Romanticism in English Literature: Features, Characteristics, Aims

 

Romanticism in English Literature

Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in Europe in the late 18th century. Various dates have been given for the Romantic period, but here it is taken as the beginning of the publication of William Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads in 1798, and the end of Queen Victoria's crowning in 1837. Romanticism later came to America in other parts of the English-speaking world.

Why it started?

The Romantic period was one of the major social changes in England, caused by the depopulation of the countryside and the rapid development of overcrowded industrial cities, which occurred in the period between 1798 and 1832. The movement of so many people in England was the result of two forces: the Agricultural Revolution, which involved the siege of the land, drove workers off the land, and the Industrial Revolution, which provided them employment, "in factories and mills, powered by steam-power." operated by machines". Indeed, Romanticism can be seen as a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, although it was also a rebellion against the aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment, as well as a reaction to the scientific rationality of nature. The French Revolution was a particularly important influence on the political thinking of many at this time.

Special Features of English Romanticism

Like the literary era of Victorianism, English Romanticism attempts to develop a closely related but independent form of symbolic engagement with areas of tension triggered by the modernization process described above. Aesthetic modernity in a broad sense, which is now emerging, is defined primarily by the conflict between individual cultural or literary creations and the prevailing social reality. Literary culture no longer sees itself as an expression of the dominant social class and ideology, but primarily as its decisive rival or fundamental substitute for it.

Thus, in Romantic English poetry, personality and likeness very well become principles or principles of expression, but with the difference, that poetic personality is clearly understood as a poetic form of design or subject matter, but Not as an abstract economic world view. Nature and landscape are closely related to the English Romantics, as they perceive London in particular, the metropolis, as a symbol of alienation and perceptual destruction. An equally sharp distinction is found in the principle of rationality: in 18th-century poetry, for example, in James Thomson's 'The Seasons', in Isaac Newton's mechanical world explanation, on the other hand, mechanics and causality are the English knowledge for. There are insufficient sources of romanticism, which do not allow access to the hidden inner spiritual life. From this point of view, creative imagination and symbolic vision are required, which alone enable imaginative transference and knowledge of the individual and thus special and paradoxical.

Characteristics of Romantic poetry

In altering both the past and the future, the English Romanticists' lack of programmatic unity becomes apparent. In addition to an emotional preference for the past, this openness is characterized by a simultaneous interest in the foreign and primitive, landscape and the focus alone of the subject's attitudes and experiences. The Romantic poetry of England is characterized by imaginative counter-designs for confronting the traumatic experiences of an increasingly industrialized and urbanized world, in which the relationship between man and nature would harmoniously solve such an identity crisis, has been shaped to.

As a synthesis and reinterpretation of modern fragmentation, the potential for imagination envisioned by the Romantics certainly provided compensation possibilities and sometimes even utopian spirit horizons; while emphasizing the aesthetic autonomy and otherness of the poetic, it also reflects the logic of the process of the specificity of modernization.

Aim of Romantics

Instead, romantic selfishness seeks to find a source of order and happiness in one's own imagination and one's own spirit. The Romantic poetic personality does not aim at the individual seeking bourgeois freedom and does not seek to the detriment of natural law guarantees. Liberation from feudal gangs remains too abstract and mechanical for the overwhelming majority of English Romantics; they see the individual as special and human in their own human soul. According to the Romantic view, it therefore means natural existence to follow one's own being and one's soul. In particular, for the English Romanticists this poetic personality is primarily realized in a meditative, harmonious relationship with nature, not characterized by the constraints of the everyday world of action or the directions of reason, especially as nature encounters alone in the situation. According to this self-image, Romantic literature or art is the natural expression of the artist's soul, the great example of this Romantic personality is Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose work breaks with the tradition of rule poems with extraordinary confidence. Thus, in Wordsworth's self-portrait, The Prelude (1805/1850) or Byron Child, Harold's, Pilgrimage (1812/1816/1818) the poet's ego as an authentic source of truth. Accordingly, Romantic theorists hardly distinguish between the poet's persona and his poetry as a work. The focus of poetic interests shifts from imitation of ancient patterns to imaginative self-expression. The shift in focus from the eclectically calculated formal design of the work's persona to the poet must engage the people to resist the fragmentation of the professionalism and culture that robbed the people.

Role of Female in Romanticism

Women writers were increasingly active in all genres in the 18th century, and by 1790 women's poetry was on the rise. Notable poets in this period include Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Joanna Bailey, Susan Blamer, Hannah More. Other female poets include Mary Alcock (c. 1742–1798) and Mary Robinson (1758–1800), both of whom "highlighted the enormous discrepancy between life for the rich and the poor", and Felicia Heymans of the nineteenth (c. 1793–1835) authored individual books during his lifetime, and continued to be widely republished after his death in 1835. More interest has been shown in recent years in Dorothy Wordsworth (1771–1855), William's sister, who "was modest about her writing abilities, producing poems of her own; And his magazines and travel stories certainly provided inspiration for his brother."