A literary and artistic movement, centered in Europe, that reacted against Enlightenment rationalism and neoclassical restraint by prizing individual emotion, the imagination, nature and, in many of its writers, a nostalgic or idealized version of the medieval past. In English poetry it is most associated with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats; in the novel, the Gothic strain of the period and later, continental figures such as Victor Hugo carried Romantic concerns into prose. Its emphasis on subjective feeling over inherited convention shaped nearly every literary movement that followed it, including the Realism that in part defined itself against it.
Facts
Disputed
Period, From (Year)Literary historians differ on a starting date. Some fix it to a political event, the French Revolution of 1789, on the reasoning that Romanticism is inseparable from its political moment; English-language literary history more often points to the 1798 joint publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads as the movement's effective English start. Both dates are in real scholarly use, not interchangeable, and neither commands universal agreement. Period, To (Year)Commonly closed at the death of Sir Walter Scott (1832) or the accession of Queen Victoria (1837) in English literary history, but continental Romanticism is generally read as continuing later, and no single end date is agreed across the movement's several national literatures. Connections
Associated Authors
Mary Shelley, Authors Her working years (1814-1851) and her place in the Byron-Shelley circle at Geneva in 1816 place her squarely within Romanticism's period, unlike Walpole's earlier, pre-Romantic Otranto (1764).
Source The Norton Anthology of World Literature
Source Encyclopaedia Britannica
Source Encyclopaedia Britannica
Associated With
Source The Norton Anthology of World Literature
Source The Norton Anthology of World Literature
Gothic Fiction, Genres Gothic fiction arose as a dark, supernatural current within Romanticism, sharing its fascination with the sublime and its suspicion of Enlightenment rationality.
Source Encyclopaedia Britannica
Source The Norton Anthology of World Literature
The 1798 joint publication is the movement's own stated candidate for its effective English start.
Source The Norton Anthology of World Literature
Literary history relation between named movements
Influenced
Bengal Renaissance figures such as Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay wrote under the influence of European Romanticism.
Nahda, Movements Nahda writers absorbed European Enlightenment and Romantic literary currents alongside classical Arabic revival.
The PRB drew heavily on Romantic poetry, especially Keats, for its medievalist and sensory aesthetic.
Influenced By
In the Other Atlases
Same As
Also in Arts and Music Atlas: the same subject.
Source Encyclopaedia Britannicatier 1
Originated In
Also in Geography Atlas: where this subject originated.
Sources
1. The Norton Anthology of World Literature
W. W. Norton & Company
Encyclopaedia Britannica
Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc.- Associated Authors: Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Associated Authors: William Wordsworth
- Associated With: Gothic Fiction
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