The Romantic Period - Research Paper Example

The Romantic Period: Romanticism and the Industrial Revolution Introduction Beginning around 1750 in Germany, France and England, and spreading shortly thereafter throughout the remainder of Europe and on to America, the Romantic movement was first and foremost a literary movement. Its spirit pervaded all aspects of life-the arts, philosophy, religion and politics-giving birth to an era unlike any other which had preceded it. The Romantic Period manifested itself as a passionate revolt against the intellectual traditions and limitations of eighteenth-century Classicism/Rationalism (Cranston 1). This paper argues that the Industrial Revolution should also be considered an important context for writings of the romantic period, underlining connections between dominant themes of period writings and the industrial background. Body From the middle of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century, Europe and America witnessed a profusion of technological innovations deeply affecting such fields as industry, agriculture, travel, and military combat (Brianna 1). While historians have long recognized and debated the importance of those innovations influence, literary scholars have seldom situated Europes literary productions of the time within this context of technological change. Technology was centrally important to literature of the time; it changed not only how texts of the time were written, printed, and distributed, but also how writers of the time configured subjectivity, related embodied experience, theorized inscription, and attempted to situate their writings in relation to politics. Romanticists should, acknowledge the technological dynamism of the romantic period and explore its manifold influences on literature. While this acknowledgement of technologys shaping force needs first to register the tremendous power of the Industrial Revolution as a context for period writing, a full consideration of technologys influence on romanticism also requires a view of technology supple and flexible enough to also examine smaller alterations and shifts that technology causes in romantic writing. In order to capture the depth, magnitude, and variety of romantic writers engagements with technology, we should begin with the broader historical movements from which these engagements emerged: romanticism and the Industrial Revolution. These two movements deeply resemble each other both in their temporal boundaries and in their concerns. The romantic period is often said to have begun with a publishing event (the publication in 1798 of Lyrical Ballads and closed with a political event (the passage in 1832 of the Reform Bill) (Haywood & Leader 2). This conjunction is symptomatic of romantic studies tendency to define romanticism as the intersection of an array of particular literary qualities (a shift in poetic diction, a concentration on the figure of the poet, a foregrounding of natural scenes, and so on) with a series of correspondent political events, particularly the French Revolution. Yet in yoking the literary primarily with the political, romanticists have generally overlooked other changes culture was undergoing at the time (Johnson 12-20). From 1750 to 1850, a number of events are highly familiar to romanticists for denoting important political events (the beginning of the French Revolution. the Terror, and the end of the Napoleonic Wars) (Jasper 34). By contrast, contemporaneous events in the history of technology are relatively unknown. Most romanticists have only passing knowledge of the technological achievements which arose in their period of study, ranging from the first railway track (1758) and the first iron bridge (1779) to the invention of the telegraph (1832) (Briggs 150-160). And yet 1770 deserves to be remembered not only as the year of Wordsworths birth, but also as the year that James Hargreave patented his spinning-jenny, one of the inventions responsible for setting in motion a revolution in the manufacture of textiles. Similarly, the year 1800 is important not only for the publication of the second edition of Lyrical Ballads but also the opening of Robert Owens model factory at New Lanark, a community run on industrial principles (Briggs 265-301). Such dates should be incorporated into our chronologies of the period in order to remind us that what we call the romantic period coincided not only with the French Revolution, but also the Industrial Revolution. Although the Industrial Revolution is commonly associated with the Victorian period, Englands economic takeoff actually occurred somewhat earlier (depending of course on which economic historian one consults), so that more of it coincides with the romantic period than with Victorias reign. The dates most often assigned to the Industrial Revolution are 1760 to 1830 (Blackford 18-19). Romanticists have made much of how the political context of the French Revolution influenced romantic writings. They have paid little attention, however, to how the technological context of the Industrial Revolution influenced the same writings. Given the temporal overlap, it is not surprising that many of the central thematic tropes of romanticism are strongly connected to the technological context of the Industrial Revolution. Many of the characteristics most strongly associated with romanticism can be linked to a background of technological change. These characteristics, which M.H. Abrams (1-15) conveys strongly and economically, in the introduction to the period in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, include Revolution and Reaction, The Spirit of the Age, Poetic Theory and Poetic Practice, Individualism, Infinite Striving, and Nonconformity, and Millennial Expectations. While Abrams often uses these rubrics to link romantic preoccupations with the periods political context, they could often be linked to the periods technological context. For example, Revolution and Reaction could refer both to the French Revolution and to the Industrial Revolution. The "Spirit of the Age" could refer to not only a thirst for political reform but also to a new mindset applying technological notions and language to human affairs and embodied by figures such as Bentham and Godwin, the fist figures profiled in Hazlitts The Spirit of the Age. The focus on experimental prosody that Abrams documents could be traced to political revolutions and to a context of technological innovation. "Infinite Striving" can refer both to dreams of extending ones mental abilities and imaginative power and to ways in which technology was extending Englands political power. And finally, "Millenial Expectations" could refer to the sense not only that a new religious or political world was about to be born, but also to the sense that technological changes were creating a new world. This was a time not only of political utopias projected on the banks of the Susquehanna River by Pantisocrats Southey and Coleridge, but also of Robert Owens utopia towns, New Lanark and New Harmony, run on industrial principles. The romantic period and the Industrial Revolution have much in common not only temporally and thematically but also onto logically; both have been defined and had their temporal limits set in varying ways because they lack the precise semantic and chronological demarcations of other historical events. In Women, Writing, and the Industrial Revolution, Susan Zlotnick reminds us that the Industrial Revolution is a discursive event: The Industrial Revolution was a fiction, one of the main discursive events of the nineteenth century. Such a statement is not intended as a denial of the profound social and material transformations that occurred in Britain over the past two centuries, but as a reminder that those transformations were not given a local habitation and a name until the 1880s. (1) Thus the Industrial Revolution is, like the romantic period itself, a retrospective intellectual construction. Both phrases give us names for major changes occurring between 1750 and 1850. That the people actually living through those changes referred to them by using other terms does not, as Zlotnick notes, lessen their import. Conclusion In conclusion, while technological changes occurring between 1750 and 1850 significantly affected the lives of men and women, those effects have seldom been explored by literary scholars of the romantic period. It is understandable that romanticists whose approaches focused on "consciousness" or produced post-structural readings would downplay historical context. While such critics often drew masterfully on specific historical information, their investigations at times regarded particular historical conditions as limiting more global assertions on the nature of mind or of literary language. It is more difficult to understand how, when romanticists renewed their engagements with history in the early 1980s, technological history could be left out. Work Cited Abrams ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 6th edition. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993. Blackford, M.. "American Manufacturing, 1850-1930: A Business History Approach. " Magazine of History  24.1 (2010): 17-22. ProQuest Education Journals, ProQuest. Web.  18 Sep. 2011. Brianna McMullen.  "Precisionism: Art in the Industrial Age. " Art Education  59.2 (2006): 25-32. ProQuest Education Journals, ProQuest. Web.  18 Sep. 2011. Briggs, Asa , Iron Bridge to Crystal Palace: Impact and Images of the Industrial Revolution. Thames & Hudson Ltd; Hardback edition, 1979. Cranston, Maurice W., The romantic movement, Summary. Blackwell Publications, 1994. Haywood, Ian. & Leader, Zachary. Romantic Period Writings, 1798-1832: An Anthology. Routledge, 1998. Hazlitts The Spirit of the Age, Kessinger Publishing, 2004 Jasper Cragwall.  "The Shelleys Enthusiasm. " The Huntington Library Quarterly  68.4 (2005): 631-654. ProQuest Education Journals, ProQuest. Web.  18 Sep. 2011. Johnson, Claudia L. "The Novel and the Romantic Century, 1750-1850" European Romantic Review 1 (2000) 12-20. Zlotnick, Susan. Women, Writing, and the Industrial Revolution. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Read More