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The Romantic Period section of Norton Topics Online offers resources for the exploration of three of the most important influences on Romantic thought: the picturesque splendour of the British landscape, the sinister atmosphere of the Gothic, and the apocalyptic expectations aroused by the French Revolution.

Suggested uses of Norton Topics Online: The Romantic Period with The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Eighth Edition (anthology page references for the new Seventh Edition are included below):

Tintern Abbey, Tourism and Romantic Landscape

• William Wordsworth, Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey NAEL8.2.258 • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison NAEL8.2.428   Frost at Midnight NAEL8.2.464 • Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alastor NAEL8.2.745   Mont Blanc NAEL8.2.762 • George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage NAEL8.2.617 • John Keats, To Autumn NAEL8.2.925 • Dorothy Wordsworth, The Alfoxden Journal NAEL8.2.390   The Grasmere Journals NAEL8.2.392 • John Ruskin, Of the Pathetic Fallacy NAEL8.2.1322

Tintern Abbey, Tourism and Romantic Landscape illustrates the Romantics' developing interest in nature, as background not only to Tintern Abbey and other poems by William Wordsworth but to Coleridge's conversation poems, Dorothy Wordsworth's journals, Percy Shelley's Alastor and Mont Blanc, Byron's Childe Harold, and Keats's To Autumn, among others. This topic cluster features paintings and prose descriptions of Tintern Abbey and the Lake District which provide the basis for comparisons with poetic evocations of these landscapes. Looking forward in time, students may wish to evaluate the contents of this section in light of Ruskin's idea of the pathetic fallacy, or, looking backward to the seventeenth century, trace the development of nature poetry from Denham's Cooper's Hill.

The Gothic

• George Gordon, Lord Byron, Manfred NAEL8.2.635   Don Juan NAEL8.2.669 • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner NAEL8.2.430   Christabel NAEL8.2.449 • John Keats, The Eve of St. Agnes NAEL8.2.888 • Thomas De Quincey,Confessions of an English Opium Eater NAEL8.2.554 • John Milton, Paradise Lost NAEL8.1.1830

The Gothic introduces a genre that both influenced Romantic poetry and, in its day, far outstripped it in popularity. This topic cluster explores signs of Gothic influence in some of the most frequently read works of Coleridge, Byron, and Keats. The fascination with the Orient that characterizes Gothic works such as Vathek can be traced in the later works of Byron and Fitzgerald.

The French Revolution: Apocalyptic Expectations

• William Wordsworth, The Prelude NAEL8.2.322 • William Blake, A Song of Liberty NAEL8.2.121   A Vision of the Last Judgment NAEL8.2.124 • Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Song: "Men of England" NAEL8.2.770   England in 1819 NAEL8.2.771   To Sidmouth and Castlereagh NAEL8.2.771 • Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman NAEL8.2.170 • William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming NAEL8.2.2036 • Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia NAEL8.2.2753

The French Revolution: Apocalyptic Expectations provides an introduction to what Shelley called "the master theme of the epoch in which we live." A companion to the section on The French Revolution and the "Spirit Of The Age" in the Norton Anthology (Seventh Edition), this topic cluster emphasizes the apocalyptic expectations which led the first generation of Romantic poets (Wordsworth, Coleridge and Blake) to regard the French Revolution as a prelude to the end of history, heralding a new epoch or a return to paradise. The texts gathered here also shed light on Shelley's radical poetry, and will allow students to assess the influence of the Revolution on writers as diverse as Wollstonecraft, Hazlitt, and Carlyle. The apocalyptic expectations of the Romantic poets resonate with the earlier writings of Winstanley and Coppe, as well as with the twentieth-century poetry of Yeats; students wishing to discover more about the importance of millenarian ideas in English history may also explore the The Meaning of the Millennium: Apocalyptic Visions and Revisions in the Twentieth Century section of Norton Topics Online.

Romantic Orientalism

• William Blake, The Little Black Boy NAEL8.2.84   The Tyger NAEL8.2.92   The Book of Thel NAEL8.2.97 • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner NAEL8.2.430   Kubla Khan NAEL8.2.446 • George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage NAEL8.2.617   Manfred NAEL8.2.635   Don Juan NAEL8.2.669 • Percy Bysshe Shelley, Queen Mab, Alastor NAEL8.2.745   Ozymandias NAEL8.2.768   Prometheus Unbound NAEL8.2.775 • John Keats, Endymion NAEL8.2.883   The Eve of St. Agnes NAEL8.2.888   Lamia NAEL8.2.909 • Mary Shelley, Frankenstein NAEL8.2.961 • Edward Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám NAEL8.2.1213 • Salman Rushdie, The Prophet’s Hair NAEL8.2.2854

The Romantic Period in Britain is now recognized as a time of global travel and exploration, accession of colonies all over the world, and development of imperialist ideologies that rationalized the British takeover of distant territories. Romantic Orientalism provides additional background materials to enhance the reading of Romantic poems and fictions and suggest how those poems and fictions connect with the political and s

ocial concerns of their real-life historical contexts.