Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries. English Literature and its Background 1760-1830

TLDR

The Age of Revolutions produced an unprecedented literary scene featuring poets such as Blake, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats and novelists like Austen and Scott, with scholarship often adopting a Romantic perspective that emphasizes creativity, imagination, and originality. The study asks why some writers embraced Romanticism while others did not. The authors contextualize Romanticism historically and argue that the era’s dynamism and stress produced a diverse, contradictory literary output.

Abstract

The Age of Revolutions and its aftermath is unparalleled in English literature. Its poets include Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats; its novelists, Jane Austen and Scott. But how is it that some of these writers were apparently swept up in Romanticism, and others not? Studies of Romanticism have tended to adopt the Romantic viewpoint. They value creativity, imagination and originality - ideas which nineteenth-century writers themselves used to promote a new image of their calling. Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries puts the movement in to its historical setting and provides a new insight in Romanticism itself, showing that one of the most dynamic and stressful periods of modern times fostered a literature that was itself various and contradictory.