The Romantic Movement in English poetry is generally described as a “Return to Nature.” But Nature for the Romantics were completely different from the notion held by Augustan or neo-classical authors. When Alexander Pope instructs… “First follow Nature, and your judgment frame/By her just standard which is still the same:”-Continue Reading
Lamb, Hazlitt, and De Quincey were the three major essayists of the Romantic period. Like the poets, these essayists were personal and subjective; their essays are often candidly autobiographical, reminiscent, and self-analytic; and when the writers treated other matters than themselves, they tended to do so impressionistically, so that theContinue Reading
The publication in 1798 of Lyrical Ballads, with many of the finest poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge, is often held to mark the start of the English Romantic movement. Lyrical Ballads differs in marked ways from Wordsworth’s early poetry: notably the uncompromising simplicity of much of the language, the strongContinue Reading
Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems is a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798 and generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature. The immediate effect on critics was modest, but it became and remainsContinue Reading
Romanticism is a movement in art and literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth century in revolt against the neo-classicism of the previous centuries. It is the direct outcome of French Revolution. The French Revolution directly inspired by Rousseauism, had its influence on the Romantic Poets, both in its revolutionary idealsContinue Reading
In the development of the English novel in the eighteenth century, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding are the two most influential figures. Richardson is best known for his three epistolary* (in the form of letters) novels: Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), Clarissa: Or, the History of a Young Lady (1748)Continue Reading
Birth of the “Novel”, with its associations of newness and originality, occurs in the eighteenth century. Before that there had been forms of long and continuous narrative prose, but it was only in the 1720s that we begin to see the emergence of a recognisable “Novel” form, i.e, concerned withContinue Reading
The comedy of manners is a genre of comedy that flourished on the English stage during the Restoration period. Plays of this type are typically set in the world of the upper class, and ridicule the pretensions of those who consider themselves socially superior, deflating them with satire. With wittyContinue Reading
Characterized by highly stylized poetic dialogue, larger-than-life heroes and idealized heroines, and sensationalistic action often played out in exotic locales, heroic tragedy is a genre of English drama that flourished in the years of the Restoration. John Dryden, the dominant playwright and dramatic theorist of his time, wrote extensively inContinue Reading
In his preface to Absalom and Achitophel John Dryden sets forth the true end of satire as “amendment of vices by correction”. Restoration period was a great age of satire in general and verse satire in particular. The greater freedom of expression with the restoration of Charles II; the politicalContinue Reading
