The Romantic Revival in the end of the 18th century was a revolt against a cold formality of classicism and against the new bourgeois order of society.

Pre – Romanticism

• the literature of Pre – Romanticism can be divided into two parts – poetry and prose.

1. a) Poetry:

The greatest pre – romantic poets were Robert Burns and William Blake

Robert Burns was born in a poor Scottish family. Although his school attendance was short, Burns acquired knowledge of French and Latin, and of literature. He was very fond of Scottish folk songs. Because he wanted to earn money, he published his poems. The book was successful, and was re-edited in the following year.

Then he wrote his famous poem My heart´s in the highlands. It is basedon Scottish folklore not only in matter, but also in form. This is why many of his poems, such as A red, red rose or Auld lang syne, were set to music.

William Blake didn´t write only poems, but also illustrated them. His two most famous collections of verse are Songs of innocence and Songs of experience.

1. b) Prose:

The sign of the approachong romanticism was the appearance of Gothic novels, which were exaggerated tales of gorror, full of mysterious happening and haunted castles. The best of them were The mystery of udolpho by Anne Radcliffe and Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, which is the first book of Science fiction.

Romanticism

1. a) Poetry:

• There are two groups of Romantic poets.
• The first group, rather conservative, also known as the Lake School, is presented mainly by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge who published jointly Lyrical ballads. The prolog of this book is wellknown as a Manifest of Romanticism. An important part of the book is The rime of the ancient mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
• The second group of Romanticist is presented by „revolutionaries“ Byron, Shelley and Keats.

George Gordon Byron was born in an aristocratic family in London. He studied at two universities and after his studies he went to the Mediterranean and the Near East. Then he published two cantos of Childe Harold´s pilgrimage. Byron married but his marriage didn´t last long and he left England and never returned. He travelled a lot and wrote other cantos of Childe Harold´s Pilgrimage.

Percy Bysshe Shelley rebelled against convention, but he rejected the romantic melancholy and characteristic despair of Byronism. His great epis, Prometheus unbound, gives both a revolutionary programme for the present and a vision of the future.

John Keats is known as the most talented men of Romanticism. He wrote his Poems.

1. b) Prose:

• the Prose of this period was writed by Jane Ausen and Walter Scott

Jane Austen was the last great novelist of the period of Enlightenment, but she lived and wrote in the period of Romanticism.  She wrote especially realistic novels of manners and from the world of gentry. Her masterpiece is Pride and prejudice, another famous novel is Emma and  Sense and sensibility.

Sir Walter Scott was born in Edinburgh and became a lawyer. He started collecting ballads, later he imitated them and then he wrote his own epics. All his poems were anthusiastically received, but when Byron became popular, Scott knew that Byron was a greater poet than himself and abandoned poetry for prose. Scott´s novels can be divided into three major groups: stories of English history in the Tudor and Stuart periods, stories of English and European history of the Midle Ages (it is f. e. Ivanhoe) and stories of Scottish history (f. e. Rob Roy or The heart of Midlothian, which is often regarded as Scott´s best novel). He also write Waverley which is known as the first historical novel.