What is Romantic Literature?

[dawgsnlocust]

By "romantic", I do not mean as in modern day "romance". I mean as in Romanticism, or the counter-culture of the Enlightenment. I've looked everywhere for the "defintion", but it seems to be ill-defined, or not defined at all. Would Les Misérables be considered "romantic literature"?

[dfloyd]

Look up Romaticism at Wikipedia for a description of the Romantic era as applied to art, music, amd literature.

[dawgsnlocust]

Look up Romaticism at Wikipedia for a description of the Romantic era as applied to art, music, amd literature.

Yeah, I could do that, but Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, making it unreliable. Not only that, but looking up anything on Wikipedia requires you to look up 1000 other things if you don't know what it's talking about.

[Scheherazade]

Yeah, I could do that, but Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, making it unreliable. So, instead you take the words of strangers on a Forum you have just joined! Excellent!

Have a look at this website (http://www.barbaracartland.com/static/home.aspx) for some ideas!

[stlukesguild]

So, instead you take the words of strangers on a Forum you have just joined! Excellent!

Have a look at this website (http://www.barbaracartland.com/static/home.aspx) for some ideas!

Now Scher... if I were a moderator I might just have to censor you for being so... so... so... :smilielol5::hand:

[L.M. The Third]

Oh, Scher.. :rolleyes: Funny.

Les Miserables (how do you put the little apostrophe up there, without breaking up the word??)...

was a product of the French Romantic period, which is different in time period than the English Romantic period.

And, by the way, the fact that a writer wrote in the Romantic period does not necessarily make them a Romantic in style and out-look. A friend and I were recently discussing how Jane Austen wrote during the Romantic period, but was not really a Romantic in content.

[kiki1982]

Just to help you out quickly and in a very incomplete manner:

Romanticism in literature deals with emotion, emotion, emotion and more emotion. Emotion in everything, even in the clouds the writer sees. Even the stars are wildly swirling in the sky, so to say :smilewinkgrin:, or, on the contrary, they stand still and make the writer emotional :rolleyes:.

Early Romanticism actually started very extremely in Germany with Goethe and Schiller. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe is one of the first works of Romanticism and produced a lot of suicides (copycat behaviour). Werther is a young man who writes down his feelings in letters which 'the editor' has now published. (hello, Defoe ;))

Where the early romantics like Goethe, but also Byron is one of them, went too far in their emotional, passionate content, they calmed down a little later. The Germans went the Biedermeyer way: bourgeois, homely stuff like fairytales by Hoffmann, the brothers Grimm and others. The English also went the middle class way with the Brontës who didn't make scandals of themselves like Byron. The French went for the big books of adventure and revisiting their glorious past. Dumas as creator of the 'historic novel' and Hugo on the verge of Realism and Romanticism. He is quite unique, like Dickens in a sense, who pairs up realistic misery and the lives of the working classes or even worse in Hugo's case, with an emotional content which expresses the writer's views on that misery. We all know Dickens of course, but Hugo writes Le Dernier Jour d'un Condamné (The Last Day of a Condemned Prisoner) as a kind of manifesto against capital punishment. Dumas writes historic fiction but, of course as he is French, with a lot of passion in words.

Scott is also on the English side early romantic. He involves nature very much in his books, folklore and great scenes described. Though of course, like Austen, living in the Regency kept both somewhat back, although under the surface there is a lot of passion. English early Romantcism I find quite strange. Apart from Byron and a few poets let's say, the novels, where passion is spitting off the page in other countries, the English are very much reserved... on the surface alone though. :D

So, what to remember: passion is of the utmost importance. They wrote for it and wrote with it. It is both the aim and the reason, sometimes even to ridiculous heights. Man in nature is also a topic. Mainly I think (in the anglo world) for Scottish writers and about Scotland with its highlands. You think that actually 'the highlander' of Scott existed? Think again. Balmoral was entirely based on Scott's creation :rolleyes:. The further the period goes on, the more enclosed it becomes: the family, the children, the quiet, middle-class life are an ideal. from there stories like A Christmas Carol, folklore (the own identity of a people) also becomes important, pagan ideas are revisited.

It is incomplete, but it'll help you along.

Les Misérables is, I think, an intelligent mix. There was emotion in it, but also a lot of realism. I think it could class as both. Certainly as he was writing at the time there were already realists around. Balzac is also such a problematic case.

@LM The Third: I have a Belgian keyboard which has all those accents ready on the keyboard. Otherwise you have to go to word and do 'Insert Symbol' and then insert an é, then copy and paste it.

[billl]

@LM The Third: I have a Belgian keyboard which has all those accents ready on the keyboard. Otherwise you have to go to word and do 'Insert Symbol' and then insert an é, then copy and paste it.

That's good advice. On a Mac, the é is easy (option-e, followed by whatever vowel you want to accent--é,í,ú,á, etc. as well as î,ê,û, and ü,ä,ë,ö, all based on option-<exemplar-vowel>+vowel. ñ, too.).

But for other tricky symbols (e.g. the emdash on my keyboard, or accented letters on Windows computers) it is a good idea to make an empty file on the desktop, and give it a name containing whatever special characters you might want to copy and paste on occassion. You can then easily get them from the file name right there.

[Scheherazade]

Now Scher... if I were a moderator I might just have to censor you for being so... so... so... :smilielol5::hand:I am allowed to be "so... so... so..." three times a week!

(And one extra for every five bans I issue.)

[kelby_lake]

Isn't it dashing heroes and stuff? Big sweeping emotions.

[applepie]

So, instead you take the words of strangers on a Forum you have just joined! Excellent!

Have a look at this website (http://www.barbaracartland.com/static/home.aspx) for some ideas!

Touche :lol: :rofl:

I suppose there are worse places. Wikipedia is mostly maintained if they're an important subject. For every person who posts something stupid another deletes it ;)

[Mr.lucifer]

Its a good place for links to more informative places and for quick references. I 've discovered a lot of great authors there.

[JBI]

Generally this varies depending on what country you are looking at, but the gist is a celebration of the "free" spirit, tied in with nationalist/revolutionary sentiments. Nature also generally plays a big role in the formation of the imagery/identity, but this is all very variable - Byron was hardly a good nature poet, and Coleridge a mediocre revolutionary.

Of course, I think the prime identity holding them together is a sense of "identity" that is solid, and generally optimistic - That is at least what I think Yeats was talking about when he called himself of "the last Romantics" in that he represents, to him, the last of the generation of poets marked by optimistic certainty.

That being said, Baudelaire was quite the pessimist - that's why we call him modernist even though he could easily be classified as romantic as well.

[janesmith]

It's anything that includes brooding, Byronic heroes and rugged sublime landscapes. For example:

Wuthering Heights
Poetry of Byron, Keats, Shelley
Jane Eyre

[L.M. The Third]

Off topic again: Thanks, kiki and billl!

[minstrelbard]

I always thought Romanticism was about great emotion, even if the specific situation did not necessarily call for great emotion. It’s fine to write Romance about revolutions and wars and mighty deeds of various kinds, but that kind of thing isn’t necessary for Romanticism. You’ve heard the old saying that there’s no use crying over spilled milk? Romantics would cry over spilled milk. A Romantic writer would portray a hero of tender feeling but iron will, suffering yet unbowed as he stands against the capricious and uncaring gods in this savage, merciless universe in which milk is spilled.

Of course, it’s easy to slip into unintentional parody when writing stuff like this.

I could be wrong about all of the above. I didn’t study any of this stuff at school; I just sort of gathered it by reading what may turn out to have been the wrong books.