Romanticism (The New Critical Idiom)
Aidan Day
Language: English
Pages: 232
ISBN: 0415460263
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Romanticism was a revolutionary intellectual and artistic movement which generated some of the most popular and influential texts in British and American literary history. This clear and engaging guide introduces the history, major writers and critical issues of this crucial era. This fully updated second edition includes:
- Discussion of a broad range of writers including William Blake, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Wordsworth, Lord Byron, John Keats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, H.D. Thoreau, Frederick Douglas
- A new chapter on American Romanticism
- Discussion of the romantic sublime or romantic imagination
- An engagement with critical debates such as postcolonialism, gender studies and ecocriticism.
deals with the warfare between the Scots and the English, that in two of the verses the ‘country of the Scotch warriors . . . has a fine romantic situation’ (Jones 1922: 236). Here, in a piece praising an antique but non-classical work of art, the word ‘romantic’ is used positively, to conjure up an image of the picturesque and exotic. Later in the eighteenth century, in his Letters CONSTRUCTIONS OF THE TERM ‘RAOMANTIC’ on Chivalry and Romance (1762), Richard Hurd spoke of what he termed the
insistence on spiritual reality as the primary reality, was commented on a few years after Hazlitt by Karl Marx in his comments on religion. In his 1844 essay ‘On the Jewish Question’ Marx observed that Man emancipates himself from religion politically by banishing it from the sphere of public law into that of private right. Religion is no longer the spirit of the state where man behaves as a species-being in community with other men. . . . It has become the spirit of civil society, of the sphere
to see beyond it: in a world of life they live, By sensible impressions not enthralled, But quickened, rouzed, and made thereby more fit To hold communion with the invisible world. Such minds are truly from the Deity, For they are powers; and hence the highest bliss That can be known is theirs. (1805, XIII. 102–108; Wordsworth, Abrams and Gill 1979: 464) At the end of the 1805 Prelude Wordsworth claims he is able to instruct others in truth about ‘the mind of man’ (1805, XIII. 446; Wordsworth,
continues his humorous assault on what he saw as the pretensions of the mature Wordsworth and Coleridge, with their idealizations of the self and the cosmos: Young Juan wander’d by the glassy brooks, Thinking unutterable things; he threw Himself at length within the leafy nooks Where the wild branch of the cork forest grew; There poets find materials for their books, And every now and then we read them through, ENLIGHTENMENT AND ROMANTIC So that their plan and prosody are eligible, Unless,
radicalism nor to mean simply the 181 182 ENLIGHTENMENT AND ROMANTIC enthusiastic and celebratory, but may include the inverse of those states, a falling away from confidence in the imagination that is a product of previous over-intense trust in imagination. When it comes to the second generation of writers, it is likewise possible to find in their work features which may be defined as Romantic and features which may be defined as late Enlightenment. The Romantic features may be either the