Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-848d4c4894-nr4z6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-30T12:42:55.628Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

1 - Romanticism and the “schools” of criticism and theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 January 2011

Stuart Curran
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
Get access

Summary

For students of English literature from the 1780s through to the mid 1830s, “Romanticism” and the “Romantic period” are not what they used to be - one good reason for a second edition of this volume. To be sure, “Romanticism” as a literary movement or a complex of beliefs and styles of art, and “Romantic” as a descriptor of that type of writing or writer, have long referred to “being like romance”: to reworking an aesthetic mode, particularly the European quest-romance of the twelfth through the sixteenth centuries, where imagination, desire, and myth-making heighten what we usually take as perceived “reality” to extend its limits with symbolic suggestions that deepen, expand, or transcend everyday human awareness. Such a relocation of “romance,” in fact, was already in progress well before 1780. By then “romantic” as a signifier had already strayed from mainly describing supernatural tales of chivalry, including their expressions of love, parodied in Cervantes's Don Quixote (1605-15), to characterize the assertively “natural,” but also mythological and idealizing, landscape paintings of Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa from the seventeenth century as these came to Britain from southern France and northern Italy (to many, then, the “regions of romance”) to become exemplars of grand sublimity within the late eighteenth- century culture of “sensibility” (Eichner, 'Romantic,' p. 5).

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2010

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure coreplatform@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×