Romanticism
- LAST REVIEWED: 15 June 2017
- LAST MODIFIED: 29 September 2014
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199846719-0109
- LAST REVIEWED: 15 June 2017
- LAST MODIFIED: 29 September 2014
- DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199846719-0109
Introduction
“Romanticism” is a retrospective, 20th-century name for a literary movement created, retrospectively, by critics and historians. During the period in which it supposedly flourished, the authors subsequently seen as its embodiments—William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley (all poets)—did not view themselves as parts of a united movement. Moreover, they wrote under the influence of, and in alliance with, writers not considered “Romantic” at all. Accordingly, this article considers them as part of lively and contested literary culture that in the years 1780–1830 saw the rise of women writers and laboring-class writers to eminence and inaugurated the popularity of the magazine essay, the Gothic novel, and the historical novel. The period also gave rise to political journalism of lasting power, to Orientalist and travel writing, to antislavery literature, to the cults of sensibility and the picturesque, and to an unparalleled closeness between literary and scientific writing. All these contexts and genres, much explored by critics and historians since the 1980s, are featured in this article.
Introductory Works
The expansion of the canon of works studied and the development of new scholarly methodologies have rendered it difficult to introduce the field in one volume. These two works do an excellent job: Gaull 1988 offers a fast-moving progress through most aspects of the culture of the period; Roe 2005 offers a greater variety of critical approaches.
Gaull, Marilyn. English Romanticism: The Human Context. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1988.
NNNA highly readable, information-packed survey of Romantic-era writing and culture, ideal for new students. Gaull discusses authors individually, but also key genres and political and cultural issues.
Roe, Nicholas, ed. Romanticism: An Oxford Guide. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005.
NNNAn accessible and thorough handbook, with contributions by many eminent critics, to the literature and culture of the period. Topic-based essay discussions and bibliographies provide a helpful introduction to debates in the scholarly field, as well as to the period itself.
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Article
- 1916
- Abbey Theatre
- Alfred (King)
- Alliterative Verse
- Ancrene Wisse, and the Katherine and Wooing Groups
- Anglo-Irish Poetry, 1500–1800
- Anglo-Saxon Hagiography
- Arthurian Literature
- Austen, Jane
- Ballard, J. G.
- Barnes, Julian
- Beckett, Samuel
- Behn, Aphra
- Biblical Literature
- Biography and Autobiography
- Blake, William
- Bloomsbury Group
- Bowen, Elizabeth
- Brontë, Anne
- Browne, Thomas
- Burgess, Anthony
- Burney, Frances
- Burns, Robert
- Butler, Hubert
- Byron, Lord
- Carroll, Lewis
- Carter, Angela
- Catholic Literature
- Celtic and Irish Revival
- Censorship
- Chatterton, Thomas
- Chaucer, Geoffrey
- Chorographical and Landscape Writing
- Coffeehouse
- Congreve, William
- Conrad, Joseph
- Crime Fiction
- Defoe, Daniel
- Diaries
- Dickens, Charles
- Donne, John
- Dracula
- Drama, Northern Irish
- Drayton, Michael
- Early Modern Prose, 1500-1650
- Eighteenth-Century Novel
- Eliot, George
- English Bible and Literature, The
- English Civil War / War of the Three Kingdoms
- English Reformation Literature
- Epistolatory Novel, The
- Erotic, Obscene, and Pornographic Writing, 1660-1900
- Everyman
- Famine
- Ferrier, Susan
- Fielding, Henry
- Ford, Ford Madox
- French Revolution, 1789–1799
- Friel, Brian
- Gascoigne, George
- Gay, John
- Globe Theatre
- Golding, William
- Goldsmith, Oliver
- Gosse, Edmund
- Gower, John
- Gray, Thomas
- Gunpowder Plot (1605), The
- Hardy, Thomas
- Heaney, Seamus
- Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey
- Herbert, George
- Highlands, The
- Hogg, James
- Holmes, Sherlock
- Hopkins, Gerard Manley
- Hurd, Richard
- Ireland and Memory Studies
- Irish Crime Fiction
- Irish Famine, Writing of the
- Irish Gothic Tradition
- Irish Life Writing
- Irish Modernism
- Irish Poetry of the First World War
- Irish Short Story, The
- Irish Travel Writing
- Johnson, B. S.
- Johnson, Samuel
- Jones, David
- Jonson, Ben
- Joyce, James
- Keats, John
- Kelman, James
- Kempe, Margery
- Lamb, Charles and Mary
- Larkin, Philip
- Law, Medieval
- Lawrence, D. H.
- Literature, Neo-Latin
- Literature of the Bardic Revival
- Literature of the Irish Civil War
- Literature of the 'Thirties
- Lyly, John
- Mabinogion
- MacDiarmid, Hugh
- MacPherson, James
- Malory, Thomas
- Marlowe, Christopher
- Marvell, Andrew
- Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
- McEwan, Ian
- McGuckian, Medbh
- Medieval Lyrics
- Medieval Manuscripts
- Medieval Scottish Poetry
- Medieval Sermons
- Middleton, Thomas
- Milton, John
- Miéville, China
- Modernism
- Morality Plays
- Morris, William
- Muir, Edwin
- Muldoon, Paul
- Mysticism
- Ní Chuilleanáin, Eiléan
- Nonsense Literature
- Novel, Contemporary British
- Novel, The Contemporary Irish
- O’Casey, Sean
- O'Connor, Frank
- O’Faoláin, Seán
- Old English Literature
- Patronage
- Percy, Thomas
- Picaresque
- Piers Plowman
- Pope, Alexander
- Postmodernism
- Post-War Irish Drama
- Post-war Irish Writing
- Pre-Raphaelites
- Prosody and Meter: Early Modern to 19th Century
- Prosody and Meter: Twentieth Century
- Psychoanalysis
- Quincey, Thomas De
- Ralegh (Raleigh), Sir Walter
- Ramsay, Allan and Robert Fergusson
- Richardson, Samuel
- Rise of the Novel in Britain, 1660–1780, The
- Robin Hood Literature
- Romance
- Romance, Medieval English
- Romanticism
- Ruskin, John
- Science Fiction
- Scott, Walter
- Shakespeare, William
- Shaw, George Bernard
- Shelley, Percy Bysshe
- Sidney, Mary, Countess of Pembroke
- Sinclair, Iain
- Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
- Smollett, Tobias
- Sonnet and Sonnet Sequence
- Spenser, Edmund
- Sterne, Laurence
- Swift, Jonathan
- Synge, John Millington
- Thomas, Dylan
- Thomas, R. S.
- Tóibín, Colm
- Travel Writing
- Trollope, Anthony
- Tudor Literature
- Utopian and Dystopian Literature to 1800
- Vampire Fiction
- Verse Satire from the Renaissance to the Romantic Period
- Webster, John
- Welsh, Irvine
- Welsh Poetry, Medieval
- Welsh Writing Before 1500
- Wilmot, John, Second Earl of Rochester
- Wollstonecraft, Mary
- Wollstonecraft Shelley, Mary
- Wordsworth, William
- Writing and Evolutionary Theory
- Wulfstan, Archbishop of York
- Wyatt, Thomas
- Yeats, W. B.