THE WRITING OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM
Part One
Like Neo-Classicism, Romanticism was an international movement, but, unlike the earlier movement, Romanticism differed from country to country. In England, Romanticism established an aesthetic that was reflective of national conditions. The British Romantic artists were closely aligned to the Romantic poets and a new group of philosophers and art writers emerged to explain this new national form of English Romanticism. The English landscape was shaped by economic forces far earlier than the environments of other nations. Due to the Industrial Revolution, England was on the road to modernity by the middle of the eighteenth century. But contemporaneous with the rise of factories was the Enclosure Movement, a “closing of the commons,” which displaced landless peasants into industrial jobs. English Romanticism is woven within the new English feeling for “nature” in the face of coming industrialization and modern agriculture.
Also listen to “Romanticism in England, Part Two” and “English Romanticism and Turner” and “Romanticism and Constable”