ROMANTICISM

Artistic and intellectual movement that originated in the late 18th century and stressed strong emotion,
imagination, freedom from classical art forms, and rebellion against social conventions. Romanticism is
found in many works of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography, and can
be defined as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality
that typified Classicism in general and late 18th-century Neo-classicism in particular. It was also to a
large extent a reaction against the Enlightenment against undue emphasis upon rationalism and
economic materialism such as was characterized in capitalism. Romanticism emphasized the individual,
the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the
visionary, and the transcendental. Finally, in the area of color, the romantics clearly distanced
themselves from the neo-classicists for whom color was always subservient to the design. For romantics,
color was the life and soul of a picture and was in itself capable of building up form without recourse to
contour-lines. The pre-eminent pioneer in this direction was Turner.

Major Writers of the Romanticism Movement

*Hawthorne, Nathaniel (1804-1864)
*Poe, Edgar Allen (1809-1849)
*Shelley, Percy Bysshe (1792-1822)
*Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1772-1834)
*Blake, William (1757-1827)
*Keats, John (1795-1821)
*Cooper, James Fenimore (1789-1851)
*Irving, Washington (1783-1859)
*Whittier, John Greenleaf (1807-1892)
*Whitman, Walt (1819-1892)
*Shelley, Mary (1797-1851)
*Wordsworth, William (1770-1850)
*Melville, Herman (1819-1891)
*Lord Byron (1788-1824)
*Bryant, William Cullen (1794-1878)
*Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth (1807-1882)
*Lowell, James Russell (1819-1891)

Stories:
 The Scarlet Letter  by Nathaniel Hawthorne
 Frankenstein or; The Modern Prometheus  by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
 The Whale by Herman Melville 
 ANGLO-SAXON ERAS
Anglo-Saxon literature (or Old English literature) encompasses literature written in Anglo-Saxon (Old
English) during the 600-year Anglo-Saxon period of Britain, from the mid-5th century to theNorman
Conquest of 1066. These works include genres such as epic
poetry, hagiography, sermons, Bible translations, legal works, chronicles, riddles, and others. In all there
are about 400 surviving manuscripts from the period, a significant corpus of both popular interest and
specialist research.
Some of the most important works from this period include the poem Beowulf, which has
achieved national epic status in Britain. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is a collection of early English history.
The poem Cædmon's Hymn from the 7th century is one of the oldest surviving written texts in English.
Anglo-Saxon literature has gone through different periods of research—in the 19th and early 20th
centuries the focus was on the Germanic roots of English, later the literary merits were examined, and
today the interest is with paleography questions and the physical manuscripts themselves such as
dating, place of origin, authorship, and looking at the connections between Anglo-Saxon culture and the
rest of Europe in the Middle Ages.

Old English poetry is of two types, the heroic Germanic pre-Christian and the Christian. It has survived
for the most part in four manuscripts. The first manuscript is called theJunius manuscript (also known as
the Caedmon manuscript), which is an illustrated poetic anthology. The second manuscript is called
the Exeter Book, also an anthology, located in the Exeter Cathedral since it was donated there in the
11th century. The third manuscript is called the Vercelli Book, a mix of poetry and prose; how it came to
be inVercelli, Italy, no one knows, and is a matter of debate. The fourth manuscript is called the Nowell
Codex, also a mixture of poetry and prose.

Old English poetry had no known rules or system left to us by the Anglo-Saxons, everything we know
about it is based on modern analysis. The first widely accepted theory was by Eduard Sievers (1885) in
which he distinguished five distinct alliterative patterns. The theory of John C. Pope (1942) uses musical
notations which has had some acceptance; every few years a new theory arises and the topic continues
to be hotly debated.

STORIES:
 The History of the World by Orosius
 The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius
 De ave phoenice by Lactantius