LYRICAL BALLADS (1798 and 1800) is a turning point in literary history, William

Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge presented and illustrated a liberating

aesthetic: poetry should express, in genuine language, experience as filtered through

personal emotion and imagination; the truest experience was to be found in nature. It 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.

Wordsworth deals with imagination at much greater length in his Preface to the 1815

edition of the Lyrical Ballads. There he draws a distinction between Fancy and

Imagination. According to Wordsworth, both Imagination and Fancy, “evoke and

combine, aggregate and associate”. But the material which they evoke and combine is

different, and their purpose in evoking and combining is different. They differ not in

their natures but in their purpose. Fancy makes things exact and definite, while

Imagination leaves everything vague and indefinite.

France standing on the top of golden hours, And human nature seeming born again.

Lightly equipped, and but a few brief looks Cast on the white cliffs of our native

shore

FRENCH REVOLUTION 1789-1799

France standing on the top of golden hours, And human nature seeming born again.

Lightly equipped, and but a few brief looks Cast on the white cliffs of our native

shore

France standing on the top of golden hours, And human nature seeming born again.

Lightly equipped, and but a few brief looks Cast on the white cliffs of our native

shore…These are the lines from the “Prelude”.

William Wordsworth associates France and the revolution with images of childhood and

youth. However, because the relationships he suggests are often complex as well as

uneasy, the vigor and specificity of such associations are often debated.

QUOTE BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, But to be young was very heaven!-

This lines tell us the central event of Wordsworth’s life, indeed of the life

of Europe in his time: the fall of the Bastille on July 14, 1789, and the

French revolution that followed.

The above lines reflect his perspective at the beginning of the French

Revolution; this spirit of enthusiasm didn't last long.

Wordsworth subscribed to Rousseau's belief that humanity was

essentially good but was corrupted by the influence of society. This may

be linked with the sentiments spreading through Europe just prior to the

French Revolution.

Romanticism has been the subject of debate in the fields of intellectual history and

literary history throughout the 20th century, without any great measure of consensus

emerging on the following points

That it was part of the Counter-Enlightenment, a reaction against the Age of Enlightenment, is

generally accepted.

Its relationship to the French Revolution which began in 1789 in the very early stages of the

period, is clearly important, but highly variable depending on geography and individual reactions.

Most Romantics can be said to be broadly progressive in their views, but a considerable

number always developed a wide range of conservative views and nationalism was in

many countries strongly associated with Romanticism, as discussed in detail below. In

philosophy and the history of ideas, Romanticism was seen by Isaiah Berlin as

disrupting for over a century the classic Western traditions of rationality and the very

idea of moral absolutes and agreed values, leading "to something like the melting

away of the very notion of objective truth“, and hence not only to nationalism, but

also fascism and totalitarianism, with a gradual recovery coming only after the catharsis

of World War II.

James Gillray 'The Man of Feeling'

Romantics stressed the awe of nature in art and language

THE LADY OF SHALLOT

based on The Lady of Shallot by Alfred Lord Tennyson.

ROMANTIC

LITERATURE

In literature, Romanticism found recurrent

themes in the evocation or criticism of the past,

the cult of "sensibility" with its emphasis on

women and children, the heroic isolation of the

artist or narrator, and respect for a new, wilder,

untrammeled and "pure" nature. Furthermore,

several romantic authors, such as Edgar Allan

Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, based their

writings on the supernatural/occult and human

psychology. Romanticism tended to regard

satire as something unworthy of serious

attention, a prejudice still influential today.

The Scottish poet James Macpherson influenced the early development of Romanticism

with the international success of his Ossian cycle of poems published in 1762, inspiring

both Goethe and the young Walter Scott. Both Chatterton and Macpherson's work

involved elements of fraud. The Gothic novel, beginning with Horace Walpole's The

Castle of Otranto (1764), was an important precursor of one strain of Romanticism,

with a delight in horror and threat, and exotic picturesque settings, matched in Walpole's

case by his role in the early revival of Gothic architecture. Tristram Shandy, a novel by

Laurence Sterne (1759–67) introduced a whimsical version of the anti-rational

sentimental novel to the English literary public.

William Blake (1757-1827)

William Wordsworth (1770-1850): the Lake School

S. T. Coleridge (1772-1834): the Lake School

Lord Byron (1788-1824): the Satanic School

Percy Shelley (1792-1822): the Satanic School

John Keats (1795-1821): the Cockney School

Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802)

Coleridge, Biographia Literaria (1817)

Shelley, A Defence of Poetry (written in 1821, published posthumously

in 1840)

England

George Gordon Byron was

born on January 22, 1788 in

Aberdeen, Scotland, and

inherited his family's English

title at the age of ten,

becoming Baron Byron of

Rochdale.

Frontispiece to a c. 1825 edition of Childe

Harold's Pilgrimage:

Lo! where the Giant on the mountain stands,

His blood-red tresses deep'ning in the sun,

With death-shot glowing in his fiery hands,

And eye that scorcheth all it glares upon;

Restless it rolls, now fixed, and now anon

Flashing a far,—and at his iron feet

Destruction cowers to mark what deeds are done.

For on this morn three potent nations meet,

To shed before his shrine the blood he deems

most sweet.

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is a lengthy narrative

poem in four parts written by Lord dedicated to

"Ianthe". She was the second daughter of Edward

Harley, 5th Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer. Her

beauty as a child prompted Lord Byron to dedicate the

first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage to her,

under the name "Ianthe

Charlotte Harley (1801-1880) as Ianthe, to

whom Byron dedicated Childe Harold.

Alastor, or The Spirit of Solitude is a poem by Percy

Bysshe Shelley, written from September 10 to December

14 in 1815 in Bishopsgate, London and first published in

1816. The poem was without a title when Shelley passed it

along to his contemporary and friend, Thomas Love

Peacock. The poem is 720 lines long. It is considered to be

one of the first of Shelley's major poems.

Peacock suggested the name Alastor which comes from

Roman mythology. Peacock has defined Alastor as "evil

genius." The name does not refer to the hero or Poet of the

poem, however, but instead to the spirit who divinely

animates the Poet's imagination.

Richard Rothwell's

portrait of Mary

Shelley in later life

was shown at the

Royal Academy in

1840, accompanied

by lines from Percy

Shelley's poem The

Revolt of Islam calling

her a "child of love

and light".

Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Biographia Literaria

The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary.

The primary Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime

Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind

of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am. The secondary I consider

as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as

identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only

in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses,

dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered

impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify.

It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge divides imagination into two parts: the primary and secondary

imagination. As the "living Power and prime Agent," the primary imagination is attributed

a divine quality, namely the creation of the self, the "I Am." However, because it is not

subject to human will, the poet has no control over the primary imagination. It is the

intrinsic quality of the poet that makes him or her a Creator; harking back to Wordsworth,

the primary imagination can be likened to poetic genius. The secondary imagination is

an echo of the primary. It is like the former in every way except that it is restricted in

some capacity. It co-exists with the conscious will, but because of this, the secondary

imagination does not have the unlimited power to create. It struggles to attain the ideal

but can never reach it. Still the primary governs the secondary, and imagination gives

rise to our ideas of perfection. In this way, Coleridge and Shelley share the belief that

inimitable forms of creation can only exist in the mind.

A statue of the Ancient Mariner, with the albatross around his

neck, at Watchet, Somerset.

"Ah ! well a-day ! what evil looks

Had I from old and young!

Instead of the cross, the Albatross

About my neck was hung."

The Mariner up on the mast in a storm. One of the wood-engraved illustrations by

Gustave Doré.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner relates the experiences of a sailor who has returned

from a long sea voyage. The Mariner stops a man who is on the way to a wedding

ceremony and begins to narrate a story. The Wedding-Guest's reaction turns from

bemusement to impatience and fear to fascination as the Mariner's story progresses, as

can be seen in the language style: for example, Coleridge uses narrative techniques

such as personification and repetition to create either a sense of danger, of the

supernatural or of serenity, depending on the mood of each of the different parts of the

poem.

The Mariner's tale begins with his ship departing on its journey. Despite initial good

fortune, the ship is driven south off course by a storm and eventually reaches Antarctica.

An albatross appears and leads them out of the Antarctic but, even as the albatross is

praised by the ship's crew, the Mariner shoots the bird ("with my cross-bow / I shot the

albatross"). The crew is angry with the Mariner, believing the albatross brought the south

wind that led them out of the Antarctic. However, the sailors change their minds when

the weather becomes warmer and the mist disappears ("'Twas right, said they, such

birds to slay / that bring the fog and mist"). However, they made a grave mistake in

supporting this crime as it arouses the wrath of spirits who then pursue the ship "from

the land of mist and snow"; the south wind that had initially led them from the land of ice

now sends the ship into uncharted waters, where it is becalmed.

Day after day, day after day, We stuck, nor breath nor motion;

As idle as a painted ship Upon a painted ocean.

Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.

"The Albatross about my Neck was Hung," etching by William Strang. Poem

illustration published 1896

Illustration by Gustave Doré, 1878

Engraving by Gustave Doré for an 1876 edition of the poem. "The Albatross," depicts

17 sailors on the deck of a wooden ship facing an albatross. Icicles hang from the

rigging.

The words 'Daffodils' and 'Wordsworth' go hand in hand with each other.

Wordsworth's most famous poem about daffodils was composed in 1804.It was

inspired by an event on April 15, 1802, in which Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy,

came across a "long belt" of daffodils.

"Lines Composed a few miles above

Tintern Abbey" (often abbreviated to

"Tintern Abbey", or simply "Lines") is a

poem by William Wordsworth. Tintern

Abbey is located in the southern Welsh

county of Monmouthshire, and was

abandoned in 1536.

The poem is of particular interest in that

Wordsworth's descriptions of the banks of

the River Wye outline his general

philosophies on nature.

It also has significance as the terminal

poem of the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads,

although it does not fit well into the titular

category, being more protracted and

elaborate than its predecessors.

The poem's full title, as given in Lyrical

Ballads, is "Lines written a few miles above

Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the

Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798".

TINTERN ABBEY

Wordsworth begins by explaining the pleasure he feels at being back in the place that

has given him so much joy over the years. He is also glad because he knows that this

new memory will give him future happiness. He goes on to explain how differently he

experienced nature five years ago, when he first came to explore the area. During his

first visit he was full of energy.

For nature then (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,

And their glad animal movements all gone by) To me was all in all.

COMPOSED A FEW MILES ABOVE TINTERN ABBEY, ON REVISITING THE

BANKS OF THE WYE DURING A TOUR. JULY 13, 1798

...in thy voice I catch

The language of my former heart, and read

My former pleasure in the shooting lights

Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while

May I behold in thee what I was once,

My dear, dear Sister!Wordsworth addresses his sister Dorothy, calling her both "Sister" and "dear Friend."

Through her eyes, Wordsworth can see the wild vitality he had when he first visited this

place, and this image of himself gives him new life. It is apparent at this point in the

poem that Wordsworth has been speaking to his sister throughout. Dorothy serves the

same role as nature, reminding Wordsworth of what he once was:

LYRICAL BALLADS (1798 and 1800) is a turning point in literary history, William

Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge presented and illustrated a liberating

aesthetic: poetry should express, in genuine language, experience as filtered through

personal emotion and imagination; the truest experience was to be found in nature. It 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.

Wordsworth deals with imagination at much greater length in his Preface to the 1815

edition of the Lyrical Ballads. There he draws a distinction between Fancy and

Imagination. According to Wordsworth, both Imagination and Fancy, “evoke and

combine, aggregate and associate”. But the material which they evoke and combine is

different, and their purpose in evoking and combining is different. They differ not in

their natures but in their purpose. Fancy makes things exact and definite, while

Imagination leaves everything vague and indefinite.

In his “Preface to Lyrical Ballad” he says that an external stimulus is not

needed for a poet so that he could write a poem. This means that whenever

we meet a poem, we shouldn’t understand that the poem is the product of a

certain definite occasion

William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was

an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely

unrecognized during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a

seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual arts of

the Romantic Age. His prophetic poetry has been said to

form "what is in proportion to its merits the least read body

of poetry in the English language".

His visual artistry led one contemporary art critic to proclaim

him "far and away the greatest artist Britain has ever

produced“. He produced a diverse and symbolically rich

corpus, which embraced the imagination as "the body of

God“ or "Human existence itself"

Major themes of William Blake’s Poetry:

•The destruction of Innocence: Songs of Innocence & Songs of Experience

•Redemption

•Religious Poetry

•Imagination over reason

•Nature as the purest state of man

•The flaws of earthly parents

•Social reform

The Destruction of Innocence

Throughout both Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, Blake repeatedly addresses the destruction of

childlike innocence, and in many cases of children's lives, by a society designed to use people for its own

selfish ends. Songs of Experience is an attempt to denounce the cruel society that harms the human soul in

such terrible ways, but it also calls the reader back to innocence, through Imagination, in an effort to redeem

a fallen world.

Redemption

Throughout his works, Blake frequently refers to the redemptive work of Jesus Christ. While he alludes to the

atoning act of Christ Crucified. Blake focuses on the Incarnation, the taking on of human form by the divine

Creator, as the source of redemption for both human beings and nature. He emphasizes that Christ "became a

little child" just as men and women need to return to a state of childlike grace in order to restore the

innocence lost to the social machinery of a cruel world.

Religious Hypocrisy

In such poems as "Holy Thursday" and "The Little Vagabond," Blake critiques the religious leaders of his day

for their abuse of spiritual authority.

Imagination over Reason

Blake is a strong proponent of the value of human creativity, or Imagination, over materialistic rationalism,

or Reason. As a poet and artist, Blake sees the power of art in its various forms to raise the human spirit

above its earth-bound mire. Songs of Experience in particular decries Reason's hold over Imagination. In "A

Little Boy Lost" from Songs of Experience, Blake admires the boy's inquiries into the nature of God and his

own Thought, even as he sharply criticizes the religious leaders of his day for demanding mindless obedience

to dogma.

Nature as the Purest State of Man

Like many of his contemporary Romantic poets, Blake sees in the natural world an idyllic

universe that can influence human beings in a positive manner. Many of his poems, such as

"Spring," celebrate the beauty and fecundity of nature, while others, such as "London,"

deride the sterile mechanism of urban society.

The Flaws of Earthly Parents

One recurring motif in both Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience is the failure of

human parents to properly nurture their children. The "Little Boy Lost" is abandoned by his

earthly father, yet rescued by his Heavenly Father. The parents of "The Little Vagabond"

weep in vain as their son is burned alive for heresy. Both mother and father seem frustrated

by their child's temperament in "Infant Sorrow."This recurring motif allows Blake to

emphasize the frailty of human communities and to emphasize the supremacy of Nature and

of divine care in the form of God the Father.

Social Reform

While much of Blake's poetry focuses on leaving behind the material world in favor of a

more perfect spiritual nature, his poetry nonetheless offers realistic and socially conscious

critiques of existing situations.

Blake's poem

And did those feet in ancient

time.

Walk upon Englands mountains

green:

And was the holy Lamb of God,

On Englands pleasant pastures

seen!

And did the Countenance Divine,

Shine forth upon our clouded

hills?

And was Jerusalem builded here,

Among these dark Satanic

Mills?

Bring me my Bow of burning

gold;

Bring me my Arrows of desire:

Bring me my Spear: O clouds

unfold!

Bring me my Chariot of fire!

I will not cease from Mental

Fight,

Nor shall my Sword sleep in my

Beneath the poem Blake inscribed an excerpt from the Bible: "Would to God that all the

Lord's people were Prophets": Numbers chapter 11, verse 29

dark Satanic Mills? This phrase is usually

interpreted as a symbol of the hardship

unleashed by the Industrial Revolution.

But other people have argued that “Satanic Mills” refers to the Church of

England, which Blake didn’t like much either. And Blake himself sometimes

used the word “mills” to mean pre-Christian megaliths like the monuments at

Stonehenge. He drew this image on a manuscript, possibly illustrating a nearby

reference to “the starry Mills of Satan”:

But other people have argued that “Satanic Mills” refers to the Church of

England, which Blake didn’t like much either. And Blake himself sometimes

used the word “mills” to mean pre-Christian megaliths like the monuments at

Stonehenge. He drew this image on a manuscript, possibly illustrating a nearby

reference to “the starry Mills of Satan”:

The first reference to Satan's "mills", next to images of megaliths (Milton a Poem, copy

C, object 4)

William Blake, The Little Girl Found, from Songs of Innocence and Experience,

1794

The archetype of the Creator is a familiar image in

Blake's work. Here, the demiurgic figure Urizen

prays before the world he has forged. The Song of

Los is the third in a series of illuminated books

painted by Blake and his wife, collectively known as

the Continental Prophecies.

"I must Create a System, or be

enslav'd by another Man's. I will not

Reason & Compare; my business is

to Create.“

Words uttered by Los in Blake's

Jerusalem: The Emanation of the

Giant Albion.

Blake's Ancient of Days. The

"Ancient of Days" is described in

Chapter 7 of the Book of Daniel.

Charles Lamb as a

Romantic Essayist

Charles Lamb

Charles Lamb is known for his essays. in

his Essays of Elia, uses the pseudonym of

Elia. Dream Children: A Reverie, is an

essay from this collection which was

published in the form of a book.

E.V.Lucas, his principal biographer, has

called him the most loved figure in

English Literature. Lamb’s writing style by

nature is very romantic. And above all he is

highly evocative, a quality possessed by

all Romantic writers.

The essay, Dreams Children in itself is

quite melancholy as most romantic

essays are. In it, Lamb reminisces his

childhood by telling his children stories

of when he was younger. The

fictionalized Charles Lamb, the father,

tells his children stories of their

deceased great- grand mother Field.

He mentions that, they recently had

heard of the horrifying ballad of the

Babes in the Wood.

Babes in the Woods

The poets of the second generation, Gorge

Gordon Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and

John Keats, all had intense but short lives.

They lived through the disillusionment of the

post-revolutionary period, the savage violence

of the terror and the threatening rise of the

Napoleonic Empire

George Gordon Byron,

second-generation

Romantic poet

William Hazlitt, Romantic

criticLeigh Hunt, second-

generation Romantic poet

SECOND GENERATION ROMANTIC

POETS

Frontispiece to a c. 1825 edition of Childe

Harold's Pilgrimage:

Lo! where the Giant on the mountain stands,

His blood-red tresses deep'ning in the sun,

With death-shot glowing in his fiery hands,

And eye that scorcheth all it glares upon;

Restless it rolls, now fixed, and now anon

Flashing a far,—and at his iron feet

Destruction cowers to mark what deeds are done.

For on this morn three potent nations meet,

To shed before his shrine the blood he deems

most sweet.

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is a lengthy narrative

poem in four parts written by Lord dedicated to

"Ianthe". She was the second daughter of Edward

Harley, 5th Earl of Oxford and Earl Mortimer. Her

beauty as a child prompted Lord Byron to dedicate the

first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage to her,

under the name "Ianthe

Charlotte Harley (1801-1880) as Ianthe, to

whom Byron dedicated Childe Harold.

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage by J.M.W.

Turner, 1823

Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Parts I-

II, on March 20, with other books

published in following years, up to

1818. Fourteen shorter poems also

included. The publication of these

first two cantos were received with

acclamation, and Byron wrote, "I

awoke one morning and found

myself famous." The poem

describes the travels and reflections

of a world-weary young man who,

disillusioned with a life of pleasure

and revelry, looks for distraction in

foreign lands; in a wider sense, it is

an expression of the melancholy

and disillusionment felt by a

generation weary of the wars of the

post-Revolutionary and Napoleonic

eras. The title comes from the term

childe, a medieval title for a young

man who was a candidate for

knighthood.

Childe Harold became a vehicle for Byron's

own beliefs and ideas

His first poems, Hours of Idleness (1807) were generally well received, but one very hostile

review upset him: "...it knocked me down - but I got up again. Instead of bursting a blood-vessel, I

drank three bottles of claret, and began an answer." This was a satire attacking his critics, and the

poetry of most contemporaries,

English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, satire in

verse by Lord Byron, first published anonymously

in 1809. The poem was written in response to the

adverse criticism that The Edinburgh Review had

given Hours of Idleness (1807), Byron’s first

published volume of poetry.

It was first published, anonymously, in March

1809; the opening parodies the first satire of

Juvenal. A second, expanded edition followed

later in 1809, with Byron identified as the author.

In English Bards and Scotch Reviewers, Byron

used heroic couplets in imitation of Alexander

Pope’s The Dunciad to attack the reigning poets

of Romanticism, including William Wordsworth

and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Francis Jeffrey,

the editor of The Edinburgh Review.

George Gordon Byron, who is usually referred to as Lord Byron, was a prominent

British writer, most famous for the influence of his poetry on the romantic movement that

originated in the eighteenth century.

Lord Byron’s best known works are not only the short poems She walks in beauty ;

When We Two Parted ; and, So, we’ll go no more a roving, but also his two narrative

poems Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, and, of course the more than famous Don Juan.

SHE WALKS IN BEAUTY – LORD BYRONShe walks in beauty, like the night Of cloudless climes and starry skies; And all that's best

of dark and bright Meet in her aspect and her eyes: Thus mellowed to that tender light

Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less, Had half impaired the nameless grace Which waves in

every raven tress, Or softly lightens o'er her face; Where thoughts serenely sweet express

How pure, how dear their dwelling place.

And on that cheek, and o'er that brow, So soft, so calm, yet eloquent, The smiles that win,

the tints that glow, But tell of days in goodness spent, A mind at peace with all below, A

heart whose love is innocent!

She Walks in Beauty Summary

The poem is about an unnamed woman. She's really quite striking, and the speaker

compares her to lots of beautiful, but dark, things, like "night" and "starry skies." The

second stanza continues to use the contrast between light and dark, day and night, to

describe her beauty. We also learn that her face is really "pure" and "sweet." The third

stanza wraps it all up – she's not just beautiful, she's "good" and "innocent," to boot.

A Legend of Montrose

illustration from the 1872

edition.

"Edgar and Lucie at

Mermaiden's well" by Charles

Robert Leslie (1886), after Sir

Walter Scott's Bride of

Lammermoor. Lucie is wearing

a full plaid.

The Bride of Lammermoor is based on a real-life

family tragedy that Scott had heard as a boy from his

maternal great-aunt Margaret Swinton and which

became one of his mother's favourite fireside tales.

Scott's heroine Lucy Ashton, derives from Janet

Dalrymple, daughter of the great jurist James

Dalrymple, first Viscount Stair.

The Stairs were a landowning family sympathetic to

the Covenanters, but Janet become secretly engaged to

the Royalist third Lord Rutherford. She was

compelled to confess the engagement when presented

with a suitor approved by her parents and forced by a

despotic mother to retract her vow. On the night of her

marriage to her parent's approved choice, she

seriously wounded her bridegroom in a fit of insanity

and died a fortnight later without recovering her

senses.

Walter Scott's stone slab at the Makars'

Court outside the Writers' Museum in

Edinburgh.

Scott Monument in Glasgow's George

Square.

The Funeral of Shelley by Louis Edouard

Fournier (1889); pictured in the centre are, from

left, Trelawny, Hunt, and Byron. (As a matter of

fact Hunt was not standing before the fire, he

remained in his coach the entire time.)

Friend: Keats and Shelley

Leigh Hunt, was an English

critic

essayist, poet and writer.

The Funeral of Shelley by Louis Edouard

Fournier

James Henry Leigh Hunt (19 October 1784 – 28 August

1859)

GOTHIC ROMANCE

GOTHIC FICTION, sometimes referred to as Gothic horror, is a genre or mode of

literature that combines elements of both horror and romance. Gothicism's origin is

attributed to English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto,

subtitled "A Gothic Story". The effect of Gothic fiction feeds on a pleasing sort of terror,

an extension of Romantic literary pleasures that were relatively new at the time of

Walpole's novel. Melodrama and parody (including self-parody) were other long-standing

features of the Gothic initiated by Walpole. It originated in England in the second half of

the 18th century and had much success during the English romantic period with Mary

Shelley’s Frankenstein and the works of Edgar Allan Poe. The name Gothic refers to

the (pseudo)-medieval buildings in which many of these stories take place. This extreme

form of romanticism was very popular in England and Germany.

FRANKENSTEIN by Mary Shelley is infused with some elements of

the Gothic novel and the Romantic movement

and is also considered to be one of the earliest

examples of science fiction.

The Castle of Otranto is a 1764 novel by Horace

Walpole. It is generally regarded as the first gothic

novel, initiating a literary genre which would become

extremely popular in the later 18th century and early

19th century.

Horace Walpole tried to do in the Castle of Otranto

was to separate and remove it from the realm of

Romance because Walpole felt that then-

contemporary romantic fiction was much too

contrived and unimaginative. Gothic conventions

which were originated in Walpole's The Castle of

Otranto, include things like castles /mansions, often

decaying in order to portray the decay of humanity;

rough, sometimes dangerous landscapes such as

jagged cliffs /foggy moors, the introduction of magic

or supernatural elements, often involving ghostly

apparations; passionate, headstrong men and

dangerously curious women.

Castle of Otranto tells the story of Manfred, lord of

the castle, and his family. The book begins on the

wedding-day of his sickly son Conrad and is

crushed to death by a gigantic helmet that falls on

him from above. princess Isabella.

GENRE:

ROMANCE NOVELS

Jane Austen (16 December 1775 – 18

July 1817) was an English novelist whose

works of romantic fiction earned her a

place as one of the most widely read

writers in English literature.

From 1811 until 1816, with the release of

Sense and Sensibility (1811), Pride and

Prejudice (1813), Mansfield Park (1814)

and Emma (1816), she achieved success

as a published writer.

She wrote two additional novels,

Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, both

published posthumously in 1818, and

began a third, which was eventually titled

Sanditon, but died before completing it.

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE