What Do We Expect To Find In Romantic Literature?

Libertarianism

Many of the libertarian and abolitionist movements of the late 18th and early 19th centuries were represented by the romantic philosophy-the desire to be free of convention and tyranny, the new emphasis on the rights and dignity of the individual. Just as the insistence on rational, formal, and conventional subject matter that had typified the neoclassicism era before it was bound to experience reversal, the authoritarian regimes that had encouraged and sustained neoclassicism in the arts were inevitably subjected to popular revolutions. Political and social causes became dominant themes in romantic poetry and prose throughout the Western world, producing many still pertinent, vital human documents. The year 1848, in which the Continent was wracked by political upheaval, in fact marked the flood tide of European romanticism in Italy, Austria, Germany, and France. In William Tell (1826), by the German dramatist Friedrich von Schiller, an obscure medieval mountaineer becomes an immortal symbol of opposition to tyranny and foreign rule. In the novel The Betrothed (1827), by the Italian writer Alessandro Manzoni, a peasant couple becomes instruments in the final crushing of feudalism in northern Italy. Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote resoundingly in protest against social and political wrongs and in defence of the struggles for liberty in Italy and Greece. The Russian poet Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin, whose admiration for the work of Byron is clearly manifested, attracted notoriety for his "Ode to Liberty" (1820); like many other Romanticists, he was persecuted for political subversion and sent into exile.

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Nature

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Nature

Central to the Romantic movement was the concern with nature and natural surroundings. Delight in unspoiled scenery and in the (presumably) innocent life of rural dwellers is perhaps first recognizable as a literary theme in such a work as "The Seasons", by the Scottish poet James Thomson. The work is commonly cited as a formative influence on later English romantic poetry and on the nature tradition represented in English literature, most notably by Wordsworth. Often combined with this feeling for rural life is a generalized romantic melancholy, a sense that change is imminent, that a way of life is being threatened. Such intimations were early evinced in William Collins's "Ode to Evening" (1747), Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751), and George Crabbe's The Borough (1810). The melancholic strain later developed as a separate theme, as in John Keats's "Ode on Melancholy" (1820), or-in a different time and place-in the works of American writers: the novels and tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne, which probe the depths

of human nature in puritanical New England, or the macabre tales and melancholy poetry of Edgar Allan Poe.

The Lure of the Exotic

In the spirit of their new freedom, romantic writers in all cultures expanded their

imaginary horizons spatially and chronologically. They turned back to the Middle Ages for themes and settings and chose locales ranging from the awesome Hebrides of the Ossianic tradition, as in the work of the Scottish poet James MacPherson to the Oriental setting of Xanadu evoked by Coleridge in his unfinished lyric "Kubla Khan" (c. 1797). A seminal work was the compilation of old English and Scottish ballads by Thomas Percy; his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) exerted a significant influence on the form and content of later romantic poetry. The nostalgia for the Gothic past mingled with the tendency to the melancholic and produced a fondness for ruins, graveyards, and the supernatural as themes. In English literature, Wordsworth's "Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey" (from the Lyrical Ballads), the Gothic novels of Matthew Gregory Lewis, and The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole are representative. The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), by the Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott, and his historical novels, the Waverley series (1814-25), combine all these concerns: love of the picturesque, preoccupation with

the heroic past, and delight in mystery and superstition.

The Supernatural

The trend toward the irrational and supernatural was an important component of English and German romantic literature. It was reinforced on the one hand by disillusion with 18th-century rationalism and on the other by the rediscovery of a body of older literature-folktales and ballads-collected by Percy and by the German scholars Jacob and Wilhelm Karl Grimm and the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen. Many romantic writers, especially in Germany, were fascinated with this concept, perhaps because of the general romantic concern with self-identity. The poet Heinrich Heine wrote a lyric apocryphally titled "Der Doppelgänger" (1827; trans. 1846); The Devil's Elixir (181516; trans. 1824), a short novel by E. T. A. Hoffmann, is about a double; and Peter Schlemihl's Remarkable Story (1814; trans. 1927), by Adelbert von Chamisso, the tale of a man who sells his shadow to the devil, can be considered a variation on the theme. Much later the Russian master Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky wrote his famous novel The Double (1846), an analysis of paranoia in a humble clerk.

ROMANTICISM

The era of Romanticism was characterized by a reliance on the imagination and subjectivity of approach, freedom of thought and expression, and an idealization of nature.

Of prime importance as a manifesto of literary romanticism was the preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800), the work of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Here, they affirmed the importance of feeling and imagination to poetic creation and disclaimed conventional literary forms and subjects.

Thus, in romantic literature everywhere, as it developed, imagination was praised over reason, emotions over logic, and intuition over science making.

This paved the way for a vast body of literature of great sensibility and passion, that emphasized content over form, encouraged the development of complex and fast-moving plots, and allowed mixed genres (tragicomedy and the mingling of the grotesque and the sublime) and freer style.

No longer tolerated, for example, were the fixed classical conventions, such as the famous three unities (time, place, and action) of tragedy. An increasing demand for spontaneity and lyricism-qualities that the adherents of romanticism found in folk poetry and in medieval romance-led to a rejection of regular meters, strict forms, and other conventions of the classical tradition. In English poetry, for example, blank verse largely superseded the rhymed couplet that dominated 18th-century poetry.

As the romantic movement spread from France and Germany to England and then to the rest of Europe and across to the western hemisphere, certain themes and moods, often intertwined, became the concern of almost all 19th-century writers.