A STUDY ABOUT THE ROMANTIC 19^th CENTURY

Prof. Adriana- Maria Ştefănescu

Liceul Tehnologic Energetic „Regele Ferdinand I”, Timişoara

The late 18th century was a period of revolutionary change across Europe. The Enlightenment, or Age of Reason, had fostered the scientific advances that brought about the Industrial Revolution, as well as the various philosophical ideas that had led to the political revolutions in North America and France.

The effects of growing industrialization and urbanization on society had a significant impact on the way that many people lived and worked.

During the Renaissance and the Enlightenment periods, humankind and reason were the twin focuses of cultural interest.

But in the early 19th century, the individual came to the fore. Partly as a reaction to the cool rationality of the Enlightenment, a movement in the arts arose, which placed emphasis on subjective feelings and faculties such as intuition, imagination, and emotion. This movement became known as Romanticism.

Romanticism had its roots in the German Sturm und Drang movement, from which the writers Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Schiller emerged. In this transition from the classical style of the Enlightenment to 19th-century Romanticism, they introduced the idea of an

unconventional protagonist whose actions are less important than his thoughts and feelings. This

“Romantic hero” later became more of an antiestablishment figure, epitomizing the rebellious spirit of the period, and a recurrent character in the growing number of novels that appeared at the time.

By the mid-19th century, Romanticism had spread across Europe to Russia, and writers such as Alexander Pushkin, Mikhail Lermontov, and Ivan Turgenev developed the idea into that of the “superfluous man,” whose unconventional ideas isolate him completely from society. Another characteristic of Romantic literature was an affinity with the natural world. English poets such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge offered an antidote to the industrial age by portraying the beauty and power of nature, and celebrating the innocence and impulsiveness of childhood. A similar reaction to urbanization was evident in the work of American transcendentalist writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman who evoked the spirit of humanitarian liberty, culminating in their call to go “back to nature.”

That nature (and human nature) also has a dark side, and can arouse feelings of terror as well as pleasure. This fascination with the destructive power of nature, and even the supernatural, inspired the genre that came to be known as gothic literature. The tone was set in Germany by Goethe’s play Faust, and the short stories by E. T. A. Hoffmann, but the genre was most eagerly adopted by English novelists, such as Mary Shelley, who wrote Frankenstein. Elements of the gothic run through many Victorian novels, often stressing the untameable nature of a Romantic hero in a wild landscape, as in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, or the grotesque characters in grim urban surroundings that feature in the works of Charles Dickens. The genre also became popular in the US, as exemplified by Edgar Allan Poe’s tales of the macabre; it also influenced the style adopted by Herman Melville in his haunting short stories and Moby-Dick.

As society industrialized, levels of literacy increased, and literature was no longer solely for an educated elite. Novels in particular reached a mass readership in 19th-century Europe and the US, and many were made available in serial form. Especially popular were historical novels by the likes of Walter Scott, Alexandre Dumas, and James Fenimore Cooper, which catered to an urban public’s desire for romance and adventure, but included graver fare such as Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace.

The early to mid-19^th century saw the rise of the novel and, a little later, the development of Romanticism in literature. By the close of the 18^th century, however, a new genre had emerged in England—the novel of manners, which moved away from the excesses of emotion and flights of fancy common to Romanticism. Instead, it placed emphasis on the beliefs, manners, and social structures of particular groups of people. These novels were often dominated by women—both as authors and as protagonists—and for this reason were sometimes wrongly dismissed as trivial.

There was also an appetite for folk stories and fairy tales which, like historical novels, were often specific to a culture. This focus on regional traditions chimed with the era’s growing nationalism. In addition to a broader readership, increased literacy spawned a greater variety of authors, most noticeably a generation of women such as the Brontë sisters and George Eliot of England, who (albeit under pseudonyms) pioneered a female perspective in literature, and the first freed slaves, such as Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Solomon Northup, who gave a voice to oppressed black people.

References:

1. Azim, Firdous, 1993. The Language of Gender and Class: Transformation in the Victorian Novel. London: Rouledge.

2. Castle, Gregory, 2007. The Blackwell Guide to Literary Theory. Los Angeles: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

3. Ellis, Sarah Stickney, 1842. The Daughters of England: Their Position in Society, Character and Responsabilities. London: Fisher.