Romanticism
Romanticism.The artistic movement that swept literary Europe across the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th is conventionally thought of as a reaction against neoclassicism, particularly in its French variants. Romantic texts, glorifying the imagination over the claims of literary form, commonly focus on an isolated individual consciousness, often engaged in transgressions against human and divine law, and often set against great natural landscapes.
In Britain, the Romantics' intense interest in Shakespeare was prompted by their apprehension of Shakespeare as a nature-taught outsider and a flouter of all inherited literary conventions, and, above all, as a poet of large sympathies and protean identity, the very reverse of the other figure that loomed largest in the English literary past, John Milton. His romantic (and by now archaic) subject matter also seemed hospitable to poets who, on the one hand, were interested in depicting...
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