Abstract:Although critics have described the plot of romance as transhistorical, the resurgence of this genre in Britain from the mid‐eighteenth through the early nineteenth century has come to define the hist...Although critics have described the plot of romance as transhistorical, the resurgence of this genre in Britain from the mid‐eighteenth through the early nineteenth century has come to define the historical period we now call ‘Romantic’. While this name for the period emerged only in the mid‐nineteenth century (Duff 2010: 74), the connection has contributed to a still‐persistent misreading of its poetry and fiction as escapist fantasy unconcerned with the world's hard realities. The rehabilitation of Romantic literature in the mid‐twentieth century came, we might say, at the cost of casting off romance as its defining genre – and embracing the concise ironies and ambiguities of lyric. Yet a renewed understanding of the social and political forces at work in the romance revival that developed in the mid‐eighteenth century has shown us that the conjuring up and the dismissal of romance, that ‘Fair‐plumed syren, queen of far‐away’ as Keats called the genre in his sonnet ‘On Sitting Down to Read King Lear Once Again’, became a part of its structure and its significance for Romantic writers, especially for poets.Read More
Publication Year: 2012
Publication Date: 2012-04-12
Language: en
Type: other
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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