Contents

• Introduction
• Chronology
• Historical overview
• Literary Overview
• Sample Reading : Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
• Reference

Chapter 4 also includes detailed readings of the following literary texts:

• William Wordsworth, 'Tintern Abbey'
• Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
• Lord Byron, The Giaour

Suggested essay questions

• William Hazlitt attacked the fashion for sensibility in literature as 'do-me-good, lack-a-daisical, whining make-believe'. To what extent do you believe his view is justified either as a critique of the literature of sensibility itself, or as a description of the characteristics found in the writings of those opposed to the fashion, or both?
• 'The projection of the present onto the past occurred, however, as part of the wider processes of political, economic and social upheaval' (Fred Botting). To what extent do you think that Gothic writing is about Romantic period events and trends of thought? Discuss with reference to at least two writers of the period.
• 'The main desideratum of the picturesque is contrast (as against the smoothness of the beautiful or vastness of the sublime)' (Nicola Trott). To what extent is the distinction between Picturesque, Sublime and Beautiful a meaningful one when discussing representations of landscape in the Romantic period?
• How does the verse of the Romantic era seek to evoke the experience of the Sublime in the form of the poetry?
• 'Women poets, supposedly confined to domestic life, in fact confidently tackled themes supposedly reserved for the men' (Nicholas Roe). To what extent do you agree with this assessment of the poetry written by female writers in this period?
• 'Erotic fascination for oriental women on the part of "western heroes" . . . bears tragic fruit' (Leask). How formulaic are Orientalist writings about the East?
• 'But while the interconnection of Romantic literature and British imperial activity at the end of the eighteenth century is now widely accepted, we need to query what kind of connection this is' (Deirdre Coleman). What kinds of connections exist between literature and the slave trade/slavery or Orientalist literature and the East?
• 'Though opposing the slave trade, many of their representations of African peoples were deeply suspect'. To what extent is Romantic period writing about slavery liberating or imprisoning or both?