Encyclopedia of Literary Romanticism

Abstract

The Romantics valued nature, spontaneity, visionary experience, powerful feeling, and the artist's individual response to the experience of life. The Encyclopedia of Literary Romanticism provides a guide to the Romantic movement. Essays cover poets and novelists, literary works, historical and cultural topics, ranging from the 18th-century precursors of the Romantics, such as Thomas Gray, to William Wordsworth, John Keats and Percy Shelley, to mid-19th-century Victorians often regarded as late Romantics, such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The volume also includes essays on novelists who were part of or were influenced by the Romantic movement, including Jane Austen, Walter Scott, and Emily Brontë, as well as their works, as well as lesser-known writers whose importance is increasingly recognized, particularly such female writers as Dorothy Wordsworth, Anna Laetitia Barbauld, and Charlotte Smith.