For education purpose.

1. Romantic Age
Prepared by Megha Trivedi
Department of English
MKBU

2. Romantic Revival (1745 – 1798)
 Romanticism
 A style in the fine arts and literature
 Passion over reason
 Imagination and intuition over logic
 Full expression of emotion and spontaneous action restrain the order
 Romanticism contrast with Classism
 From 18th century to mid – 19th century

3. Medieval Romances
Flourished in the 12th century when clerks, working for aristocratic patrons, began
to write for a leisured and refined society.
 Courtly love and romance was the vehicle of a new aristocratic culture which was
based in France and spread to other parts of Western Europe.
 Features of medieval romances that influenced the Romantic movement
Romantic Revival
 18th century in both England and Germany saw a strong reaction against the
rationalistic canons of French classicism.

5. Characteristics of Romanticism
• Freedom of Expression
• Revolt against the Literary Convention
• Freedom of Revolution
• Freedom of the Common Man
• Strong, Original, Authentic Feeling
• Natural Language
• Individualism
• The poet as Prophet
• Sublime Beauty of Nature
• Idealization of Rural Living (Urban to Rural)
• Reform in Politics and Education
• Romanticism in Painting
• Romantic Music
• Romanticism in Literature

6. Transitional Poetry
 Reaction against the intellectual Augustan poetry
 Emphasis on originality and inspiration
 Portrayed rural, life of the common man in the countryside
 John Dyer, James Thomson, Oliver Goldsmith

7. Graveyard Poets or Churchyard Poets
• Found inspiration from graveyard
• Poems set in graveyard
• Focus on the lives of ordinary, undignified characters
• Contributed to the melancholy side of Romanticism
• Thomas Gray – Gray’s Elegy written in country Churchyard - 1751
• William Collins – wrote Odes
• William Cowper

8. 1. William Blake
• Innocence and Experience
• The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
2. Robert Burns

9. Gothic Romance
 Gothic novel is a kind of European Romantic, Pseudo medieval fiction having a
prevailing atmosphere of mystery and terror
 Commonly used setting as castles or monasteries equipped with subterranean passage,
dark battlements, hidden panels, and trapdoors
 The Gothic vogue was initiated in England by Horace Walpole’s immensely successful
novel ‘The Castle of Otranto’ (1765)
 Other Gothic Novelists
1) Ann Radcliffe – The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794)
2) Matthew Gregory – The Monk (1796)
3) William Thomas Beckford – Vathek (1786)
4) William Godwin – Caleb Williams (1794)
5) P B Shelley
6) Mary Shelly – Frankenstein (1818)

10.  Walter Scott (1771 – 1832)
- Scottish writer, Poet and greatest historical novelist
- His works such as Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802 -03), The
Lady of the Last Minstrel (1805), Waverley (1814)
- Waverly novels are a long series of Scottish by Scott, starting from
Waverley (1814)
- English novels such as Ivanhoe (1819) and Kenilworth (1821)

11. Early Romantics (1798 – 1815)
 Principles of Early Romantic Poetry
 Revolt against Industrialization and modernity
 Support to rustic life
 Renaissance of wonder
 Return to nature

12. The Age of Revolution
• American Revolution (1775 – 83)
• French Revolution (1789 – 99)
• Napoleonic Wars (1803 – 15)

13. Features of the Age
• Free Trade
• Population
• Riots
• Attitude of Nature
• Periodical Writing
1) The Examiner (1808 – 86) started by Leigh Hunt and John Hunt
2) The Edinburgh Review (1802 – 1929) Whig newspaper
3) The Quarterly Review (1809 – 1967) Tory newspaper
4) The Blackwood’s Magazine (1817 – 1980) Tory magazine
5) The London Magazine

14. Poets
• William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850)
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge ( 1772 – 1834)
• Robert Southey (1774 – 1843)

15. Late Romantics and Prose Writers (1815 – 1851)
• Shared their predecessors’ passion for liberty.
• Desire to be free of convention and tyranny.
• A new emphasis on the rights and dignity of the individual.
• Criticism of the bourgeois society.
• Experimentation with form and technique.
• Importance of originality.
• Rise of realism marked the end of romanticism
• Realism rebelled against romanticism but romanticism not died out completely.
• Romanticism in Germany and America ( Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller,
Hawthorne, Melville, Poe, Walt Whiteman )
• American considered nature as a haven where the self can fulfil its potential.

16. The 2ed Generation Poets in England
• Byron, Shelley, Keats
• All three distinct from the lake school of poets
• All born at the time of the French revolution

17. Novelists
• Walter Scott (1771 – 1832)
• Jane Austen (1775 – 1817)
Prose writers
• Charles Lamb (1775 – 1834)
• William Hazlitt (1778 – 1830)
• Thomas De Quincey (1785 -1859)

18. Reference: A Contemporary Encyclopaedia of English Literature,
Volume II, by Kalyani Vallath.

19. Thanks