The Oxford Companion to English Literature | Romanticism
Romanticism, A profound and irreversible transformation in artistic styles, in cultural attitudes, and in the relations between artist and society is evident in Western literature and other arts in the first half of the 19th cent. In Britain, a stark contrast appears between representative works of the preceding
Augustan
age and those of leading figures in what became known as the Romantic movement or ‘Romantic Revival’ in the period from about
1780
to about
1848
(the ‘Romantic period’):
Blake
,
Burns
,
Wordsworth
,
Coleridge
,
Southey
,
Scott
,
Byron
,
Shelley
,
Keats
,
Hazlitt
,
De Quincey
,
Carlyle
,
Emily
Brontë
and
Charlotte
Brontë
. To define the general character or basic principle of this momentous shift, which later historians have called Romanticism, though, is notoriously difficult, partly because the Romantic temperament itself resisted the very impulse...
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