Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Romantic Age
Romantic Age
Romantic Age
1798-1870:
mstorical Background
Characteristics of Romanticism
3. love of nature
5. lndlvlduallsm
This particular literary period was known as the "golden age" for both
poets and novelists. Some of the greatest writers of all time beyond that
of William Shakespeare were to come about. They are as follows:
Poets:
William Wordsworth
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Percy Bysshe Shelley
John Keats
George Gordon Byron
Alfred Tennyson
Novellstl:
Jane Austen
Charlotte and Emily Bronte
Charles Dickens
George Eliot
Romantic Period in American Llteratuare. 1830-1865:
Historical Background
The period between the "second revolution" of the Jacksonian Era and
the close of the Civil War in America saw the testing of the American nation
and its development by ordeal. It was an age of great weltward expansion, of
the increasin, gravity of the slavery question, of an intensification of the
spirit of embattled sectionalism in the South. of powerful impulse to reform
in North. Its culmination act WILl the trial of arms of the opposing views of
the two sections in a civil war. whose conclusion cerWled the fact of a
united nation dedicated to the doctrine of absolute egalltarianism -. In a
sense it may be said that the three decades follOWingthe inauguration of
Andrew Jackson as president in 1829 put to the test ~is views of democracy
and saw emerge from the test a secure union committed to essentially
Jacksonian principles.
At the end of the Civil War a new nation had been born in the ordeal of
war, and it was to demand and receive a new literature less idealistic and
more practical. less exalted and more earthy. less consciously artistic and
more direct than that produced in the age when the American dream
glowed with greatest intense1ty and American writers had made a great
literary period by capturing on their pages the enthUSiasm and the
optimisim of that dream. The new literary period that followed was to be
labeled as the Realistic Period (1885-1900).