decasyllabic couplets favoured by Alexander Pope (1688-1744) and most writers of the “Augustan” period (so called after the Roman emperor in which formal writing was thought by many to reach ... (incomplete. link)