* Revolutions occurring in France, and in America, thus many in England saw this as a turning point in history for a more ideal and civilized society. * The Industrial Revolution brought about many improvements, particularly to the upper classes, but the living and working conditions for industrial laborers were horrific. Laws to regulate safety, hours, wages, or child labor did not exist.

* Writers also revolting against prior literary conventions, and were looking for freer artistic forms. * Emotion was more important than reason, and the individual’s relationship to nature became the focus, along with ordinary things * Romantic movement mainly attributed to Wordsworth and Coleridge, and their landmark poetry collaboration, Lyrical Ballads, in 1798

* Romanticism saw a shift from faith in reason to faith in the senses, feelings, and imagination; a shift from interest in urban society to an interest in the rural and natural; a shift from public, impersonal poetry to subjective poetry; and from concern with the scientific and mundane to interest in the mysterious and infinite. Mainly they cared about the individual, intuition, and imagination

* * 1. Imagination and emotion are more important than reason and formal rules; imagination is a gateway to transcendent experience and truth. * 2. Along the same lines, intuition and a reliance on “natural” feelings as a guide to conduct are valued over controlled, rationality. * 3. Romantic literature tends to emphasize a love of nature, a respect for primitivism, and a valuing of the common, "natural" man; Romantics idealize country life and believe that many of the ills of society are a result of urbanization. –Beginning of environmentalism

* 4. Romantics were interested in the Medieval past, the supernatural, the mystical, exotic, the “gothic,” –literature characterized by gloom, the supernatural, made popular during this time period-the horror story * 5. Romantics were attracted to rebellion and revolution, especially concerned with human rights, individualism, freedom from oppression; * 6. There was emphasis on introspection, psychology, melancholy, and sadness. The art often dealt with death, transience and mankind’s feelings about these things. The artist was an extremely individualistic creator whose creative spirit was more important than strict adherence to formal rules and traditional procedures. * Emphasis on the individual, and the heroic individual outcast

* Jane Austen- her novels called novels of manners, still read and brought to film today * Novels include Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility-remakes of her works include Clueless, Bridget Jones’s Diary * Mary Shelley- wrote the novel Frankenstein, sometimes said to be the first work of science fiction

* Samuel Taylor Coleridge credited with Romantic movement, did more to spread the ideas of this philosophy * Collaborated with Wordsworth, the work Lyrical Ballads begins with this poem * Is a literary ballad, or narrative poem written to imitate folk ballads * Has supernatural elements, use of archaic language, the heroic outcast, love of nature