Intro+to+Romanticism

Romanticism is "just that which cannot be defined." ~ F. R. de Toreius, the writer of the first history of Romanticism

There seems to be considerable agreement that the Romantic era was a period of almost unparalleled significance in our understanding of art. Isaiah Berlin, a well-known historian of ideas, called the Romantic Movemeent the single most important shift in the sensibility of Western thinking since the fifth century BC. While most commentators might not be that emphatic, they would certainly agree that the period exercised a decisive influence on art and culture.

Despite its seeming cohesiveness and unity, the Romantic period was a complex nexus of revolution and conservatism, of bold iconoclasm and hidebound conventionality. It was unquestionably an age of contradiction; we might just as easily speak of Romanticisms as we might of Romanticism. Where Romanticism was once discussed with reference to nature and to the imagination than it was with reference to politics or ideology, a broader contextual perspective is now almost universally acknowledged as essential to a comprehensive understanding of the period. It is almost universally accepted that the Romantic mind-set and the literary works it produced were shaped, above, all, by the __French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution.__

It was a period in which political consciousness spread through society in unprecedented ways, with a grewat growth in collective awareness not only among those whose hearts resonated with revolutionary developments on the Continent but also amongst workers, the disenfranchised poor, women, and anti-slavery activitists. Yet it was also a time of unprecedented growth in awareness of humans as individuals, of a rights-based political activism, and of a Romantic individualism of the soul.

Revolutions played a central role in shaping the Romantic period - and continue to shape our perceptions of it. The concept of Romanticism itself has changed radically in recent decades. Prior to the mid-twentieth century, it was centred on five or six major poets, all male, and a select number of prose writers, also all male; but it has gradually come to be seen as an era in which writers and thinkers of diverse genders, beliefs and social backgrounds all contributed to shaping their era. The poetic voices of Mary Robinson, Anna Letitia Barbauld and Charlotte Smith have come to support the works of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and John Keats (collectively known as 'The Big Six'). Similarly, in prose non-fiction, the proto-feminist writing of Mary Wollstonecraft and the didactic prose of Maria Edgeworth has come to join that of Coleridge, Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt. In fiction, previously little regarded as part of the Romantic movement, the works of Jane Austen are held to be central, along with those of Sir Walter Scott, Mary Robinson and Charlotte Smith.

In its own time, Romanticism (a label never used by any of its writers, but rather first applied by the Victorians) was very frequently a house divided. "Lakers" like Wordsowrth and Southey denounced the "Satanic School" of Shelley and Byron, who in turn produced vicious satires of these elders. "The Cockney School" of Londoners Leigh Hunt and John Keats were derided by critics of the day, while writers now long ignored, such as Felicia Hemans, were lauded for their skill and weree extremely popular.

The Romantic era gains richness and interest if we view it not as a perfect stream, but as what it was: a thick murmuring torrent of powerful voices that chorused and clashed, that simultaneously sought and struggled. These mingled tones together make up the voice of a movement that changed English literature.

Source: The Age of Romanticism