Romanticism
The Literary Movement
1798-1837
Historical context of Romanticism
•	1789-French Rev.
•	1793-1802, 1803-1815 Napoleonic Wars
•	1798- Preface to Lyrical Ballads Published
•	1832-1st reform bill, expands voting rights, made society less aristocratic
•	1837-Victoria takes the throne
What is Romanticism?
•	A movement in art and literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in revolt against the Neoclassicism of the previous centuries...The German poet Friedrich Schlegel, who is given credit for first using the term romantic to describe literature, defined it as "literature depicting emotional matter in an imaginative form.”
“Liberalism in Literature”- Hugo
•	Imagination, emotion, and freedom are certainly the focal points of romanticism.
•	characteristics of the literature of romanticism include subjectivity and an emphasis on individualism; 
•	spontaneity; freedom from rules; solitary life rather than life in society; 
•	the beliefs that imagination is superior to reason and devotion to beauty; 
Characteristics and Authors
•	love of and worship of nature; and fascination with the past, especially the myths and mysticism of the middle ages. 
•	English poets: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats 
•	American poets: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allen Poe, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman.
Schools of British Romanticism
•	Lake School
•	Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey
•	The Cockney School
•	Keats, Leigh Hunt
•	The Satanic School
•	Byron, Shelly
Romantic Themes
•	Exploring the human heart
•	Exploring the deep self	
•	The identity of the poet as special, genius
•	The quest for transcendence
•	The mind’s encounter with nature
•	The supernatural
Key Romantic Ideas
•	Human mind complex
•	individual self changes
•	poet is special, has special talents
•	poems reflect poet’s feelings
•	children are of interest
•	imagination is a source of inspiration
What does “Romantic” mean?
•	The American Scholar A.O. Lovejoy once observed that the word 'romantic' has come to mean so many things that, by itself, it means nothing at all.The variety of its actual and possible meanings and connotations reflect the complexity and multiplicity of European romanticism. In The Decline and Fall of the Romantic Ideal (1948) F.L. Lucas counted 11,396 definitions of 'romanticism'. 
Etymology of Romanticism
•	The word romantic (ism) has a complex and interesting history. In the Middle Ages 'romance' denoted the new vernacular languages derived from Latin - distinctive from  Latin itself, which was the language of learning. Enromancier, romancar, romanz meant to compose or translate books in the vernacular. The work produced was then called romanz, roman, romanzo and romance. 
Etymology cont’d
•	A roman or romant came to be known as an imaginative work and a 'courtly romance'. The terms also signified a 'popular book'. There are early suggestions that it was something new, different, divergent. By the 17th c. in Britain and France, 'romance' has acquired the derogatory connotations of fanciful, bizarre, exaggerated, chimerical. 

•	In France a distinction was made between romanesque (derogatory) and romantique (which meant 'tender', 'gentle', 'sentimental' and 'sad'). In Germany the word romantisch was used in the 17th c. in the French sense of romanesque, and then, increasingly from the middle of the 18th c., in the English sense of 'gentle', 'melancholy'. 
18th C English Romanticim
•	Many theorize that the romantic movement really started in Britain. In the 18th c.,a definite shift in sensibility and feeling, particularly in relation to the natural order and nature occurs. In the works of Keats, Coleridge and Wordsworth, many of their sentiments and responses are foreshadowed by what has been described as a 'pre-romantic sensibility'. Definitive dates are difficult to give.
Romanticism as a reaction to the Gothic Novel and Neoclassical Period
•	the text was a reaction to the age of reason, order, and politics of Eighteenth century England. 
•	The use of the sublime and the overt use of the supernatural profoundly influenced the style and material of the emerging romantics. Coleridge writes a Gothic drama, Shelley writes two Gothic Novels and Byron writes Manfred.

Romanticism as a Reaction to the Gothic genre
•	The English Gothic Novel-1764 to 1834 
•	The Gothic novel dominated English literature from its conception in 1764 with the publication of The Castle of Ortanto by Horace Walpole; condemned for being “base” 
•	has been continually criticized by numerous critics for its sensationalism, melodramatic qualities, and its play on the supernatural.
GOTHIC LITERATURE
•	drew many of its intense images from the graveyard poets, intermingling a landscape of vast dark forest with vegetation that bordered on excessive, concealed ruins with horrific rooms, monasteries and a forlorn character who excels at the melancholy. Gothic literature was a disappointment to the idealistic romantic poets because it was not realistic, had no high purpose, concerned with sensationalism.

•	Gothic novels started to ease by 1815. 
•	The influence of the Gothic novel is felt today in the portrayal of the alluring antagonist, whose evil characteristics appeal to ones sense of awe, or the melodramatic aspects of romance, or more specifically in the Gothic motif of a persecuted maiden forced apart from a true love.