The Romantic Period lasted from 1790 CE to 1830 CE, and it is characterized by the following:
When searching MICAL or an online database, the following Subject Headings can be used for conducting a "Subject" search. You can also follow the links below for a subject search in the catalog:
English literature -- 18th century
English literature -- 19th century
Transcendentalism in literature
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Emerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason: The Transatlantic 'light of All Our Day' by
Emerson, Romanticism, and Intuitive Reason is a comparative study in transatlantic Romanticism, focusing on Emerson's part in the American dialogue with British Romanticism and, as filtered through Coleridge, German Idealist philosophy. The book's guiding theme is the concept of intuitive Reason, which Emerson derived from Coleridge's distinction between Understanding and Reason and which Emerson associated with that "light of all our day" in his favorite stanza of Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality." Intuitive Reason became the intellectual and emotional foundation of American Transcendentalism. That light radiated out to illuminate Emerson's life and work, as well as the complex and often covert relationship of a writer who, however fiercely "self-reliant" and "original," was deeply indebted to his transatlantic precursors. The debt is intellectual and personal. Emerson's supposed indifference to, or triumph over, repeated familial tragedy is often attributed to his Idealism--a complacent optimism that blinded him to any vision of the tragic. His "art of losing" may be better understood as a tribute to the "healing power," the consolation in distress, which Emerson considered Wordsworth's principal value. The second part of this book traces Emerson's struggle--with the help of the "benignant influence" shed by that "light of all our day"--to confront and overcome personal tragedy, to attain the equilibrium epitomized in Wordsworth's "Elegiac Stanzas": "Not without hope we suffer and we mourn." As a study in what has been called "the paradox of originality," the book should appeal to those interested in the Anglo-American Romantic tradition and the innovations of the individual talent--especially in the capacity of a writer such as Emerson not only to absorb his precursors but also to use them as a stimulus to his own creative power.
Gothic Literature by
This introductory study provides a thorough grounding in both the history of Gothic literature and the way in which Gothic texts have been (and can be) critically read.The book opens with a chronology and an introduction to the principaltexts and key critical terms, followed by four chapters: The GothicHeyday 1760-1820; Gothic 1820-1865; Gothic Proximities 1865-1900; and theTwentieth Century. The discussion examines how the Gothic has developed in different national contexts and in different forms, including novels, novellas, poems, and films. Each chapter concludes with a close reading of a specific text - Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, Draculaand The Silence of the Lambs- to illustrate the ways in which contextual discussion informs critical analysis. The book ends with a conclusion outlining possible future developments within scholarship on the Gothic.Key Features* Provides a single, comprehensive and accessible introduction to Gothic literature* Offers a coherent account of the historical development of the Gothic in arange of literary and national contexts* Introduces the ways in which critical theories of class, gender, race andnational identity have been applied to Gothic texts*Includes an outline of essential resources and a guide to further reading
British Romanticism and the Critique of Political Reason by
What role should reason play in the creation of a free and just society? Can we claim to know anything in a field as complex as politics? And how can the cause of political rationalism be advanced when it is seen as having blood on its hands? These are the questions that occupied a group of British poets, philosophers, and polemicists in the years following the French Revolution. Timothy Michael argues that much literature of the period is a trial, or a critique, of reason in its political capacities and a test of the kinds of knowledge available to it. For Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Burke, Wollstonecraft, and Godwin, the historical sequence of revolution, counter-revolution, and terror in France--and radicalism and repression in Britain--occasioned a dramatic reassessment of how best to advance the project of enlightenment. The political thought of these figures must be understood, Michael contends, in the context of their philosophical thought. Major poems of the period, including The Prelude, The Excursion, and Prometheus Unbound, are in this reading an adjudication of competing political and epistemological claims. This book bridges for the first time two traditional pillars of Romantic studies: the period's politics and its theories of the mind and knowledge. Combining literary and intellectual history, it provides an account of British Romanticism in which high rhetoric, political prose, poetry, and poetics converge in a discourse of enlightenment and emancipation.