Lecture the theme: the romantic age in english literature (1780-1830). Representatives of romanticism

Prose in the romantic age included essays, literary criticism, jour-nals, and novels. The two greatest novelists of the romantic period were Jane Austen (1775-1817) and Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832). Their novels drastically differed from each other. Though Jane Austen wrote during the height of the period, she remained remarkably unaffected by Romantic literary influences. Her plots concerned domestic situations. Austen wrote about middle-class life in small towns and in the famous resort city Bath. More than anyone since Fielding, she regarded the novel as a form of art which required a close and exacting discipline. The resulting narratives were so inevitable in their movement, so precise in their realism, that they gave the impression of ease, but the facility was a gift to the reader, exacted from the fundamental brainwork of the author. Her integrity as an artist was shown by the fact that she had continued to write and to revise novels even when her work seemed unlikely to find acceptance from the publishers. The women in Austen’s novels as “Pride and Prejudice”(1813) and “Emma” (1816) are known for their independence and wit. Her novels, including “Mansfield Park” (1814), “Persuasion” (1818) are realistic in tone. These later novels lack the continuous comedy and the semblance of spontaneity. In compensation, they have a more complex portrayal of characters, a more subtle irony, a deeper, warmer-hearted attitude to the players of her scene. Jane Austen respected the novel as a great art. In “Northanger Abbey” (1818) she had satirized the “terror” novel, and in her own work she substituted her cleverly worked realism and comedy. Her letters show how conscious she was of what she was doing, and of her own limitations: “I must keep to my own style and go on in my own way; and though I may never succeed again in that, I am convinced that I should totally fail in any other”. The complete control of her world gives her work a Shakespearian quality, though the world she controlled was smaller. She is considered to be more representative of the neoclassical tradition of eighteenth century literature than of the Romanticism. Although she received little public recognition during her lifetime, Austen is now one of the best-loved English novelists who helped to develop a modern novel.
Sir Walter Scott wrote novels of adventure. He was immensely popular during his lifetime and is now considered the father of the historical novel. Reflecting the Romantic interest in the past, he set many of his novels in old England and Scotland. Scott is considered to be a true product of the Romantic Age. Scott’s death in 1832 marked the end of the romantic period.