119-) English Literature

119- ) English Literature

Romanticism

Drama

This was a great era of English theatre, notable for the acting of John Philip Kemble, Sarah Siddons, and, from 1814, the brilliant Edmund Kean. But it was not a great period of playwriting. The exclusive right to perform plays enjoyed by the “Royal” (or “legitimate”) theatres created a damaging split between high and low art forms. The classic repertoire continued to be played but in buildings that had grown too large for subtle staging, and, when commissioning new texts, legitimate theatres were torn between a wish to preserve the blank-verse manner of the great tradition of English tragedy and a need to reflect the more-popular modes of performance developed by their illegitimate rivals.

This problem was less acute in comedy, where prose was the norm and Oliver Goldsmith and Richard Brinsley Sheridan had, in the 1770s, revived the tradition of “laughing comedy.” But despite their attack on it, sentimental comedy remained the dominant mode, persisting in the work of Richard Cumberland (The West Indian, 1771), Hannah Cowley (The Belle’s Stratagem, 1780), Elizabeth Inchbald (I’ll Tell You What, 1785), John O’Keeffe (Wild Oats, 1791), Frederic Reynolds (The Dramatist, 1789), George Colman the Younger (John Bull, 1803), and Thomas Morton (Speed the Plough, 1800). Sentimental drama received a fresh impetus in the 1790s from the work of the German dramatist August von Kotzebue; Inchbald translated his controversial Das Kind Der Liebe (1790) as Lovers’ Vows in 1798.

By the 1780s, sentimental plays were beginning to anticipate what would become the most important dramatic form of the early 19th century: melodrama. Thomas Holcroft’s Seduction (1787) and The Road to Ruin (1792) have something of the moral simplicity, tragicomic plot, and sensationalism of the “mélodrames” of Guilbert de Pixérécourt; Holcroft translated the latter’s Coelina (1800) as A Tale of Mystery in 1802. Using background music to intensify the emotional effect, the form appealed chiefly, but not exclusively, to the working-class audiences of the “illegitimate” theatres. Many early examples, such as Matthew Lewis’s The Castle Spectre (first performance 1797) and J.R. Planché’s The Vampire (1820), were theatrical equivalents of the Gothic novel. But there were also criminal melodramas (Isaac Pocock, The Miller and His Men, 1813), patriotic melodramas (Douglas Jerrold, Black-Eyed Susan, 1829), domestic melodramas (John Howard Payne, Clari, 1823), and even industrial melodramas (John Walker, The Factory Lad, 1832). The energy and narrative force of the form would gradually help to revivify the “legitimate” serious drama, and its basic concerns would persist in the films and television of a later period.

Legitimate drama, performed at patent theatres, is best represented by the work of James Sheridan Knowles, who wrote stiffly neo-Elizabethan verse plays, both tragic and comic (Virginius, 1820; The Hunchback, 1832). The great lyric poets of the era all attempted to write tragedies of this kind, with little success. Coleridge’s Osorio (1797) was produced (as Remorse) at Drury Lane in 1813, and Byron’s Marino Faliero in 1821. Wordsworth’s The Borderers (1797), Keats’s Otho the Great (1819), and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) remained unperformed, though The Cenci has a sustained narrative tension that distinguishes it from the general Romantic tendency to subordinate action to character and produce “closet dramas” (for reading) rather than theatrical texts. The Victorian poet Robert Browning would spend much of his early career writing verse plays for the legitimate theatre (Strafford, 1837; A Blot in the ’Scutcheon, produced in 1843). But after the Theatre Regulation Act of 1843, which abolished the distinction between legitimate and illegitimate drama, demand for this kind of play rapidly disappeared.

The post-Romantic and Victorian eras

Self-consciousness was the quality that John Stuart Mill identified, in 1838, as “the daemon of the men of genius of our time.” Introspection was inevitable in the literature of an immediately Post-Romantic period, and the age itself was as prone to self-analysis as were its individual authors. Hazlitt’s essays in The Spirit of the Age (1825) were echoed by Mill’s articles of the same title in 1831, by Thomas Carlyle’s essays “Signs of the Times” (1829) and “Characteristics” (1831), and by Richard Henry Horne’s New Spirit of the Age in 1844.

This persistent scrutiny was the product of an acute sense of change. Britain had emerged from the long war with France (1793–1815) as a great power and as the world’s predominant economy. Visiting England in 1847, the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson observed of the English that “the modern world is theirs. They have made and make it day by day.”

This new status as the world’s first urban and industrialized society was responsible for the extraordinary wealth, vitality, and self-confidence of the period. Abroad these energies expressed themselves in the growth of the British Empire. At home they were accompanied by rapid social change and fierce intellectual controversy.

The juxtaposition of this new industrial wealth with a new kind of urban poverty is only one of the paradoxes that characterize this long and diverse period. In religion the climax of the Evangelical revival coincided with an unprecedentedly severe set of challenges to faith. The idealism and transcendentalism of Romantic thought were challenged by the growing prestige of empirical science and utilitarian moral philosophy, a process that encouraged more-objective modes in literature. Realism would be one of the great artistic movements of the era. In politics a widespread commitment to economic and personal freedom was, nonetheless, accompanied by a steady growth in the power of the state. The prudery for which the Victorian Age is notorious in fact went hand in hand with an equally violent immoralism, seen, for example, in Algernon Charles Swinburne’s poetry or the writings of the Decadents. Most fundamentally of all, the rapid change that many writers interpreted as progress inspired in others a fierce nostalgia. Enthusiastic rediscoveries of ancient Greece, Elizabethan England, and, especially, the Middle Ages by writers, artists, architects, and designers made this age of change simultaneously an age of active and determined historicism.

John Stuart Mill caught this contradictory quality, with characteristic acuteness, in his essays on Jeremy Bentham (1838) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1840). Every contemporary thinker, he argued, was indebted to these two “seminal minds.” Yet Bentham, as the enduring voice of the Enlightenment, and Coleridge, as the chief English example of the Romantic reaction against it, held diametrically opposed views.

A simila sense of sharp controversy is given by Carlyle in Sartor Resartus (1833–34). An eccentric philosophical fiction in the tradition of Swift and Sterne, the book argues for a new mode of spirituality in an age that Carlyle himself suggests to be one of mechanism. Carlyle’s choice of the novel form and the book’s humour, generic flexibility, and political engagement point forward to distinctive characteristics of Victorian literature .

Early Victorian literature: the age of the novel

Several major figures of English Romanticism lived on into this period. Coleridge died in 1834, De Quincey in 1859. Wordsworth succeeded Southey as poet laureate in 1843 and held the post until his own death seven years later. Posthumous publication caused some striking chronological anomalies. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “A Defence of Poetry” was not published until 1840. Keats’s letters appeared in 1848 and Wordsworth’s Prelude in 1850.

Despite this persistence, critics of the 1830s felt that there had been a break in the English literary tradition, which they identified with the death of Byron in 1824. The deaths of Austen in 1817 and Scott in 1832 should perhaps have been seen as even more significant, for the new literary era has, with justification, been seen as the age of the novel. More than 60,000 works of prose fiction were published in Victorian Britain by as many as 7,000 novelists. The three-volume format (or “three-decker”) was the standard mode of first publication; it was a form created for sale to and circulation by lending libraries. It was challenged in the 1830s by the advent of serialization in magazines and by the publication of novels in 32-page monthly parts. But only in the 1890s did the three-decker finally yield to the modern single-volume format.

Most Famous Writers in The Romantic Period in English Literature- Summary

1. William Wordsworth (1770–1850)

2. S.T Coleridge (1772–1834)

3. Lord Byron (1778–1824)

4. P.B. Shelley (1792–1822)

5. John Keats (1795–1821)

William Wordsworth

The poet William Wordsworth was born on April 7, 1770, in Cockermouth, a remote town in the lowlands of northern England. He is known as “Poet of Nature,” “Worshiper of Nature,” “The Lake Poet.” The French Revolution inspired him. He became The Poet of Laureate in England.” In nature, the great Creator exists,” his belief is known as Pantheism William Wordsworth was the brightest star of the age of the Romantic Period.. This poet died in 1850.

His Well-known Works :

 Lyrical Ballads  , The Daffodils , The Solitary Reaper , The Excursion ,

 The Prelude  , The Recluse

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in 1772, the youngest of thirteen children of his parents. He was an extraordinary child who read the Bible and Arabian Nights before he was five. He was an influential writer, poet, literary critic, and philosopher of the age of the Romantic Period. He was a founder of his friend William Wordsworth of the Romantic Movement in England. He was called “Opium Eater,” “The Poet of Super-naturalism.” This poet died in 1834.

His Well-known Works :

· Lyrical ballads , · The Rime of the Ancient Mariner , · Christabel , · Kubla Khan , · Dejection: An Ode , · The Nightingale , · Biographia Literaria

Lord Byron

George Gordon Byron was a British poet and one of the leading figures in the Romantic movement . The poet was born in 1788 in London, the year preceding the French Revolution. He was called the Rebel poet in England. He was also an influential poet of the age of the Romantic Period. He published his first work “Hours of Idleness (Juvenilia)” at the age of 19 when he was reading Cambridge University. He fought on behalf of the Greeks in their Liberation War. This poet contracted fever at the age of 36 and died in 1824.

His Well-known Works :

Don Juan ,  Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage ,  She Walks in Beauty ,  Hours of Idleness ,  Heaven and Earth

Percy Bysshe Shelly

Percy Bysshe Shelly was one of the major English Romantic poets and is critically regarded as among the finest lyric poets in the English language. The famous English poet was born in 1792 in Fieldplace, near Sussex, England. He was an Optimistic & Pessimistic poet. This great poet died in 1822 when he was caught in a storm while traveling by boat on the beach.

His Well-known Works :

Ode to a Skylark ,  Ode to the West Wind ,  Adonais ,  Queen Mab ,  The Necessity Atheism ,  A Defense of Poetry , Prometheus Unbound

John Keats

John Keats was not only the last but also the most perfect of the Romanticists. He was most young among the Romantic poets. The famous poet of English literature was born in 1795 in Mubfields, London. He was called “Poet of Beauty” “Poet of Sensuousness.” He was most famous for his sense of beauty and professionally known as a man of medicine. This poet died at the age of 26 of Tuberculosis in 1821.

His Well-known Works :

Ode to a Nightingale ,  Ode to Psyche ,  Odeon Melancholy ,  Ode to Autumn

,Isabella ,  Lamia

Poets / Romanticism / Writer / English Language

William Blake. , Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772–1834 , Percy Bysshe Shelley1792–1822 , John Keats 1795–1821 , Robert Burns , 1759–1796 , Joseph Warton 1722–1800 , Walter Scott, 1771–1832 , Edgar Allan Poe1809–1849 , Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803–1882 , James Russell Lowell , 1819–1891 , Henry Wadsworth Longfellow1807–1882 , Mary Shelley 1797–1851 , Thomas Love Peacock 1785–1866 , John Clare 1793–1864 , Felicia Hemans 1793–1835