Romantic literature (1764-1865) reacted against Enlightenment literature’s devotion to order and reason by praising imagination, spontaneity, intuition, and emotion. The Romantic period began earlier in Britain, followed by a later, American Romantic period especially emphasizing the importance of nature.
Romantics tended to admire the individual hero resisting the confining restrictions of corrupt society. The contemporary term “romance novel” usually refers to a mass market paperback telling a story of a lovestruck woman engaging in a sensual love affair with a hunky billionaire; understandably, perhaps, this usage results from the romantic writers of Britain and America privileging emotion—including love and desire—as a counter to the Enlightenment’s privileging of reason.
Many romantics were fascinated by the sublime, a feeling of awe beyond reason. The sublime could be inspired by extreme beauty, such as a panoramic landscape viewed from a mountain top. Dark or Gothic romantics experienced the sublime especially through mystery or terror.
The Romantic period may be said to begin, in fact, with the publication of the first gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story in 1764.
What are Representative Works of Romantic Literature?
Lyric poetry and gothic novels are particularly representative literary forms during the romantic period.
The lyric’s emphasis on the perspective of an individual speaker relating his or her emotive experience is particularly suited to the Romantic period’s celebration of individuality and emotion over reason.
Gothic Romanticism
The gothic novel has a more complex relationship with the Enlightenment literature it reacted against. A massive earthquake utterly destroyed a major European capital city on the morning of November 1, 1755. The Lisbon Earthquake not only rocked the mighty Portuguese Empire, but it shook Enlightenment Europe’s optimistic belief in the perfection of human life through scientific progress.
Gothic authors, beginning with Walpole, countered the Enlightenment’s devotion to reason and natural law by creating a new literature featuring fear and the supernatural. Walpole set his novel The Castle of Otranto in the haunted titular castle, and his characters struggle against supernatural forces from the past that are intruding on the present. This emphasis on the past and the supernatural implicitly rejects the Enlightenment’s optimism about a progressive future based on scientific reason and the eradication of superstition.
The castle’s “gothic architecture,” with its dark spaces and its grotesque and exaggerated proportions, refers to the early-medieval style of European architecture erroneously attributed to the Goths, who were responsible for the destruction of the Roman Empire and its balanced, rational architectural style. The intrusion of the past onto the present in the form of ghosts, prophecies, and old bloodlines also undermines the Enlightenment belief in progress.
Ann Radcliffe is Walpole’s successor in these themes, especially in her work The Mysteries of Udolpho, while Mary Shelley wrote an astonishgly original gothic novel with Frankenstein late in the British Romantic period.
Gothic literature has continued to survive through subsequent literary periods, perhaps finding its greatest expression in the ruined battlements and immortal medieval lord of Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula (1897) (published during the late Victorian era).
Romantic Poets
Other British romantics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth explored a lyric poetry that celebrated freedom, independence, and the natural world. Their successors in British romanticism, Lord Byron, John Keats, and Percy Shelley, took radical independence to new levels with their sublime poetry and outrageous lifestyles.
What is the Difference Between British and American Romantic Literature?
American romantic literature differed from British Romanticism chiefly in its emphasis on renewal through one’s encounter with wilderness. American romanticism proved so influential in the nineteenth century as to lead to the creation of America’s national parks and the environmental movement.
America’s earliest romantic novelist, James Fenimore Cooper, told the story of the legendary Hawkeye and his friend Chingachgook, The Last of the Mohicans, who hunted the wilderness of Upstate New York during the eighteenth century. Our earliest romantic poet, William Cullen Bryant, meditated on nature and the human spirit in his poems. And a third pioneer of America’s romantic movement, Washington Irving, gently mocked the whole movement with his comic characters Ichabod Crane and Rip in “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle.”
Transcendentalism
One variety of American romanticism, called Transcendentalism, whose practitioners believed in transcending one’s limitations and encountering the romantic sublime through nature, produced two of America’s greatest essayists and most profound philosophers, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. America’s most important epic poet, Walt Whitman, and America’s most important lyric poet, Emily Dickinson, both found inspiration in Emerson’s essays.
No one embodied the Transcendentalist ideal of self-reliance more than America’s most influential heroic individual, Frederick Douglass. Douglass was a slave who taught himself to read and write, escaped his bondage, and became advisor to President Lincoln during the Civil War. Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself, stands with Ben Franklin’s memoirs as one of the two most important American autobiographies ever written.
Dark Romanticism
Another strain of American romantic writers, the Dark Romantics, were more pessimistic and skeptical of the Transcendentalists. Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville wrote in a new sort of American gothicism. Poe set many of his stories in gothic Europe or in ruined mansions in the American South. In his Twice-Told Tales and his novel The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne visited the terrifying side of America’s Puritan past and found evil, not simply renewal, in the New England woods. Melville, inspired by Hawthorne, confronted the possibility of a demonic heart of nature in his novel of the White Whale, Moby Dick.
“All my means are sane, my motive and my object mad.”
Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
Representative Works of British Romantic Literature, 1764-1832
Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otronto; William Blake’s poetry; Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho; Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads; poems of Lord Byron, John Keats, and Percy Shelley; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Sir Walter Scott’s Rob Roy and Ivanhoe
Representative Works of American Romantic Literature, 1820-1865
Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle;” William Cullen Bryant’s “Thanatopsis” and “To a Waterfowl;” James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans; Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature and essays; Henry David Thoreau’s Walden and “Civil Disobedience;” Edgar Allan Poe stories and poems; Emily Dickinson’s poems; Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass; Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales and The Scarlet Letter; Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick, “Benito Cereno,”and “Bartleby the Scrivener;” Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
