Romantic literature
Literature associated with Romanticism, emphasizing imagination, emotion, nature, individual experience, and resistance to classical rules.
Romanticism: An artistic and intellectual movement that emphasized imagination, emotion, nature, and individual freedom. The movement supplies the shared ideas and historical frame of Romantic literature.
Lyrical Ballads: A poetry collection by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798. Its poems helped establish a new emphasis on ordinary life, feeling, and poetic language.
William Wordsworth: An English poet whose work helped establish the first generation of British Romantic poetry. His prefaces and poems articulated a major case for ordinary language and emotional memory.
French Revolution: A period of political upheaval in France beginning in 1789 that ended the monarchy and reshaped Europe. Its promises and violence shaped British Romantic writers’ hopes, loyalties, and disillusionment.
Transcendentalism: A nineteenth-century American intellectual movement emphasizing intuition, individual conscience, and spiritual unity with nature. It adapted Romantic ideas about inward experience and nature to American writing and thought.
Sublime: An aesthetic experience of overwhelming grandeur, power, or vastness that exceeds ordinary comprehension. Romantic writers used encounters with nature’s immensity to evoke awe and terror.
The Prelude: William Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem about the growth of his mind and poetic imagination. It makes individual experience and the shaping power of nature its central subjects.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: An English poet and critic whose work helped shape British Romanticism. His theory of imagination and supernatural verse clarify Romantic poetry’s creative ambitions.
Industrial Revolution: The transformation of production through mechanization, factories, and new energy sources, beginning in Britain in the eighteenth century. Romantic writing often measured industrial change against rural life and the living natural world.
Victorian literature: Literature produced during the reign of Queen Victoria, from 1837 to 1901. Victorian writers inherited Romantic forms and concerns while responding to industrial and social change.