Special education of uzbekistan karshi state university the faculty of roman-german philology

Romantic period in English literature.

Romantic period in English Literature, 1798-1870. Between the publication of Lyrical Ballads (1789) by Wordsworth and Coleridge and the death of Dickens (1870), English Literature was dominated by Romanticism.

The romantic period came into being during the Napoleonic Wars and flourished during the painful economic dislocations that followed. It saw union with Ireland; it witnessed the suffering attendant on the Indistrial Revolution. It was torn by chartism and the great debates centering on the Reform Bill.
It developed a sensitive humanitarianism out of witnessing the suffering of the masses; it both espoused and despised the doctrine of Utilitarianism. In industrial England was being born in pain and suffering. The throes of developing democracy, the ugliness of the sudden growth of cities, the prevalence of human pain the blatant presence of the profit motive-all helped to characterise what was in many respects “the best of times … the worst of times”.
Romanticism is a movement of the XVIII^th and XIX^th centuries that marked the reaction in literature, philosophy, art, religion and politics from the Neoclassicism and formal orthodoxy of the preceding period Romanticism arose so gradually and exhibited so many phases that a satisfactory definition is not possible. The aspect most stressed in France is reflected in Victor Hugo’s phrase “Liberalism in literature”, meaning especially the freeing of the artist and writer from restraints and rules and suggesting that phase of individualism marked by the encouragement of revolutionary political ideas. The poet Heine noted that the chief aspect of German romanticism in calling it the revival of medievalism in art, letters and life. An interesting schematic explanation calls romanticism the predominance of Imagination over reason and formal rules (classicism) and over the sense of fact of the actual (realism).
Here is a list of romantic characteristics, though Romanticism was not a clearly conceived system. Among the aspects of the romantic movement in England may be listed: Sensibility Primitivism; love of Nature; sympathetic interest in the past, especially the medieval; Mysticism; individualism; Romantic Criticism and a reaction against what ever characterized neoclassicism. Among the specific characteristics embraced be these general attitudes are: the abondenment of the Heroic Couplet in favour of Blank Verse, the Sonnett the Spenserian Stanza, and many experimental verse forms; the dropping of the conventional poetic diction in favour of fresher language and bolder figures; the idealization of rural life, enthusiasm for the wild, irregular of Grotesque in nature and art; unrestrained imagination, enthusiasm for the uncivilized or “national”, interest in human rights (Burns, Byron); sympathy with animal life (Cowper); sentimental melancholy (Gray); emotional and imitation of popular ballads (Persy, Scott); interest in ancient Celtic and Scandinavian mythology and literature; renewed interest in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. Typical literary forms include the lyric, especially the nature lyric, and the lyric of morbid melancholy.
In the first half of the period a philosophical romanticism based an value in the individual, on the romantic view of nature, and on the organic concept of art dominated the English literary mind. There was some skepticism and cynicism, expressed in the from of abusive parody and satire, but optimism was the spirit of the times, although it was an optimism closely associated with the impulse to revolt and with radical political reform. In the second half of the period, the Early Victorian Age, the impact of Industrial Revolution was more deeply felt and the implications of the new science for philosophy and religion began to be obvious. The romantic philosophy still held, and the spirit of romanticism permeated literature and much of life; but it found itself seriously in conflict with much of the world around it , and out of that conflict came a literature of doubt and questioning. If for example, the attitudes of Coleridge and Shelly are compares with those of Carlyle – all three clearly romantics – the extent to which the romanticism of the earlier period was being qualified by the conditions of industrial England and was being used to test those conditions becomes clearer.
In poetry the romantic period heard the voices of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Tennyson, Arnold, the Pre-Raphaelites, and Browning. It was a great age for the novel, producing Godwin, Scott, Austen, the Brontes, Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope. And the early George Eliot. A period of serious critical and social debate in prose, it produced Carlyle, Ruskin, Macaulay Arnold, Pater, Mill and Newman.
In the informal essay it produced Lamb, Hazlitt, Hunt, and de Quincey. Only in the drama, bound by the Patent Theatres and a blind idolatry of Shakespeare and hampered by the star system, did the romantic period fail to produce work of true distinction; it was virtually the weakest period in the English stage since Elizabeth I ascended the throne.
A famous literary critic Arnold Kettle gives the following point of view on the Romantic movement:
The Romantic movement in English literature coincides with the transformation of Britain from the agricultural and commercial country of the XVIIIth century into “the workshop of the world”. It coincides with the Industrial Revolution at home and the French Revolution abroad. It was (to simplify a very complicated question) the expression of the need of the British writers to come to grips with the new world that the Industrial Revolution created. In this task the old secure standards of the eighteenth-century ruling classes were inevitably insufficient. The old horizons were inadequate; a thousand new problems, new relationships, new ideas, came crowding in.
The writers whom we have come to see as belonging to the Romantic movement were men and women of widely differing attitudes to life and ways of writing. Wordsworth and Byron, Coleridge and Keats, Shelley and Scott have, when we come to look at their work, remarkably little in common in the way of positive achievement or philosophy. But they have this that links them together: each is responding in his particular way to the new situation brought about by the Industrial Revolution. They have differing philosophies, but they are all in revolt against the mechanical and undialectical materialism of the eighteenth-century philosophers and its later development, the utilitarianism of the theorists of industrial capitalism.
The Romantic movement was not a literary movement away from realism. On the contrary it was the aim of the Romantic writers to achieve a more significant, more inclusive realism than the conventions of aristocratic literature had permitted. They did not always succeed, for it was one thing to recognize the inadequacies of the class-bound standards of the “classical” writers and quite another to achieve a satisfactory democratic art. For reasons which, from our point of vantage a hundred and fifty years on, it is not hard to understand, it was impossible from them to attach themselves any longer to the eighteenth century tradition, than to discover a positive force upon which to base their work and aspirations. Hence the tendency of a good deal of Romantic literature to lose itself in vagueness and individualist and to become in the end romantic in the pejorative sense.