Characteristics of Romanticism
Resulting in part from the libertarian and egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution, the romantic movements had in common only a revolt against the prescribed rules of classicism. The basic aims of romanticism were various: a return to nature and to belief in the goodness of humanity; the rediscovery of the artist as a supremely individual creator; the development of nationalistic pride; and the exaltation of the senses and emotions over reason and intellect. In addition, romanticism was a philosophical revolt against rationalism.
Romanticism in Literature England
Although in literature romantic elements were known much earlier, as in the Elizabethan dramas, many critics now date English literary romanticism from the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads (1798). In the preface to the second edition of that influential work (1800), Wordsworth stated his belief that poetry results from "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings," and pressed for the use of natural everyday diction in literary works. Coleridge emphasized the importance of the poet's imagination and discounted adherence to arbitrary literary rules.
Such English romantic poets as Byron, Shelley, Robert Burns, Keats, Robert Southey, and William Cowper often focused on the individual self, on the poet's personal reaction to life. This emphasis can also be found in such prose works as the essays of Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt and in Thomas De Quincey's autobiographical Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1822). The interest of romantics in the medieval period as a time of mystery, adventure, and aspiration is evidenced in the Gothic romance and in the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott. William Blake was probably the most singular of the English romantics. His poems and paintings are radiant, imaginative, and heavily symbolic, indicating the spiritual reality underlying the physical reality.
The development of English novel in Victorian period. The artistic method of Critical Realism and the main novelists of that period.
1.Victorian literature is that produced during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) or the Victorian era. Victorian novels tend to be idealized portraits of difficult lives in which hard work, perseverance, love and luck win out in the end; virtue would be rewarded and wrongdoers are suitably punished. They tended to be of an improving nature with a central moral lesson at heart, mixed with a heavy dose of sentiment. While this formula was the basis for much of earlier Victorian fiction, the situation became more complex as the century progressed. During this period, the novel made a rapid progress.
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This was partly because this middle-class form of literary art was bound to flourish increasingly as the middle class rose in power and importance, partly because of the steady increase of the reading public with the growth of lending libraries, the development of publishing in the modern sense and other events which accompanied this increase, and partly because the novel was the best means to present a picture of life, lived under the stable background of social moral values by people who were like the people encountered by readers, and this was the kind of picture of life, the middle-class readers wanted to read about.
The early Victorian or first generation novelists comprised of William Thackrey (Vanity Fair), Charles Dickens (Oliver Twist, Our Mutual Friend, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations), Anthony Trollope, Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell (Mary Barton and North-South as the instrument of social reforms) etc. Although there were several more novelists of the time, only the ones mentioned here have survived the test of time and are considered representative of the early phase of the Victorian fiction in England.
If the novels of the early Victorians were written in the 40s and 50s, those of the later Victorians were published in the 60s and 70s. George Eliot (Adam Bede, Middlemarch, Romola), George Meredith (The Egoist, The Shaving of Shagpot), and Thomas Hardy (The Desperate Remedies, The Return of the Native, Far From the Madding Crowd), Bronte sisters all these major novelists of the period started publishing around the end of the 50s or later.
2. In mid and late 19th century, appeared a new literary trend - critical realism. The critical realists described with much vividness and artistic skill the chief traits of the English society and criticized the capitalist system from a democratic viewpoint. It found its expressions in the form of novel. The greatest English realist of the time was Charles Dickens.
Others were W.M. Thackeray, Bronte sisters, Mrs Gaskell, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy. These critical realists exposed and criticized the corrupted society mercilessly. The English critical realists not only gave a satirical portrayal of the bourgeoisie and all the ruling classes, but also showed profound sympathy for the common people. But the critical realists did not find a way to eradicate the social evils and they were unable to find a good solution to the social contradictions.
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