Summary
The Romantics valued nature, spontaneity, visionary experience, powerful feeling, and the artist's individual response to the experience of life.
Encyclopedia of Literary Romanticism provides a comprehensive A-to-Z guide to the Romantic movement, including such great writers as William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Mary Shelley. Entries in this new resource cover poets and novelists, literary works, historical and cultural topics, and more, ranging from the 18th-century precursors of the Romantics, such as Thomas Gray, to the six poets traditionally regarded as the chief Romantics, to mid-19th-century Victorians often regarded as late Romantics, such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
Coverage includes:
- The great poets William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and John Keats, as well as many of their greatest poems
- Great novelists who were part of or were influenced by the Romantic movement, including Jane Austen, Walter Scott, and Emily Brontë, as well as their works
- Lesser-known writers whose importance is increasingly recognized, particularly such female writers as Dorothy Wordsworth, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and Charlotte Smith
- Historical and cultural context of the movement, including essays on industrialism, the monarchy, the American and French Revolutions, childhood, slavery, the empire, science, and more
- Important literary genres and sub-movements, such as the Gothic novel, historical fiction, and the "Lake School"
- and much more.
Specifications
Index. Bibliography. Cross-references.
About the Author(s)
Andrew Maunder is Principal Lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire in the United Kingdom. He has authored books on Bram Stoker and Wilkie Collins and is the editor of The Facts On File Companion to the British Short Story; Sensationalism and the Sensation Debate: An Anthology; and Victorian Crime, Madness and Sensation: Interdisciplinary Essays. He received his Ph.D. in English from the University of Nottingham.