Research Paper on British Literature

Introduction

This paper analyses the theme of romance in British Literature. Romance is a term with many meanings. In the middle Ages, a romance was a tale in prose or poetry dealing with the adventures of a knight and filled with chivalric deeds and courtly love. In the nineteenth century, a romance was a prose narrative telling a fictional story that dealt with its subjects and characters in a symbolic, imaginative, and non-realistic way (Patrum, 195). Typically, a romance would deal with plots and people that were exotic, remote in time or place from the reader, and obviously imaginary. Hawthorne's The House of Seven Gables, with its exaggerated characters, its overtones of the supernatural, and its symbolic intertwining of the past and present, is an example of the romance.

Discussion

Romanticism generally is defined as an approach that differs from classicism in many important ways. Romantic thought places higher emphasis on emotion than on rationality; it exalts the individual over society; it questions or attacks rules and conventions; it prefers Nature over the city; it sees humankind in nature as being morally superior to civilized humanity (the concept of the noble savage); it sees children as essentially innocent, until corrupted by their surroundings. Its quest for emotional fulfillment may take it in the direction of dark Romanticism, toward the Gothic.

The early Romantic period was a time of great thinkers, artists, and scientists. It is possible that the wealth of creativity at the time reflected the desire of 18th century philosophers to reassess reality and, in particular, man's role in the universe (Horstmann,87).

Early Romantic music was all about emotion and individual expression--the extremes of joy and sorrow, triumph and dejection, passion and despair. The intensity of passion, individualism and the striving for self-expression are central to the Romantic ...