British Romanticism 1

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British Romanticism
Professor Elisa Lima Abrantes
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Description
Introduction to English literature from 1785 to 1830, by examining the nature of the literary period called
Romanticism and emphasizing the works of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott.
Purpose
The analysis of English literature from the Romantic Period (1785-1830) in light of an improved
understanding of the cultural, political, social, and artistic movements of the time will help students identify
literary devices, techniques and traditions at work in texts of the period and connect these to themes and
meanings. Students will therefore get acquainted with the manner these writers contribute to an
understanding of some Romantic issues including imagination, art, revolution, gender, race, and class.
Preparation
Before beginning this Unit, just make sure you have a good English dictionary at hand. There are many good
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online options, and we surely recommend both the Merriam-Webster and the Cambridge dictionaries.
Goals
Section 1
Context and in�uences of Romanticism
To identify the political, economic, and social contexts that led to the emergence of Romanticism in
England in the last decades of the 18th century.
Section 2
First and second generations of romantics poets
To analyze some elements present in the English Romantic poetry of the 1st and 2nd generations of poets.
Section 3
Study of novels by Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott
To recognize the characteristics of the English Romantic fiction through the study of novels by Jane
Austen and Sir Walter Scott.
Although the word romantic, nowadays, may bring us images of love and sentimentality, the term
Romanticism has a much wider meaning. It covers a range of developments in art, literature, music
and philosophy, from the late 18th and early 19th centuries. The Romantics would not have used this
term to define themselves: the label was applied retrospectively after the middle of the 19th century
Warm-Up
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1 - Context and in�uences of Romanticism
term to define themselves: the label was applied retrospectively, after the middle of the 19th century.
During that period, major transitions took place in society, as artists and intellectuals challenged the
Establishment. There was an emphasis on the importance of the individual and a conviction that
people should follow ideals rather than imposed conventions and rules. The Romantics rejected the
rationalism and order associated with the preceding Enlightenment age and advocated for the
importance of expressing personal feelings.
In this Unit, you will be introduced to the context and influences that led to the emergence of English
Romanticism. Also, you will get familiar with six great English poets emblematic of English
Romanticism.
In England, the poets were at the heart of this movement. They were inspired by a desire for liberty
and denounced the exploitation of the poor. These poets were committed to their responsibility to
inform, inspire, and change society for the better.
In the last section, you will be introduced to Romantic Prose by examining two remarkable fictionists
of the time: Jane Austen (1775-1817) and Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832).
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By the end of this section, you will be able to identify the political,
economic, and social contexts that led to the emergence of Romanticism
in England in the last decades of the 18th century.
The Romantic Period (1785-1830) - context
and in�uences
Romantic Era
Romanticism is not what you may think it is...
The term Romantic period is used to refer to the time span between the year 1785, the midpoint of the
decade in which English poets published their first poems, and 1830, by which time the major writers of the
preceding century were either dead or no longer productive.
This was a turbulent period, during which England experienced the challenge of transforming from an
agricultural society, where wealth and power had been concentrated in the landholding aristocracy, into a
modern industrial nation.
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Iron and Coal, William Bell Scott, 1855-1860.
This change took place in a context of revolutions — first the American and then the more radical French —
and of Anglo-French wars (from 1793 until the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815), of economic cycles of
inflation and depression, and the constant threat, posed by imported revolutionary ideologies, to the social
structure.
During the second half of the 18th century, the country went through the Industrial Revolution, when new
industries sprang up and new processes were applied to the manufacture of products. This industrial
development, mainly of cloth, coal, and iron was marked by an increase in the export of these materials.
Coalbrookdale by Night, Philipp Jakob Loutherbourg, 1801.
With the prosperity brought by trade, much money was invested in road and canal-building.
The first railway line, which was launched in 1830 from Liverpool to Manchester, allowed many people
inspired by poets of Romanticism to discover the beauty of their own country.
See this painting, portraying the Duke of Wellington's train and other locomotives being readied for departure
from Liverpool, 15 September 1830.
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Friendly reminder
The Industrial Revolution brought about huge changes to English society. It helped to create both great
fortunes and great hardship.
England went from being a country of small villages with independent craftsmen to a country of huge
factories, and sweatshops full of men, women, and children who lived in overcrowded and dangerous city
slums.
The presence of a developing democracy, the ugliness of the sudden and unordered
growth of industrial cities, and the search for profit characterized what was in many
respects the best and the worst of times.
Besides the great advancements and drawbacks of industrialization in England, the Romantic era was a time
of rebellion in Europe, with the French Revolution (1789), and in the New World, with the declaration of
independence of the thirteen colonies of America (1776) and the revolutionary wars of independence (1775-
1783).
The early romantic English poets were inspired by the French Revolution ideals, with the hope that it would
bring about political change and better conditions of life to ordinary people.
Liberty leading the people, Eugène Delacroix, 1830.
However, the bloody Reign of Terror (1793-1794), under the leadership of Maximilien Robespierre, with its
series of mass massacres and numerous public executions of the “enemies of the revolution” (BRITANNICA,
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series of mass massacres and numerous public executions of the enemies of the revolution (BRITANNICA,
2020), was a period during which:
These awful events shocked the poets deeply and affected their views. William Wordsworth, for example, in
his youth, was enthusiastic about the republican cause in France, but he gradually became disenchanted with
the revolutionaries.
The Romantic movement meant a shift of sensibility in art and literature and was based on the
interdependence of Man and Nature.
It was a style in European art, literature, and music that emphasizedthe importance of feeling, emotion, and
imagination rather than reason or thought.
300,000 suspects were arrested.
17,000 were officially executed.
10,000 died in prison or without trial.
40,000 are estimated to have been executed.
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Old sarum, John Constable, 1834.
Romanticism in literature came into being in direct reaction against a variety of ideas and historical events
taking place in England and Europe at that time. There was tension in the writings as the poets tried to face
the contradictions of life.
William Blake, for example, published Songs of Innocence and Experience, Shewing the Two Contrary States
of the Human Soul (1794).
"The Lamb", from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul, William Blake, 1794.
In this book, we find two different perspectives on religion in The Lamb and The Tyger.
The simple vocabulary and form of The Lamb suggest that God is the loving Good Shepherd.
"The Tyger", from Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul, William Blake, 1795.
In contrast, the creator depicted in The Tyger is a powerful blacksmith.
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The speaker is stunned by the exotic, frightening animal, posing the rhetorical question:
‘Did he who made the Lamb make thee?’
In The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-1793), Blake asserted:
Without contraries is no progression.
(stanza 8)
A seminal book of essays that represents well the climate among the leading artists of the time is William
Hazlitt’s The Spirit of the Age (1825). This author believed that the crucial event for his generation had been
the French Revolution:
The outbreak was registered in England with the dramatic news that the Bastille in Paris, a
fortress prison that was the symbol of despotic power, had been stormed in July 1789.
In that event and its political, intellectual, and imaginative repercussions, he saw both the
promise and the failures of his violent and contradictory era.
Hazlitt defended that the characteristic poetry of the age was shaped by the pressure of
revolution and its reaction and by those sentiments which produced that revolution.
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For him, Wordsworth’s poetry was a pure emanation of the spirit of the age.
[Wordsworth’s poetry] partakes of, and is carried along with, the
revolutionary movement of our age: the political changes of the day
were the model on which he formed and conducted his poetical
experiments.
(HAZLITT, 2004, chap. X)
Other essayists and writers shared the view that the age had a spirit of revolutionary change. John Stuart
Mill (1806-1873) wrote a series of essays on the spirit of the age.
Percy Shelley (1792-1822) in A Philosophical View of Reform (1819), reviewing the outbreaks of liberty
against the tyranny which culminated in the American and French revolutions, asserted that the related crisis
of change in England had been accompanied by a literary flourishing, in which the poets displayed a
“comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit that was less their own spirit than the spirit of their age.” (CLARK,
1954, p.239-240).
Hazlitt and his contemporary viewers of the literary scene claimed the Romantic period was an age
obsessed with the violent and inclusive change brought by the French Revolution.
John Stuart Mill (1806-1873)
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Percy Shelley (1792-1822)
William Hazlitt (1778-1830)
It is not an exaggeration to say that English romantic poets were political and social artists. They genuinely
thought that they were prophetic figures who could interpret the realities of their era. They highlighted the
power of imagination because they believed that it could enable people to transcend their troubles.
Their creative talents could illuminate and transform the world into a coherent whole, and regenerate
mankind spiritually. Many romantic poets made political and social comments in essays, speeches,
pamphlets, editorials, or sermons.
In his essay A Defence of Poetry (1821), Shelley elevated the status of poets stating that they “measure the
circumference and sound the depths of human nature with a comprehensive and all-penetrating spirit.”
(SHELLEY, 2013).
Attention
It is important to highlight that in England, the romantic authors were individuals with many contrary views,
but all of them were against injustice and inequality, against suffering and human selfishness. They all
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but all of them were against injustice and inequality, against suffering and human selfishness. They all
depicted the interdependence of man and nature, as well as based their theories on intuition and the wisdom
of their hearts. They hoped to find a way of changing the social order through their writing and believed
literature to be a sort of mission to reach the wisdom of the Universe.
Democratic language and intense emotion
Another characteristic of English Romantic poets was that they were concerned about the elitism of earlier
poets, whose sophisticated language and subject were neither accessible nor relevant to ordinary people.
They thought that poetry should be democratic; that it should be composed in the language really spoken by
men, as Wordsworth exposes in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802).
For this reason, he tried to give voice:
to the rural poor
to the insane
to the discharged soldiers
to the working-class women and children
to those who tended to be marginalized and oppressed by society
In the next section, we will examine better some works of Wordsworth and other poets.
Title page from: Wordsworth, William and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Lyrical Ballads, with a few other poems.
To restore mankind, the Romantics affirmed that it was necessary to start all over again with a childlike
perspective. They believed that children were innocent and uncorrupted and had an affinity with nature. This
idea resembles the thought of the Swiss philosopher of the Enlightenment and predecessor of Romanticism,
Jean Jacques Rosseau (1712-1778), who proclaimed the natural goodness of man, asserting that:
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Jean Jacques Rosseau (1712 1778), who proclaimed the natural goodness of man, asserting that:
Humans are born good, wise, and free, but society corrupts and enslaves them.
In the state of nature, people were innocent, egoism was absent, and compassion was present.
Learn more
According to Rousseau, the laws of nature were benevolent, and all humans were equal; distinction and
differentiation among humans were the products of culture and civilization, and the influence of society was
responsible for the misconduct of the individual. One of his famous sayings is “Man is born free, and
everywhere he is in chains” (ROUSSEAU, 2014, Chap. I).
With the conviction that being close to nature would bring about the best in humans, the Romantic verse
presents reverence for the natural world. Romantic poets were inspired by the environment and encouraged
people to enter new territories, both literally and metaphorically. In their writings, they made the world seem a
place with unlimited potential.
Port on a stormy day, George Chambers, 1835.
In this matter, Romanticism may be understood as a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature,
characteristic of the Age of Enlightenment. Now, intense emotion is valued as an authentic source of
aesthetic experience, placing emphasis onthe sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities.
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Wanderer above the sea of fog, Caspar David Friedrich, 1817.
A key idea in Romantic poetry is the concept of the sublime.
This term conveys the feelings people experience when they see awesome landscapes or find themselves in
extreme situations which elicit both fear and admiration.
For example, Shelley described his reaction to stunning, overwhelming scenery in the poem Mont Blanc
(1816), when the power of his imagination is influenced by the wild landscape he contemplates, as you can
observe in the lines below:
“Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee
I seem as in a trance sublime and strange
To muse on my own separate fantasy,
My own, my human mind, which passively
Now renders and receives fast influencings,
Holding an unremitting interchange
With the clear universe of things around […]”
(II, lines 23-29)
Besides the belief in the power of imagination as superior to reason, the Romantics
revived the unseen world, the supernatural, the mysterious, the world of medieval man,
i iti t th ti li ti f th A f R th t d d th t
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in opposition to the rationalization of the Age of Reason that preceded the movement.
It was a world of fantasy, intuition, instinct, and emotion. A world of truth and beauty
that emanated from the artist’s soul and heart; or, in Shelley’s words in 1821, a world in
which artists are the unacknowledged legislators.
Romanticism transformed not only the theory and practice of art but also the way we perceive the world. The
movement defined its goals in contrast with the norms of neoclassicism.
Romanticism advocated for the supremacy of the artists as creators of something that reflected their
individuality and emotions. Its major principles are:
Imagination as the supreme faculty of the mind.
The importance of nature and its sublimeness to help urban men find their true identity.
Prominence of symbolism and myth.
Emotion vs. rationality.
A sense of nationalism, developing folklore, culture, language, and customs of their country.
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Let's listen to a romantic composition inspired by nature: the Moonlight Sonata.
To conclude, Romanticism in literature was a rejection of rational Enlightenment values. It focused on the
power of imagination, emotions, and intuition to build creative expressions of literature and the arts. The
philosophy and sentiment of the Romantic movement would impact not only the arts, but society at large,
changing the ways in which human emotions, relationships, and institutions were viewed, understood, and
artistically reflected.
Follow the thread
The most important topics of this section are revised in the following videos.
Section 1 - Follow the thread
The everyday vs. the exotic.
The belief in the supernatural, which led to the emergence of gothic literature as a branch of
Romanticism.
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Section 1 Follow the thread
The context of Romanticism
Section 1 - Follow the thread
Characteristics of Literary Romanticism
You are very close to reaching your goals.
Let’s practice!
Question 1
From the second half of the eighteenth century onwards, England was transformed into a modern industrial
nation, with much economic and social inequality as a consequence of:
A The Napoleonic wars.
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B The French Revolution.
C The Industrial Revolution.
D The revolutionary wars of independence.
E The American Declaration of Independence.
Parabéns! A alternativa C está correta.
The Industrial Revolution was a process of change in the economy from agrarian and handicraft to
industrial and machine manufacturing production, promoting new ways of working and living, as
workers moved from the countryside to cities and had to live in overcrowded slums, while factory-
owners built great fortunes.
Question 2
The English Romantic poets supported the French Revolution, and their early works reflected their
enthusiasm for the cause. However, their views changed, and, in a few years, they became disenchanted with
the revolutionaries. What was the reason for it?
A The sense of nationalism was not equally spread among French people.
B The rules and conventions imposed on people constrained their creativity.
C The ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity were not applied to common people.
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2 - First and second generations of Romantic
D The arrests and executions of enemies of revolution during the Reign of Terror.
E The poets of the revolution used sophisticated language not accessible to everyone.
Parabéns! A alternativa D está correta.
Initially, the French Revolution was viewed as the beginning of a change in society and an
improvement in the lives of the oppressed. Its ideals of equality, fraternity, and liberty inspired the
English poets. However, with the implementation of the Reign of Terror (1793-1794) with its killings
and arrests, the poets felt shocked and disillusioned with the revolutionaries.
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g
poets
By the end of this section, you will be able to analyze some elements
present in the English Romantic of poetry of the �rst and second
generations of poets.
Poetry: �rst and second generations –
similarities and di�erences
For didactic purposes, we will consider in this section two generations of romantic poets, although these
generations overlap, and many features are continuous between them.
First generation
William Blake (1757-1827)
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
Second generation
Lord Byron (1788-1824)
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)
John Keats (1795-1821)
Women poets of the Romantic period were not so much studied until the 1980s, but they were important and
widely read during their lifetime. As we agree that they should not be erased from the literary history again, in
this section some of these women poets will also be briefly introduced to you:
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Anna Laetitia Barbauld (1743-1825)
Charlotte Smith (1749-1806)
Mary Robinson (1757-1800)
Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793-1835)
Anna Seward (1742-1809)
Helen Maria Williams (1759-1827)
But let’s get to the beginning of it.
The year 1798 marked the birth of English Romanticism, which is when the work Lyrical Ballads was
anonymously published. It encompasses individual poems of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor
Coleridge.
A second edition was published in 1800 with the names of the authors, a preface, some other poems, and a
rearrangement of the previous ones; and a third edition, in 1802, with significant additions to the preface,
which may be regarded as a manifesto or critical essay about romantic poetry.
In it, Wordsworth establishes the principles governing the composition of poetry. It should:
employ the language used by common people
contain imagination and spontaneity
be the overflow of powerful feelings
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Lyrical Ballads, by William Wordsworth and
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The importance of this opening work and manifesto.
Although grouped into the same literary movement, these six mentioned poets didnot create the same kind
of poetry or used the same style.
William Blake
William Wordsworth
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Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Lord Byron
Percy Bysshe Shelley
John Keats
They offered a rich diversity of achievements and concerns, which is not surprising, since Romanticism is
remarkable for the range and variety of its forms, being diversity itself a characteristic of the movement.
This diversity displays the sense of newly exhilarating freedom of forms of expression, perception, and
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This diversity displays the sense of newly exhilarating freedom of forms of expression, perception, and
response.
Attention!
Nowadays, it is necessary to emphasize the term Romanticisms to better understand the novelties and
particularities of romantic art in different countries produced by different artists.
Despite all diversity, however, romantic poetry describes a body of experimental work that points to larger
trends in poetry beyond its constraints. It is possible, also, to gather a group of poets who responded to a
common moment of massive cultural, social, and political change by attempting to remake poetry and revise
their world.
The first generation of poets, William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge started their
writing careers in the 1790s, a period of pervasive social and political crisis. Every sphere of life was
affected, everybody had their opinions and convictions about political beliefs. Besides the French Revolution,
Napoleon’s military career and the war against France, which lasted much more than people could imagine
(1793-1815), raised a campaign for English resistance, generating intense nationalistic sentiment and the
reinforcement of national cultural identity.
By the second decade of the new century, affected by social and psychological
pressure, these poets who had been radicals when young turned into conservatives. It
was then when they confronted a new generation, which was becoming articulate
towards the end of the war.
Byron was born in the year before the Revolution. Keats and Shelley in the early 1790s. As the war against
France drew to a close, the poets from the previous generation of the revolutionary decade were seen by the
young radical poets of the second generation, who wrote between 1812 and the mid-1820s, as conservatives
in politics and religion.
Both generations were much concerned with Nature and with the superiority of imagination over rationality.
However…
First generation
They were concerned with developing a new mode of thought, criticizing society and social
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y p g g g y
conventions, and defending that a poem had to be written in simple language. They were optimistic
about the power of imagination and criticism operating dialectically. The first generation, as you
noticed, was writing when the French Revolution seemed to be a hopeful manner to make the world
more egalitarian, and poor people less exploited, able to live in better and decent conditions.
Second generation
More pessimistic and rebellious, they affirmed an extreme individualism, lived isolated from society,
proclaimed a new ethical philosophy centered on beauty and truth, and returned to a more complex
versification. For the second generation, the French Revolution was a betrayed memory, and there was a
return of the pre-revolutionary structures throughout Europe. The spirit of the age was completely
different from that of the first generation. Hopelessness and despair were in the center of their poems.
Even Shelley, the most optimistic poet of the second generation, could only maintain this perspective by
using the future tense, a prophetic poetry born in exile, as he wrote in a sonnet, England in 1819, with a list of
present-tense realities and hope in a future promise, the possibility of a new day for England in times to
come.
“An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king;
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow
Through public scorn, —mud from a muddy spring;
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
But leechlike to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow.
A people starved and stabbed in the untilled field;
An army, whom liberticide and prey
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;
Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless—a book sealed;
A Senate, Time’s worst statute, unrepealed,
Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day.”
(SHELLEY, 2007)
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The second generation presents a poetry of extremes and escapism, which is the reflection of the
circumstances in which their lives, work, and culture were forced to develop. Cultural analyses and critique
point to:
Shelley’s idealism.
Byron’s sensationalism.
Keats’s aesthetic poetry.
Another feature of this generation’s work is eroticism.
Comment
Of the earlier Romantics, only Blake took erotic subjects with directness, but his work differs from that of the
later generation as he was analytical where they were voluptuous.
In order to have a better idea of these Romantic poets’ styles, let’s examine them and trace some
characteristic elements present in their poetry!
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characteristic elements present in their poetry!
William Blake
William Blake (1757-1827), poet, painter, and engraver, as the other romantic poets of his generation,
preferred emotion to reason, praised spontaneity and simple language, was connected to Nature, and
defended a childlike perspective to regenerate mankind.
He regarded children as beings uncorrupted by society, from whom a natural innocence emanated.
This childlike perspective is present in his most popular collections, Songs of Innocence (1789), followed by
Songs of Experience (1794), composed in naïve and simple lyrics with hints of parody and critique.
Both books were printed in a format that resembles illuminated manuscripts.
The text and illustrations were printed from copper plates and each picture was finished by hand in
watercolors.
Introduction of Songs of Innocence and of Experience.
Blake used powerfully myths and symbols, the energy of rhythm to construct his
cosmic vision. He considered himself a prophet and visionary and, since childhood, he
affirmed his visions of God, angels, demons, and spirits.
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The ghost of Samuel appearing to Saul, by William Blake, 1800
Learn more
Throughout his life and reflected in his works, there is an intricate and unique world-system. His early work is
rebellious in character and can be seen as a protest against dogmatic religion, such as in The Marriage of
Heaven and Hell (1790), in which the Devil is a hero rebelling against an authoritarian deity. In later works,
such as Milton (1804-1811) and Jerusalem (1804), Blake creates a distinctive vision of a humanity redeemed
by self-sacrifice and forgiveness.
London, by William Blake
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) considered Nature a source of happiness to humans, a place where they
could meet God, as he exposes in the excerpt:
“A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.”
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And the blue sky, and in the mind of man.
(Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey (…), lines 94-99)
Vision and Landscape, Samuel Palmer, 1833-34
He considers people living close to nature purer and wiser than those that live in the city, and their language
is more sincere and truthful. The poet himself spent his life in the Lake District of Northern England to
experience this closeness to nature.
In his poetry, he focused on nature, children, the poor, common people and used simple
ordinary words to express his personal feelings.
He focused on the emotional meaning of everyday events, depicting individual human
beings in moments of everyday emotion: joy, love, affection, sadness, anxiety, and
loneliness.
His friend poet Coleridge argued that Wordsworth had the ability to “give the charm of novelty to things of
every day” (COLERIDGE, 2013, Chap. XIV), or, in other words, to awaken the mind’s attention to the wonders
of the world.
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His poetry dealt with Nature and external events like revolution and wars, but his primary concern is the
humans’ response to the world as a result of contemplation and reflection.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
The poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), friend and Wordsworth’s literary partner, preferred the
fantasy, the supernatural. His poems bring mysterious happenings, exotic themes, colors. His most famous
poems are The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1834), Christabel (1797-1800), and Kubla Khan (1797).
The rime of the ancient mariner, Gustave Doré.
Unlike his friend Wordsworth, Coleridge did not focus on everyday themes; he used supernatural images and
creatures instead, as you can see in the excerpt below:
“But oh! that deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! as holy and enchantedAs e'er beneath a waning moon was hauntedBy woman wailing for her
demon lover!”
(Kubla Khan lines 12-16)
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Coleridge, like the other Romantics, was also a critic and essayist. He wrote a very famous two-volume book,
Biographia Literaria (1817), a work of criticism and theory, first intended to function as a preface to his book
of poems, explaining his writing style, but it also included events of the poet’s life, which gave it
characteristics of a literary autobiography.
About his construction of believable supernatural characters, for example, he wrote in chapter XIV:
[It] was agreed, that my endeavors should be directed to persons and
characters supernatural, or at least Romantic; yet so as to transfer
from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth
su�cient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing
suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic
faith.
(COLERIDGE, 2013, Chap. XIV)
Percy Bysshe Shelley
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1772-1822), a radical in his poetry and also in his political and social views,
demonstrated a mystical reverence for the beauty of Nature and felt connected to nature’s sublime power
over his imagination. He recognized the dark side of Nature, its power of destruction, as well. His connection
with the natural world gives him access to cosmic truths, as in Alastor, or, the Spirit of Solitude (1816), in
which he has the power to translate these truths into poetry that the public can understand.
His poetry becomes a kind of prophecy, and a poet has the ability to change the world
for the better and to bring about political, social, and spiritual change.
Observe some lines of this poem, in which the solitary poet pursues the most obscure part of nature in
search of “strange truths in undiscovered lands” (SHELLEY, 2003):
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search of strange truths in undiscovered lands (SHELLEY, 2003):
“When early youth had past, he leftHis cold fireside and alienated home
To seek strange truths in undiscovered lands”
(lines 75-77)
“Obedient to high thoughts, has visited
The awful ruins of the days of old:
Athens, and Tyre, and Balbec, and the waste
Where stood Jerusalem, the fallen towers
Of Babylon, the eternal pyramids…
… Dark Ethiopia in her desert hills
Conceals. Among the mined temples there,
Stupendous columns and wild images.”
(lines 107-117)
It is important to highlight Shelley’s poetic masterpiece, his mythical drama, and political allegory
Prometheus Unbound (1820), a four-act drama that encompasses Shelley’s aspirations and contradictions as
a poet.
It is about the torments of the Greek mythological figure Prometheus, who defies the gods and gives fire to
humanity, for which he suffers eternal punishment. Shelley’s play presents Prometheus’s release from
captivity.
The work has an important Preface on the role of poetry in reforming society.
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Prometheus and Hercules, Christian Griepenkerl, 1878.
John Keats
John Keats (1795-1821) emphasized extreme emotion through significant stress on natural beauty.
His poetry is marked by vivid imagery, sensuous appeal, and philosophical expression
through classical legends. His imagery comprises diverse physical sensations: sight,
hearing, taste, touch, smell.
Example
He combines different senses in one image, as in “In some melodious plot / Of beechen green”, combining
hearing and sight (Ode to a Nightingale, stanza I), or in the same poem, stanza II: “Tasting of Flora and the
country green / Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth! / O for a beaker of the warm South” (KEATS,
2007).
The poet tastes the visual (Flora and the country green), movement (dance), sound (Provencal song),
emotional state (mirth), visual (sunburnt), temperature (warm), and a location (South).
In 1819, Keats composed six odes, which are among his most famous poems:
Ode on a Grecian Urn.
Ode on Indolence.
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Ode on Melancholy, by John Keats
Keats’ poems grow out of inner conflicts, as pain and pleasure intertwined in Ode to a Nightingale and Ode on
a Grecian Urn, for example, or love intertwined with pain, as well as pleasure intertwined with death in the
ballad La Belle Dame Sans Merci, The Eve of St. Agnes and Isabella.
Ode on Melancholy.
Ode to a Nightingale.
Ode to Psyche.
To Autumn.
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ballad La Belle Dame Sans Merci, The Eve of St. Agnes and Isabella.
Ophelia, John Everett Millais, 1851-2
Lord Byron
Lord Byron (George Gordon Byron, 1788-1824) was dedicated to freedom of thought and action, and
anarchism in his political views; he was the personification of the Romantic hero: defiant, melancholic,
haunted by secret guilt.
Learn more
The term Byronic hero, named after him, defines a despairing man of extraordinary and respectable
standards. He is courageous and tries to hide some mysterious past wrongdoing, normally a transgression
of unlawful forbidden love. He is distanced, glad, and driven by his tempestuous energy.
Don Juan and the statute of the commander, Alexandre-Évariste Fragonard, first half of 19th century.
Byron’s scandalous private life made him develop a reputation for promiscuity and extravagance.
Well-acquainted with classic literature, he developed a line in satire that characterizes his greatest poems, as
the autobiographical Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812), an overnight success that epitomized the
disillusioned melancholy of his generation.
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His most famous and successful work was the satiric epic Don Juan, which he began to publish in 1819, and
had not finished in 1824 when he died of fever at Missolonghi, where he had sailed to support the Greek fight
for independence.
Love and death, by Lord Byron
Female writers
It is important to highlight the disregard with which almost all Romantic poetry by women has been treated
after the nineteenth century.
During the Romantic period, some of the best poets of the time were women – Anna Laetitia Barbauld,
Charlotte Smith, Mary Robinson. Wordsworth and Coleridge (junior colleagues of Robinson when she was
poetry editor of the Morning Post in the late 1790s) looked up to these women and learned their craft from
them.
Felicia Hemans was a best-selling author comparable to Lord Byron.
That period became the first era in literary history in which women writers began to
compete with men in numbers, sales, and literary reputations.
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[Just] in the category of poetry, some nine hundred women are listed
in J. R. de J. Jackson’s comprehensive bibliography, Romantic Poetry
by Women.
(ABRAMS, 1993, p. 6)
Despite the fact that some of their writings were popular and widely read during the romantic period, many of
these women’s writings were impoverished and damaged by the cultural disabilities imposed on women in
their lack of education and generally subordinate social status. Subsequent neglect has merely reinforced
the original limitations of this mode of writing.
These female writers wrote about nature and politics, disillusion with the French Revolution, political
pamphlets, and public as well as domestic issues of their time.
Anna Laetitia Barbauld, for example, wrote political pamphlets in the 1790s, opposing Britain’s declaration of
war against France and defending a democratic government and popular education.
In her Epistle to William Wilberforce (1791), she addressed a politician and humanitarian who presented a
Motion in the House of Commons to abolish the slave trade and attacked Britain’s involvement in that issue.
The motion was rejected a day later by a vote of 163 to 88.
“Cease, Wilberforce, to urge thy generous aim!
Thy Country knows the sin, and stands the shame!
The Preacher, Poet, Senator in vain
Has rattled in her sight the Negro's chain;
With his deep groans assail'd her startled ear,
And rent the veil that hid his constant tear;
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And rent the veil that hid his constant tear;
Forc'd her averted eyes his stripes to scan,
Beneath the bloody scourge laid bare the man,
Claim'd Pity's tear, urg'd Conscience' strong control,
And flash'd conviction on her shrinking soul.
The Muse too, soon awak'd, with ready tongue
At Mercy's shrine applausive paeans rung
And Freedom's eager sons, in vain foretold
A new Astrean reign,° an age of gold: reign of justice
She knows and she persists—Still Afric bleeds,
Uncheck'd, the human traffic still proceeds;
She stamps her infamy to future time,
And on her harden'd forehead seals the crime.”
(Lines 1-18)
Charlotte Smith
She refashioned the sonnet, that was out of fashion in eighteenth-century Britain.
Her first book, Elegiac Sonnets and Other Essays, was published in 1785 and went through nine expanding
editions in the following sixteen years.
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editions in the following sixteen years.
Besides being a widely read poet, she reached considerable success also as a novelist.
Mary Robinson
She is one of the accomplished writers of blank verse in the 1790s, as well as extremely talented and
musical in different forms of rhyme. Her verses were good-humored, satirical, and sentimental.
The final volume of Robinson’s poetry, Lyrical Tales (1800) to be published in her lifetime, appeared the
month before the second edition of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, from the same publisher
and printer and in exactly the same format and typography.
To conclude, it is interesting to highlight the main characteristics of Romantic poets: the importance of
Nature for the poets – they are only at peace when in Nature; they frequently personified it, ascribing human
traits to fields, flowers, mountains, streams, lakes; the beauty of the supernatural energy, the importance of
the individual and a disdain for technology and industrialism.
Follow the thread
The most important topics of this section are revised in the following videos.
Section 2 - Follow the thread
Blake and Wordsworth
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Section 2 - Follow the thread
Keats
Section 2 - Follow the thread
Byron
You are very close to reaching your goals.
Let’s practice!
Question 1
The first generation of poets, composed of William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
has some differences when compared to the second one. Which of the characteristics below expresses this
distinction?
A Reverence for Nature.
B Supernatural energy.
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C Individualism.
D Optimism
E Escapism
Parabéns! A alternativa D está correta.
Poets from the 1st generation had hope in the power of poetry to regenerate mankind. They were
more optimistic than the melancholic poets of the 2nd generation. The so-called ‘spirit of the age’
influenced this attitude. Poets from the 1st generation started to write in the 1790s when the French
Revolution ideals of liberty, fraternity, and egalitarianism were a promise for a world with more justice
and better living conditions for the poor. The dream was ruined by the period of Terror, and the
ascension of Napoleon. The second generation lived the war against France, the conservatism of
Britain, and the disillusionment of the end of the Revolution and the return of old, prerevolutionary
modes of government.
Question 2
The importance of nature for the Romantics is enormous, and it is possible to identify two beautiful features
of the natural world – the bright side, represented by the contemplation and peace of being in nature, and the
dark side, in the wilderness, witnessing the power of destruction nature also has. Which poets would you
associate with the bright side and the dark side, respectively?
A Keats and Wordsworth.
B Lord Byron and Shelley.
C Shelley and Wordsworth.
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3 - Study of novels by Jane Austen and Sir
D Lord Byron and Coleridge.
E Wordsworth and Coleridge.
Parabéns! A alternativa E está correta.
The contemplative and peaceful view on nature is typical of Wordsworth, that wrote about everyday
life and the beauty of small things in nature. Coleridge, for his part, was attracted by the supernatural
and threatening power of nature.
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y y J
Walter Scott
By the end of this section, you will be able to recognize the characteristics
of English Romantic �ction through the study of novels by Jane Austen
and Sir Walter Scott.
The novel revamped
Novels were immensely popular in the Romantic period, but, in the beginning, they were not regarded as
serious literature. Loose in structure, this literary genre lacked the reputation of poetry and drama. Their
readers were attracted by those escapist stories of romantic love, and commentators of the time described
the novels as mass-produced commodities.
The 'Brunswick' and the'Vengeur du Peuple' at the Battle of the First of June, Nicholas Pocock, 1794.
Matters change, however, around 1814, with excellent reviews of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley series of
historical novels and then a review that Scott wrote of Jane Austen’s novel Emma, announcing a renaissance,
a new style of novel.
Also, by this time, the genre had its historians, who delineated the novel’s origin and rise, forming a canon.
Anna Barbauld and Sir Walter Scott compiled and introduced collections of best novels, and the genre began
to gain literary prestige.
In the last decade of the eighteenth century, there were experiments with novels’ form and subject matter,
new ways of linking fiction, philosophy, and history.
Another innovation was the reworking of the past, recovering medieval romance, looking to a ‘Gothic’ Europe,
and picturing gloomy castles, ghosts, and monks in mystery stories, a branch of Romanticism now termed as
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and picturing gloomy castles, ghosts, and monks in mystery stories, a branch of Romanticism now termed as
Gothic fiction.
The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli, 1781
The growth of importance of the novel in the early nineteenth century is a result of
fiction writers’ self-consciousness about their relation to works of history. By 1814, the
novelist’s and the historian’s fields were intertwined, and both pursued similar interests.
Example
The Irish novelist Maria Edgeworth, in her Castle Rackrent (1800), provides an almost anthropological
account of the way of life in bygone Ireland. She described details about local practices that demonstrated
how people’s perspectives are rooted in the particularities of their native places.
Scott admired Edgeworth a lot and commented that he had the intention to write about the Scottish people
the same way Ms. Edgeworth had done with the Irish. Scott learned from her how to incorporate
regionalisms into a new style of historical novels, in which he also portrayed the past as a place of
adventures and grandeur.
Scott and Edgeworth established the theme of the early 19th-century novel: how the
individual consciousness is entangled within larger social structures, and how far the
character is or is not the product of history.
Jane Austen, for her part, was a brilliant satirist of the English leisure class and literary historians compared
her works to witty Restoration and 18th-century comedies. But she, as Scott and Edgeworth, articulated the
relationship between the psychological history of the individual and the history of society.
Leisure class
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Leisure class
Privileged class of people who did not have to work.
Like other Romantics, Austen’s topic is revolutions. Not the French Revolution or wars,
but revolutions of the mind, instead. She depicts the change of mind that creates the
possibility of love.
Scott recognized the extent to which Austen had changed the genre by developing a new novelistic language
for the workings of the mind. He wrote about her in his journal on March 14th, 1826:
Read again, and for the third time at least, Miss Austen’s very �nely
written novel of Pride and Prejudice. That young lady had a talent for
describing the involvements and feelings of characters of ordinary
life, which is to me the most wonderful ever met with. The Big Bow-
wow strain I can do myself like any now going; but the exquisite
touch, which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters
interesting, from the truth of the description and the sentiment, is
denied to me. What a pity such a gifted creature died so early!
(SCOTT, 1890, p. 222)
Walter Scott and the historical novel
Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) was a Scottish poet and novelist who was internationally renowned during his
lifetime. He had innumerable readers in Great Britain and also in the European and American continents.
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An eight-volume set of Walter Scott's Waverley Novels.
Since the anonymous publication of Waverley, in July 1814, all the twenty-six volumes of the Waverley Novels,
written in the following eighteen years, became popular and reached huge success. They were reprinted,
exported, and translated to most European languages.
Scott inaugurated a new perspective over history, the relationship between past and
present, and the socio-historical forces that determine human daily lives. His novels
reveal a historical view that emerges from his sense of place, geography, and society.
What interests him is history as a process, with its advancements and drawbacks, and
the past, understood as the prehistory of the present, as a place, although impossible
to be visited, that can be glimpsed, in its tensions and discontinuities.
In the center of the action, a passive, ‘middle-of-the-road’ hero, a protagonist who is acted upon by outside
forces, is an ordinary man who transits between two distinct eras and cultures as a mediator for the conflicts
between them.
Middle-of-the-road
Moderate.
Folklore, legends, and traditions are important elements to understand the different ways of life in the two
sides of the border, divisions between the English and the Scots, the Highlands and the Lowlands, Saxons,
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sides of the border, divisions between the English and the Scots, the Highlands and the Lowlands, Saxons,
and Normans.
Scott’s historical imagination allows him to recreate the customs and daily lives of people from the past,
establishing relationships between the characters’ feelings and their attachment to their native land and
country.
The narrator interacts with the reader, explaining, commenting, as in chapter 1 of Waverley, when he explains
the choice of the name of the protagonist: “I have, therefore, like a maiden knight with his white shield,
assumed for my hero, WAVERLEY, an uncontaminated name, bearing with its sound little of good or evil,
excepting what the reader shall hereafter be pleased to affix to it” (1829, p.9), or clarifying his intent with the
novel: “the object of my tale is more a description of men than manners”. (SCOTT, 1829, p.11)
Scott is the founder of the historical novel genre, a type of fiction in which historical
events and characters are present in the background, but the plot develops around
common, ordinary people, that experience the social forces in place at those events.
He blends fact and fiction to present the history of Scotland, England, and France. His
historical account is not faithful because he builds a personal version of the historical
facts, telling the facts as they likely happened.
Learn more
The Marxist philosopher and literary critic Georg Lukács (1885-1971) developed an influential work, a theory
of the historical novel based on Scott’s novels.
For Lukács, Scott builds an authentic portrayal of the peculiar consciousness of a people, showing the
social environment confronting a particular people in a particular period, which is a critical feature of any
historical novel (LUKÁCS, 1937). According to Lukács: “what matters in the historical novel is not the re-
telling of great historical events, but the poetic awakening of the people who are figured in those events.”
(LUKÁCS, 1937, p.42).
You may notice that the authenticity of Scott’s novels is largely based on his presentation of historical and
non-historical figures, and he presented an effective interaction between historical and fictional characters,
as it is possible to observe from the conversation between Prince Charles Stuart and Waverley:
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The Chevalier was silent for a moment, looking steadily at them both, and then
said, 'Upon my word, Mr. Waverley, you are a less happy man than I conceived I
had very good reason to believe you. -- But now, gentlemen, allow me to be
umpire in this matter, not as Prince Regent, but as Charles Stuart, a brother
adventurer with you in the same gallant cause.
(SCOTT, 1829, p. 575)
Generally speaking, Scott’s plots describe the story of an Englishman or Lowland Scotsman who travels
north to the Highlands, when the national feeling arises passions, becomes entangled in local disputes,
either by chance or by sympathy, and returns home changed by the experience.
What is remarkable here is that Scott throws the individual into the current of the
sociohistorical forces that were shaping modern Scotland, mingling the public and the
private, fiction and history.
In the journey of the hero, he describes, with fresh eyes, landscapes, and countrymen from different ranks,
when crossing the Anglo-Scottish border. The reader has access to the cultural discontinuities of a divided
country.
Besides presenting a variety of landscapes and building characters as types, or, in other words, characters
who represent a certain social class and culture, Scott used Scots in his historical novels, either adapting
the words to be understood by an English reader or using notes or a glossary in the chapter. Scots language
is used to mark the speech of servants and other low classes in society, while powerful and upper-classes
people speak English.
Jane Austen and the revolutions of the mind
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J
Jane Austen (1775-1817), in a letter to her niece Anna Austen, on September 28ᵗʰ, 1814, wrote about Sir
Walter Scott and commented about his novel Waverley:
Walter Scott has no business to write novels, especially good ones. It
is not fair. He has fame and pro�t enough as a poet, and should not
be taking the bread out of other people’s mouths. I do not like him,
and do not mean to like Waverley if I can help it, but fear I must.
(CHAPMAN, 1952 apud MILGATE, 1993)
In fact, Austen cited Sir Walter Scott in many of her works, demonstrating respect and admiration,
principally for his poetry.
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Scott, on his part, admired Austen greatly, as you could notice in his comments mentioned above.
Both Romantic novelists were popular in their time, and their works have been continuously admired,
discussed, and reprinted until the present day.
Miss Austen had six novels published:
The Jane Austen Collection
Sense and Sensibility (1811)
Pride and Prejudice (1813)
Mansfield Park (1814)
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The Jane Austen Collection
Emma (1816)
Northanger Abbey (1817)
Persuasion (1818)
All of them show the author’s great artistic merits and her mastery of the form and subject-matter of the
genre.
Austen chose to portray small groups of people in an enclosed environment to shape
the facts of their lives in an ironic comedy of manners.
Her characters are middle-class, and their preoccupation is with courtship and subsequent marriage.
Scene from the Pride and Prejudice miniseries (1995).
As you read above, the revolutions which interested Austen were those of the characters’ minds. She
employed irony to criticize the overvaluation of love and the marriage market, and her view of country social
life let her delineate the restricted life of provincial ladies and their fitting or not to these society constraints.
As the daughter of a clergy and educated at home, Austen spent her life in small country parishes, quietly
doing her domestic duties. She represents the world she knew and the influences she saw at work.
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doing her domestic duties. She represents the world she knew and the influences she saw at work.
Characters
Her characters are country families, clergymen, and naval officers, all of them concerned with social duties.
Themes
Her themes encompass personal relationships, but there is little passion in them; the language of emotion is
not present in Austen’s books.
Example
In Sense and Sensibility (2021), the narrator says: “Lucy does not want sense, and that is the foundation on
which everything good may be built”. (AUSTEN, 1811, Chap. XXXVII).
Austen’s irony pervades her whole body of work, and the opening of the novel Pride and Prejudice is no
exception: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be
in want of a wife.” (AUSTEN, 2021, Chap. I) This comment sets the ironic tone of the novel and subtly
criticizes the main concern of those country families in the book.
At the end of chapter I, the narrator employs irony again, when describing Bennet’s personality:
Mr. Bennet was so odd a mixture of quick parts, sarcastic humor,
reserve, and caprice, that the experience of three-and-twenty years
had been insu�cient to make his wife understand his character.
Her mind was less di�cult to develop. She was a woman of mean
understanding, little information, and uncertain temper. When she
was discontented, she fancied herself nervous. The business of her
life was to get her daughters married; its solace was visiting and
news.
(AUSTEN, 2021, Chap. I)
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Another feature of Austen’s novels is the inwardness of the action, the value she places
on self-knowledge. Her plots converge to a story of self-discovery.
Example
In Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet says, “till this moment, I never knew myself.” (AUSTEN, 2021, Chap.
XXXVI). The obstacles characters have to overcome are internal rather than external, which makes Austen
invent ways of disclosing them.
Concluding, it is important to highlight that Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen were great popular Romantic
novelists who wrote in diverse ways.
Walter Scott
He focused on the journeys of a hero into the countryside, exploring new territories and cultures, being
trapped in political conflicts. Scott, in his historical novels, presents to readers the macrocosm and
microcosm of a world led by social forces which act upon ordinary people, who have their lives affected
by the events that change mentalities and ways of living.
Jane Austen
She emphasizes the domestic aspects of life, the behaviors people have in society.
Austen depicts the microcosm of a countryside society and the manners and thoughts of its people.
Self-knowledge and the changes those people go through are key to her well-written novels.
Romantic Prose: Renewal of Novels
Do you want to learn more about these two British writers? Click to watch a really informative video!
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Follow the thread
The most important topics of this section are revised in the following videos.
Section 3 - Follow the thread
Jane Austen
Section 3 - Follow the thread
Walter Scott
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You are very close to reaching your goals.
Let’s practice!
Question 1
Sir Walter Scott is the founder of the historical novel. Which features are important to highlight in this
subgenre?
A The historical accuracy and the number of details in the novel.
B The centrality of the social forces to shape people’s lives.
C The use of real historical characters as protagonists.
D The extensive use of Scots throughout the novel.
E The presence of a strong, determined epic hero.Parabéns! A alternativa B está correta.
The great achievement of Scott was creating stories in which emblematic events are depicted and
historical and fictional characters interact, to reveal the extent to which social-historical forces shape
the lives of ordinary people who lived and witnessed those events. Scott blended fact and fiction to
construct his version of historical events.
Question 2
Jane Austen’s novels present subtle criticism about the issues of her days. Which literary device does she
employ to do it?
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Final issues
As you could study in this Unit, the Romantic period in England was strongly influenced by the Industrial
Revolution in England, which created a gulf between the rich and the poor, and the revolutions in France
employ to do it?
A Euphemism
B Metaphors
C Flashbacks
D Allegory
E Irony
Parabéns! A alternativa E está correta.
Jane Austen was very well-acquainted with provincial countryside society, religious clergymen, and
naval officers. In order to criticize the constraints of women and the prejudices of that world, she
made use of irony to reveal them to her public.
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Revolution in England, which created a gulf between the rich and the poor, and the revolutions in France
(1789) and in America (1775-1783). The ideals of liberty, fraternity, and equality among people inspired
artists and brought a sense of hope in democracy, justice, and an improvement in people’s lives. The
atrocities perpetrated during the Reign of Terror (1793-1794) and the ascension of Napoleon (1799) to
govern France with the aim to make other European countries submissive to him, changed completely the
spirit of the age.
Poets from the first generation, who started writing in the 1790s were optimistic and believed in the
Revolution. Their disillusion with the outcomes of it made them nationalists and more conservative. The
second generation of poets, who wrote approximately from 1812 to 1820 was much more pessimistic and
criticized the posture of England during the war of France and afterward.
Novelists abounded in the Romantic period, but the genre was not taken seriously, being considered escapist
literature, poorly written commodities. Two novelists changed this panorama with their great achievements
in this arena: Sir Walter Scott, the founder of the historical novel, and Jane Austen with her novel of manners.
Podcast
Now listen to professors Elisa Abrantes and Tatiana Massuno talking about this important literary
movement, their themes, techniques, and other achievements and peculiarities.
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References
ABRAMS, M. H. et al., (ed.) The Norton Anthology of English Literature. NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993.
ABRANTES, E. A Celtificação da Escócia por Walter Scott. Dissertação (Mestrado em Letras). Instituto de
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ABRANTES, E. A Celtificação da Escócia por Walter Scott. Dissertação (Mestrado em Letras). Instituto de
Letras da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro. UERJ. Rio de Janeiro, p.178, 2005.
AUSTEN, J. Pride and Prejudice. Project Gutenberg. February 10, 2021. Accessed August 3rd, 2021.
AUSTEN, J. Sense and Sensibility. Project Gutenberg. March 16, 2021. Accessed August 3rd, 2021.
BLACK, CONOLLY et al., (ed.) The Broadview Anthology of British Literature Volume 4: The Age of
Romanticism, 3rd Edition, Broadview, 2018.
BRITANNICA, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. "Reign of Terror". Encyclopedia Britannica, 29 Aug. 2020.
Accessed August 9th, 2021.
CHAPMAN, R. W. Jane Austen’s Letters to her sister Cassandra and Others. London: Oxford University Press,
1952.
CLARK, D. L. (ed.). Shelley’s Prose or The Trumpet of a Prophecy. Albuquerque: The University of New
Mexico Press, 1954.
COLERIDGE, Samuel. Biographia Literaria. Project Gutenberg. January 26, 2013. Accessed August 3rd, 2021.
EVEREST, K. English Romantic Poetry. Ballmoor: Open University Press, 1990.
HAZLITT, W. The Spirit of the Age. Project Gutenberg. February 12, 2004. Accessed August 3rd, 2021.
KEATS, J. Poems Published in 1820. Project Gutenberg. December 2, 2007. Accessed August 3rd, 2021
LUKÁCS, G. The Historical Novel, 1937, Trans H and S. Mitchell, London 1962.
MILGATE, J. Persuasion and the presence of Scott. Persuasions n. 15, 1993, p. 184-195.
OUSBY, I. (ed.). The Wordsworth companion to literature in English. Cambridge: CUP, 1998.
ROUSSEAU, J. The Social Contract & Discourses. Project Gutenberg. July 19, 2014. Accessed August 3rd,
2021.
SCOTT, W. Waverley, or ‘Tis Sixty Years Since. 1829.
SCOTT, W & DOUGLAS, D. (ed). The Journal of Sir Walter Scott from the Original Manuscript at Abbotsford.
Project Gutenberg, February 1st, 2005. Accessed August 3rd, 2021.
SHELLEY, P. A Defence of Poetry and Other Essays. Project Gutenberg. June 16, 2013. Accessed August 3rd,
2021
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SHELLEY, P. The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Project Gutenberg. December 2, 2007.
Accessed August 3rd, 2021
Go Further
A very good website to be exploited is the British Library’s. Go to the section “Discovering Literature:
Romantics & Victorians” to find articles, images, videos, and a lot of updated information about
Romanticism in literature.
If you want to widen the scope of your studies on Romanticism, read the article Literature 1780-1830 – the
Romantic Period, available at the Oxford Academic website. The authors expand their views on the era,
presenting a robust bibliography and news in the field.
Watch the interesting documentary The Romantics – Nature produced by BBC, available at the BBC´s
YouTube Official Channel.
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