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Romanticism - A Complete Summary
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Introduction: Romanticism1. "Romanticism"
• No agreement even on spelling: romantic or Romantic
• Easily confused with everyday use of the word nowadays (usually not capitalized) = clichéd,
formulaic kind of sentimentalism and tenderness + prone to naïve idealizations and
enthusiasms
• An essentially contested retrospective term that became widespread since the 1820s
"Romantic": Meaning & History
“Romantic” ironically derives from the city of Rome, although we tend to regard the
ancient Romans as the least Romantic of peoples (by contrast, the tourist industry now
promotes Rome as “The Romantic City”)
The shift happened in the Middle Ages, when the Franks adopted Old French, the
descendant of Latin spoken in France, and called it Romauns
“Romance” also came to stand for the tales written in this language: tales of chivalry,
magic, love = the ancestors of the modern novel (today still called “roman” in French,
Dutch, or German)
English came to adopt the term “novel” from Italian (“storia novella”) and kept
“romance” for these medieval stories as well as certain descendants (see Hawthorne’s
The Scarlet Letter: A Romance or today’s “Harlequin Romances”)
By the mid-18th century, “romantick” started to catch on in English, though it began to
be applied to literature only by the end of the century in Germany (the Schlegel
brothers)
By the 1820s the term was widely and passionately debated in especially Continental
Europe, where it was used to make the distinction with “classical” (or what we would
now label “neoclassical”)
Note that none of those authors whom we now consider to be the great English
Romantic writers of either the first or second generation called themselves or their
writings Romantic!
Different application from parallel terms in our program
“Realism”: many of its authors did insist on the accuracy with which they represented
“reality” (but still avoided the –ism)
“Modernism”: retrospective again as an overarching term, though many of its
practitioners insisted on being “modern” or responding to “the modern world”
“Postmodernism”: mostly a label invented and stuck by academics
-isms are always largely retrospective
Beware of their reductive tendency
Beware of their homogenizing tendency
Beware of their unifying tendency (not everything is a romantic feature!)
A matter of imposing patterns in hindsight that were certainly not obvious or agreed-
upon while occurring (think of our own times)
Yet also: distance (in time and space) makes us see patterns + as humans we have a
deep evolutionary talent for establishing links and seeing patterns
, Not an arbitrary invention
The term derives from a need to distinguish from, and contrast with, the 18th-century
literature, philosophy, art, etc. that preceded
Literature: “Augustan” (valuing balance and order after a period of civil war)
Pope is the most important 18th-century poet and the best example of "Augustan"
poetry
Philosophy: Enlightenment (though the Romantics in many ways are indebted to this)
Art: (Neo)Classicism (// Augustanism)
A Sample Definition from Michael Ferber’s Romanticism: A Very Short Introduction
Romanticism was a European cultural movement, or set of kindred movements, which found in a
symbolic and internalized romance plot a vehicle for exploring one’s self and its relationship to
others and to nature, which privileged the imagination as a faculty higher and more inclusive than
reason, which sought solace in or reconciliation with the natural world, which
“detranscendentalized” religion by taking God or the divine as inherent in nature or in the soul
and replaced theological doctrine with metaphor and feeling, which honored poetry and all the
arts as the highest human creations, and which rebelled against the established canons of
neoclassical aesthetics and against both aristocratic and bourgeois social and political norms in
favor of values more individual, inward, and emotional.
2. Romanticism: timetable
Since it’s a retrospective term, how precisely we delineate the period is our own
judgment call?
Dependent especially on three factors:
1. Which aspect of social reality (politics, social history, art, poetry, fiction)?
2. Which country / linguistic culture?
3. Which features of Romanticism?
Examples of Periodization
Norton Anthologies:
- English literature: Rmtm = 1785-1830
- “American Literature 1820-1865”
Longman Anthology: avoids time limits
Michael Alexander: Rmtm = 1790-1837
Peter Widdowson: Rmtm = 1790-1829
Duncan Wu in his 1500-page Romanticism: An Anthology: timeline for 1770-1851
Note the nonliterary nature of some of these time limits
1830: accession of a new king (William IV)
1837: accession of Queen Victoria (Victorian period: 1837-1901)
1865 in a US context: end of the Civil War
Note also the usual simplification of thinking in decades: cf. starting points like 1770,
1790, 1820
,Some effects on this course
Exclusion of Victorian poets, though the main figures like Lord Tennyson, Elizabeth
Barrett, and Robert Browning are in many ways still largely Romantic
Inclusion of what is strictly speaking a Victorian novel: Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights
(in many ways more Romantic than Jane Austen, who was writing during the supposed
heyday of Romanticism)
American texts covering quite a different, later period (from ca. 1830 until after the Civil
War)
“Romantic” as flexible on both ends
“Pre-Romantic”: esp. the important emergence of a culture of Sensibility, c.1740-1789
(examples: Thomas Gray in the 1740s, James Macpherson’s pseudo-medieval Ossian,
the suicide boy Thomas Chatterton, the rise of Gothic fiction as of the 1760s)
“Post-Romantic”: easily runs on into the early 20th century (applicable to a lot of
Modernist artists, cf. search for what is revolutionary, original etc.)
Different applications according to country or art form
Germany: “Romanticism” used for a much shorter window of time; extra label of Sturm
und Drang (already in 1770s); by early 19th century another term: Klassik (Goethe and
Schiller)
Music: pretty much all of 19th-century art music is dominated by Romanticism: also
figures from the second half of the century like Brahms, Wagner, Bruckner, Dvořák,
Tchaikovsky, even down to Mahler (transition into 20th century)
Painting: contrary to music, here the term is usually applied to less than half of the 19th
century
Highlights from the Period's Political Context
American Revolution = 1776
Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson (1776; affirmation of the right to “life,
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”); War of Independence (1775-83) won under the
leadership of General George Washington ( first President); establishment of a federal
republic with a Constitution (1789) and a Bill of Rights guaranteeing state and individual
rights
French Revolution = 1789: fall of the aristocracy
1789: started with the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the overthrow of royalty
and a feudal aristocratic system (slogan: “Liberty Equality Fraternity”); followed by
turbulent years: Jacobin extremists, massacres, the king and queen executed, invasions,
thousands of citizens guillotined during the Reign of Terror under Robespierre, the
despot Napoleon Bonaparte, several wars, Napoleon crowning himself emperor (1805)
and finally being defeated at the Battle of Waterloo (1815)
Political Context
Especially the French Revolution triggered a lot of polemical writings in England:
1. Edmund Burke: the voice of conservative opponents pleading against such revolutions
(cf. the sublime)
2. Thomas Paine: Rights of Man (pro Revolution)
3. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Vindication of the Rights of Men (followed by …of Women)
4. William Godwin (MW’s husband): Inquiry Concerning Political Justice
, These foreign revolutions led to a backlash in Britain: a political climate of harsh repression,
esp. during the Regency era (1811-20, when the Prince Regent stood in for the mad King
George III), which triumphed after the defeat of Napoleon and blocked all political and social
reform for decades (until 1832: first Reform Bill)
Socioeconomic context
Unsettling effects of the First Industrial Revolution (during which Britain is a leader)
Invention of the steam machine European nations quickly moving from agricultural to
manufacturing societies (esp. England)
Quickly enlarging working classes, demanding a better life (cf. “Luddites” smashing up
machines, the “Peterloo” Massacre in Manchester in 1819)
The Romantic belief and trust in human progress (which derives from the
Enlightenment) is at odds with the increasing predominance of economic values,
industrialization, science and technology, urbanization (fast-growing, dirty,
overcrowded, morally corrupting cities), whose mere utilitarianism is often contested by
Romantic writers (e.g. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein)
Nature becomes a major topic, esp. in its divine, spiritual, ideal, moral dimensions,
which all stand in opposition to the mechanical worldview of 17thC and 18thC scientific
philosophers
The overall economic context for Romantic writers and artists is fickle: a time of
constant wars, revolutions, cycles of inflation and depression, economic laissez-faire
policies (cf. belief in freedom, translated economically as unfettered free enterprise)
For the changing economic position of the writer: see List of Features
Cultural Context
• This is also the era of the Romantic idealization of the People (das Volk) and the birth of
the modern nation-state
interest in constructing a national history
interest in folklore and cultural legends
3. Romanticism: Beware of the Features!
• For every text and author: keep checking them against the List of Features!
• Ultimate hope: that you come away from this course with two almost contradictory feelings:
1. Continuity: our closest cultural ancestors
2. Discontinuity: in many ways already strange and alien to us
4. Romantic Fiction
• The strength of English Romanticism lies almost all in its poetry, yet there was also fiction;
these were the 4 major varieties:
1. The Gothic novel (see synoptic notes on Blackboard)
2. The novel of ideas / purpose (e.g. the social philosopher William Godwin, Mary Shelley’s
father)
3. The historical novel (often regional in focus; most famous example: Sir Walter Scott)
4. The novel of manners (not a new genre; most famous, ironic practitioner: Jane Austen)
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