PROGRAM: BS (ENGLISH)-2

SUBJECT: HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE-1 (MEDIEVAL

TO ROMANTICS)
SUBMITTED TO: Ms. ZEHRA SHAH
SUBMITTED BY: SYEDA MISBAH FATIMA
YEAR: 2019
CHARACTRISTICS OF ROMANTIC ERA
Interest in the common man and childhood
Romantics believed in the natural goodness of humans which is
hindered by the urban life of civilization. They believed that the savage
is noble, childhood is good and the emotions inspired by both beliefs
causes the heart to soar.

Strong senses, emotions, and feelings

Romantics believed that knowledge is gained through intuition rather
than deduction. This is best summed up by Wordsworth who stated
that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”

Awe of nature
Romantics stressed the awe of nature in art and language and the
experience of sublimity through a connection with nature. Romantics
rejected the rationalization of nature by the previous thinkers of the
Enlightenment period.

Celebration of the individual

Romantics often elevated the achievements of the misunderstood,
heroic individual outcast.

Importance of imagination
Romantics legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority.

Literature
Romanticism in English literature began in the 1790s with the
publication of the Lyrical Ballads of William
Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordsworth’s
“Preface” to the second edition (1800) of Lyrical Ballads, in which
he described poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings,” became the manifesto of the English Romantic
movement in poetry. William Blake was the third principal poet of
the movement’s early phase in England. The first phase of the
Romantic movement in Germany was marked by innovations in
both content and literary style and by a preoccupation with the
mystical, the subconscious, and the supernatural. A wealth of
talents, including Friedrich Hölderlin, the early Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe, Jean Paul, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, A.W. and Friedrich
Schlegel, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, and Friedrich Schelling,
belong to this first phase. In Revolutionary France, the vicomte de
Chateaubriand and Mme de Staël were the chief initiators of
Romanticism, by virtue of their influential historical and theoretical
writings.

MUSIC
Musical Romanticism was marked by emphasis on originality and
individuality, personal emotional expression, and freedom and
experimentation of form. Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz
Schubert bridged the Classical and Romantic periods, for while
their formal musical techniques were basically Classical, their
music’s intensely personal feeling and their use of programmatic
elements provided an important model for 19th-century Romantic
composers.

VISUAL ARTS
Romanticism expressed itself in architecture primarily through
imitations of older architectural styles and
through eccentric buildings known as “follies.” Medieval Gothic
architecture appealed to the Romantic imagination in England and
Germany, and this renewed interest led to the Gothic Revival.