An Introduction to the English Romantic Movement

Video reports the characteristics of English literature, influences and principles. A

movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which marked the reaction in literature,

philosophy, art, religion, and politics from the neoclassicism and formal orthodoxy of the

preceding period. Resulting in part from the libertarian and egalitarian ideals of the French

Revolution, the romantic movements had in common only a revolt against the prescribed rules

of classicism. The French revolution which was supposed to create a new society in France,

creating a model for the world that would lead to the liberation of the human spirit. Romantic

poet William Blake and Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett-Browning both considered child

labour a curse of their times. Blake bitterly attacked the social, political, and spiritual abuses

and saw the growing need for child labour a threat to their innocence, while Browning's cry

gave them voice within society. Blake's views on what he saw as oppression and restriction of

rightful freedom extended to the Church.

The main features shown in the video related to the period of Romanticism are:

Imagination and emotion are more important than reason and formal rules; Romantic

literature tends to emphasize a love of nature, a respect for primitivism, and a valuing of the

common, "natural" man; Romantics idealize country life and believe that many of the ills of

society are a result of urbanization; Romantics were interested in the Medieval past, the

supernatural, the mystical, the “gothic,” and the exotic; Romantics were attracted to rebellion

and revolution, especially concerned with human rights, individualism, freedom from

oppression; There was emphasis on introspection, psychology, melancholy, and sadness.

Byron was also the host of the celebrated ghost-story competition involving himself,

Percy Bysshe Shelley , Mary Shelley , and John William Polidori at the Villa Diodati on the

banks of Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816. This occasion was productive of both Mary

Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and Polidori's The Vampyre (1819).