Critical note on romantic literature

Name : Jayshree Kunchala
Class : M.A.,Part -1 ,Sem -2
Roll No : 12
Paper :5
Paper name : The Romantic Literature
Submitted To : Maharaja shri Krishnakumarsinhji  Bhavnagar University.

 

Introduction

The fiction written during the Romantic period is often studied in ways that focus on its historical context but skirt around the issue of its relationship to concepts of Romanticism itself, although many critics regard some concept of Romanticism as central to the interpretation of literature written between 1785 and 1832. Since what we have come to identify as ‘Romanticism’ is based mainly on readings of the poetry of the period, I intend to discuss not only whether some significant novels of this period can be considered ‘Romantic’ in a similar way to much of its poetry, but also whether these significant novels enlarge the received notion of what the canon of the Romantic age comprises.

One has to ask whether the ‘novels of the Romantic age’ can be said to form a coherent group. Recent criticism has tended to group novels of the era thematically, focusing, for instance, on regional novels, such as those by Maria Edgeworth and Sydney Owenson, which are set in Ireland, and by Walter Scott in Scotland; on fiction by women writers, including Austen, Frances Burney, Edgeworth, Mary Shelley and others; or on novelists who engage with some of the political upheavals of the 1790s, such as William Godwin, Elizabeth Hamilton, Mary Hays, Thomas Holcroft and Mary Wollstonecraft. The majority of novels written during this era share some thematic preoccupations, such as sensibility, nationalism, the Gothic, and the sublime in nature to an extent that is unique to the period. A significant number of interesting novels that are not classified as ‘Gothic novels’ or ‘novels of sensibility’ nonetheless engage with these preoccupations satirically: Austen’s Northanger Abbey (1818) and Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey (1818) both make a central feature of Gothic conventions and language, while Matthew Lewis’s uber-Gothic novel The Monk (1796) also pokes fun at many conventional Gothic tropes and plot devices. Yet more novels are frequently classified under one sub-genre but gesture towards others: Godwin’s Caleb Williams is seen as the great Jacobin novel of the 1790s, but it is also a Gothic novel, while Hogg’s Confessions of a Justified Sinner, set in Scotland, could be described as regional Gothic. Tropes such as the sublime landscape and ancient castle are practically ubiquitous in regional novels as well as in Gothic ones.

In his comprehensive study English Fiction of the Romantic Period, Gary Kelly attempts to characterize the Romantic novel in his description of Jane Austen as the ‘representative Romantic novelist’:

she deals superbly with the central thematic and formal issues of the novel of the period – the gentrification of the professional classes and the professionalization of the gentry, the place of women in a professionalized culture that denies them any significant role in public or professional life, the establishment of a ‘national’ culture of distinction and discrimination in the face of fashionand commercialised culture, the re-siting of the authentic self in an inward moral and intellectual being so cultivated as to be able to negotiate successfully the varieties of social experience and cultural discriminations, the establishment of a standard speech based on writing, and resolution of the relationship of aut horitative narration and detailed representation of subjective experience.

However, while this description fits many novels of the Romantic age, at least to some extent, the characteristics he lists contrast sharply with what he later refers to as ‘the central characteristics and achievements of Romantic poetry … intense, transcendent and reflexive subjectivity, supernatural naturalism and discursive self-consciousness’.In a subsequent essay discussing ‘Romantic Fiction’, Kelly concludes by comparing these two versions of Romanticism, that of poetry and that of fiction, to imply that the predominant aims of the literature of the period were those of its novelists, whom he considers to have achieved as much or more than its poets in exploring domestic affections, local life, and national culture. These aims are not, however, the central concerns in a Gothic novel such as Vathek any more than in a poem such as ‘Kubla Khan’; whereas ‘the domestic affections and local quotidian life’,for instance, are as much if differently explored in Wordsworth’s poems as they are in Austen’s novels.

The majority of the novels of the Romantic age tend to support Kelly’s view that their predominant ideology is a bourgeois one, since the almost inevitable resolution of the plot with one or more marriages would seem to valorize middle-class ‘quotidian’ life and the ‘domestic affections’, while the ‘realism’ of many novels also tends to mjdeflate romantic idealism through collision with the commonplace. This deflation occurs in Radcliffe’s novels through the marriage plot and her characteristic device of the ‘supernatural explained’, where she accounts for supernatural events in rational terms, and in Austen’s, through her ‘punishment’ of sensibility in heroines such as Marianne in Sense and Sensibility(1811).

A related Romantic project was to valorize the poet and to resist the marginalization of the artist in an increasingly industrialized, mercantile, and bourgeois-dominated British society. This is expressed in autobiographical and semi-autobiographical poems by male poets including Wordsworth and Byron, and epitomized in the construction of the poet as Promethean creator. Many of the most influential and widely read fiction-writers of the period, including Austen, Burney, Edgeworth, Radcliffe, Scott, and Mary Shelley, implicitly or overtly support the changes in British society, although with qualifications, stressing the importance of family life and rational judgement, and implicitly or overtly condemn the perceived ‘Romantic’ personality cultivated and cult-ified by many Romantic poets.

In English Fiction of the Romantic Period, Kelly reveals the limitations of his aforementioned generalizations, since his list of sub-genres of Romantic fiction is an assemblage of contraries: Jacobin novels, anti-Jacobin novels, Gothic, Gothic Romance, novels of sensibility, national tales, moral tales, tales of fashionable life, tales of the heart, tales of real life, historical romances, tales for youth, tales of wonder, Scotch novels, ‘silver fork’ novels, ‘Newgate’ novels, and the Romantic quasi-novel. Several of these kinds of novel have little, if anything, in common with Romantic poetry: ‘Anti-Jacobin novels’, and ‘tales of real life’, in particular, were thematically and formally in opposition to the Romantic cult of the imagination and sensibility. Yet Gothic novels, for example those by Ann Radcliffe, have much that is in common with Romantic poetry, in terms of both language and themes – for instance the transcendentalizing of nature, and the significance accorded to an emotional response to such landscapes.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

His life

Wordsworth was born at cocker mouth, a town which is actually outside the lake district, but well within hail of it. His Father, who was a lawyer, died when William was thirteen years old. The elder wordsworth left very little money, and that was mainly in the form of a claim on lord Lonsdale, who refused outright to pay his debt, so that William had to depend on the generosity of two uncles, who paid for his schooling at hawks head near lake Windermere. Subsequently wordsworth went to Cambridge entering st John’s college in 1787.His work at the university was quite undistinguished and having graduated in 1791 he left with no fixed career in view. After spending a few months in London he crossed over to France (1791) and stayed at Orleans and Blois for nearly a year. An enthusiasm for the revolution was aroused in him ;he himself has chronicled the mood in one of his happiest passages:
Bliss was it in that
Dawn to be alive,
But to be young
Was very heaven!
He returned to Paris in 1792, Just after the September massacres, and the sights and stories that greeted him. The dominant political doctrine. It was there that the two poets took the series of walks the fruit of which was to be the lyrical ballads. Wordsworth after a visit to Germany in 1798-99 the wordsworth settled the lake district which was to be their home for the future.
Poetry of Wordsworth
He records that his earliest verses were written at school, and that they were “a time imitation of pope’s versification”. This is an interesting admission of the still surviving domination of the earlier poet. At the university he composed some poetry . which appeared as an Evening walk (1793)and descriptive sketches(1793). In style these poem have little have little originality but they already show the wordsworthian eye for nature. The first fruits of his genius were seen in the lyrical Ballads (1798) a joint production by Coleridge and himself which was published at Bristol l.
This volume is epoch-making for it is the prelude to the Romantic movement proper Wordsworth had the larger share in the book. Some his poems in it such as the thorn and the Idiot, boy, are condemned as being trivial and childish in style a few such as Simon lee and expostulation. And reply are more adequate in their expression ; and the concluding piece Intern Abbey , is one of the triumphs of his genius.
During the years 1798-99 wordsworth composed some of his finest poems which appeared in 1800 , together with his contributions to the lyrical ballads.
The prelude which was completed in 1805 but not published 1850 after wordsworth death is record of his development as a poet he described his experiences with a fullness ,closeness and laborious anxiety that are unique in our literature . the prelude was intended to form part of a vast philosophical work called the recluse which was never completed . Another section of his same work was the excursion much of which was composed in the years now under riewe through it was not published until 1814.

His Theory of poetry:

In the preface to the second edition of thy lyrical Ballads (1800) Wordsworth set out his theory of poetry It reveals a lofty conception of the dignity of that art which is “The breath and finer spirit of all knowledge”. And which is product of “The spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”. Taking its origin from “emotion recollected in tranquility”.
(a) Reading subject wordsworth readers his preference for “incidents and situations from common life”. Was generally chosen because in that condition the essential passion of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain thegir maturity”.
(b) Wordsworth views on poetical style are the most revolutionary of all the ideas in this preface. Disaccording the “gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers it is touchingly simple in some of his Lucy poems. Gay and other lyrics.
Features of his poetry:
(a) Its inequality and its limitations all the critics of wordsworth are at pains to points out the mass of inferior work that came from his pen . Matthew Arnold one of the acutest of the poet’s admirers closes the recorded of wordsworth best work with year 1808, even before the completion of the excursion.
(b) Its egoism. In a person of lesser caliber such a degree of self esteem as wordsworth would have been ridiculous ; in his case with the undoubted genius that was in the man it was something almost heroic.
(c) In spite of this self obsession he is curiously deficient in the purely lyrical gift. He cannot leap into the ether like Shelley.

The Romantic Movement the Romantic Age

Important themes

of the early 19th was a reaction to many cultural, social and political developments. Many artists and thinkers began to see developments in society threatening individualism: the factory system made human beings replaceable parts in a system, and mass political movements (like the French Revolution) diminished individual accomplishment. Similarly, increased urbanization made people feel cut off nature. Also, Neoclassicism's strict rules and formalism began to seem limiting.
In reaction, the Romantic Movement stressed the individuality of the artist's expression, a personal relationship with nature, and a trust in emotion and subjective experience.
Since classical times artists had attempted to achieve mimesis, a faithful recreation of the world. Romantic artists, however, felt no obligation to depict the world mimetically. Rather, they sought to express their personal vision.
As a result, Romantic form could be open-ended. Poems might conclude without clear resolution; music could be highly personal and emotional. The Romantic artist was in many ways an outsider of society, a person who followed his or her own vision while continuously creating new works that expressed an evolving self.

Important philosophical figures:

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804): Kant is not a Romantic philosopher, but his ideas, especially his Pure Critique of Reason, influenced many Romantic thinkers. Essentially, Kant was interested in how we can know that the world we experience is real and not just the product of our minds. He concluded that we can never be fully certain about the world outside of our minds, but we can be somewhat more certain about the categories our minds impose upon the world. Kant was skeptical about the idea of the self, but Romantic thinkers seized on the idea that the individual mind could play a role in ordering, shaping and imposing meaning on the world.

Jean-Jacque Rousseau (1712-1778): a French writer whose work celebrated his own personality and intellect. Rousseau's essays and his autobiographical Confessions were written during the Enlightenment, but they challenged Enlightenment ideals. He thought human beings were more moral before they were corrupted by the influences of civilization. Thus, he prized childhood, imagination and a primitive relationship to nature.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882): an essayist and thinker whose influential writings shaped American literature and popular ideas about nature and individualism. Emerson wrote his great essay "Nature" in 1836. In it he posited that human imagination was limited by too much reliance on the ideas of the past. Instead, Emerson urged his readers to explore themselves through self-reflection in nature and "sallies of the spirit." He called his ideal person "Man-Thinking", a term that reflected his belief in an ever changing self.

Important literary figures:

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834): English Romantic poets whose Lyrical Ballads (1798) revolutionized poetry by using common language, natural imagery, and an emphasizing the poet's own perceptions.
Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe (1749-1832): an influential German Roma writer whose novel The Sorrows of Young Werther expressed his dissatisfaction with the neoclassical ideals of order, rationalism and science. Goethe's play Faust depicts the struggle of humanity to balance poetic passions with the dictates of reason. In his old age, Goethe became a much-revered sage.

Trends in Architecture:

The Romantics prized originality above all else, so it isn't surprising that they didn't like neoclassical architecture with its echoes of Greek and Roman models. They did, however, admire Gothic architecture with its intricate and often irregular tracery, spires and pinnacles. The British Houses of Parliament were rebuilt in the 1830s in a neo-gothic style. Such structures evoked a Romantic view of the past as mysterious, idealistic, and emotional.

Important Musical figures:

Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770-1827): a German-born composer whose work spans the shift from the Enlightenment to the Romantic era. His early work reflected the neoclassical style of Haydn. By 1800, however, Beethoven had become almost deaf, a condition that provoked thoughts of suicide. Rather than kill himself, he began composing a series of highly emotional and dramatic symphonies. In the last 12 years of his life, he wrote work of great complexity and passion. Indeed, Beethoven's music embodies the "sense of personal becoming" that typifies Romantic art.
Giuseppi Verdi (1813-1901): Italy's greatest composer of romantic operas. His music epitomizes passion, power and energy, and his melodies express the emotions of his characters. Among his operas-many of which are still performed-are Aida, Rigoletto, La Forza Del Destino, Otello andLa Ballo in Mashere.
Richard Wagner (1813-1883): a German composer whose operas emphasize the blind forces of irrationality that influence human behavior. His characters are often made unhappy by fate or uncontrollable events. Influenced by Beethoven, Wagner sought to arouse his audience's emotions with stirring and heroic music. He also sought to find serious material for his librettos (an opera's story). His Ring Cycle comprises a series of operas that depict Norse mythology.

Concluding remarks:

Scholars debate the definition of Romanticism. And I won't attempt to provide a final articulation here. Suffice to say, it was a wide-ranging cultural phenomenon that influenced the visual arts, philosophy, literature, music and politics. There were, one might argue, Romanticisms rather than a single coherent version, yet it is possible to speak broadly about some of the central themes and tendencies common to the movement.
Romanticism was in some ways a reaction to the 18th century. That century, also known as the age of reason, had witnessed a series of prolonged attacks on many fronts to the idea of an individual self. During these years, for example, Europe underwent rapid industrialization. This in turn created socioeconomic changes that shifted the population from a rural, agrarian way of life to a more depersonalized urban lifestyle. Consequently, people became distanced from nature. In addition, large-scale mechanized industries sprang up and changed the character of work. The factory system with its regimented hours and mindless repetition seemed to make human beings mere interchangeable parts in an impersonal process.
The 18th Century also saw the rise of radically skeptical philosophers who doubted the very existence of an individual self. The philosopher David Hume argued that the self Descartes believed himself to have found was only a product of cultural situatedness, and the German philosopher Imannuel Kant saw the self as an empty fiction accompanying on-going thought.
In the face of these social and philosophical attacks, Romantic writers, philosophers and artists tried to reassert the importance of the self. Their art and criticism focused on self-analysis and self-reflection. They went inward to examine the human mind's relationship to the world. Oddly, even though he was not a Romantic philosopher, Kant's ideas about consciousness, especially his Pure Critique of Reason, influenced many Romantic thinkers.
Kant had been interested in how we can know that the world we experience is real and not just the product of our minds. As you may recall, this problem also concerned Descartes. In the end, Kant concluded that we could never be fully certain about the reality of the world outside of our minds. He did think, however, that we could be somewhat more certain about the categories our minds tended to impose upon the world.
Romantic thinkers like Emerson seized on this idea because it seemed to suggest that the individual mind does play a role in ordering, shaping and imposing meaning on the world. From Plato to Kant, one important goal for philosophers had been to describe the nature of the reality that we inhabit but cannot agree upon. The Romantics, however, saw the problem differently. They were not trying to grasp what was really out there. Rather, they sought to express the power of the individual mind to give shape to what was out there. In short, they wanted to put the "self" back in the driver's seat. Nature for them was a set of building blocks for the creative mind. Through it, the individual expressed his will and unique being.
As a result, nature became an important focus of Romanticism, but not in its naturalistic or scientific sense. Indeed, one important idea to keep in mind while reading Emerson is that the word "Nature" has more than one meaning. Commonly we use it to mean the external world in its entirety: trees, rocks, mountains, the ocean. But we also use the word to mean the inherent character or basic disposition of a person. For example, we might say, "It's just not in his nature to lie."
For Emerson, nature comprises both of these meanings simultaneously. Thus the forest or the mountainside exist, but they have no meaningful existence without a person's individual nature to behold them. In the end, Emerson argued, human consciousness is the giver of meaning to nature. It is our mind, our thoughts, and our imagination that are forever creating the meaning of this world
Emerson's "transparent eyeball" represents the thin, permeable membrane between the external world in its entirety (the NOT ME) and the inherent personal nature of the human being who perceives it (the ME). What's tragic, in Emerson's view, is that so many people get locked into only one way of viewing the world. They fail to realize that they are radically free to re-envision the world's meaning, for nature is at once their own being and a playground for their creative minds.
Romantics also tended to rebel against social conformity and the rising industrialism that seemed to make individuality insignificant. They often identified with the outsider or anti-hero, a figure like Icarus, the mythological Greek boy who flew too close the sun. In the Romantic era, the hero was often the one who asserted his or her individuality by going against the prevailing order even if this rebellion proved futile.
But it is overly simplistic to say that Romanticism began around 1800, or that it was merely a reaction to neoclassicism. In many ways, the opposition of feeling to intellect, clarity to impressionism, form to expression, and nature to civilization echo earlier cultural debates. Yet the birth of a self-conscious Romanticism does mark a turning point in many ways.
We can still see elements of the Romantic Movement in society and culture today. In many ways, the rock star is a type of Romantic hero living outside of social norms and asserting individuality at all costs. Indeed, bands like Rage Against the Machine or The Insane Clown Posse echo the Romantic themes of rebellion and dissent. Moreover, white middle class kids who play rap music may feel that its messages of defiance and anger speak to them with more passion and authenticity because they are sallies against a dominant and conformist culture. Thus we are all to one degree or another still Romantics, or at least familiar with Romanticism's themes of freedom, individual assertion and the desire for a more real, more authentic way of life Novels of the Romantic Age