The English Romantic movement was a reaction against neoclassicism in the 18th and 19th centuries. It valued emotion, imagination, nature, and individualism over reason and rules. Romantic writers were inspired by medievalism, the supernatural, and the French Revolution's ideals of human rights and freedom from oppression. Two Romantic poets, William Blake and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, criticized the social ills of their time like child labor. The movement also emphasized introspection and the gothic. A famous ghost story competition between Romantic writers like Byron and the Shelleys in 1816 led to seminal works including Frankenstein and The Vampyre.
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1. An Introduction to the English Romantic Movement
Video reports the characteristics of English literature, influences and principles. A
movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which marked the reaction in literature,
philosophy, art, religion, and politics from the neoclassicism and formal orthodoxy of the
preceding period. 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 French revolution which was supposed to create a new society in France,
creating a model for the world that would lead to the liberation of the human spirit. Romantic
poet William Blake and Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett-Browning both considered child
labour a curse of their times. Blake bitterly attacked the social, political, and spiritual abuses
and saw the growing need for child labour a threat to their innocence, while Browning's cry
gave them voice within society. Blake's views on what he saw as oppression and restriction of
rightful freedom extended to the Church.
The main features shown in the video related to the period of Romanticism are:
Imagination and emotion are more important than reason and formal rules; Romantic
literature tends to emphasize a love of nature, a respect for primitivism, and a valuing of the
common, "natural" man; Romantics idealize country life and believe that many of the ills of
society are a result of urbanization; Romantics were interested in the Medieval past, the
supernatural, the mystical, the “gothic,” and the exotic; Romantics were attracted to rebellion
and revolution, especially concerned with human rights, individualism, freedom from
oppression; There was emphasis on introspection, psychology, melancholy, and sadness.
Byron was also the host of the celebrated ghost-story competition involving himself,
Percy Bysshe Shelley , Mary Shelley , and John William Polidori at the Villa Diodati on the
banks of Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816. This occasion was productive of both Mary
Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and Polidori's The Vampyre (1819).