Valentine's Day is for the Romanticists

 Isn’t it Romantic? Well, isn’t it? With Valentine’s Day right around the corner we may all have Romance on our minds. Flowers, chocolates, and cards may be expressions of romantic notions nowadays, but what about in years gone by? The Romantic movement took hold in the late eighteenth century and encompassed all sorts of cultural touchstones. Art, literature, philosophy, politics, science, everything was being reexamined or restructured through this new lens. In some ways it was a look back at our human past through sentimental eyes. It was a harkening back to a time when things seemed better, but it also demanded something new. The industrial revolution had driven growth for so many cities, but its inhabitants were not all equally reaping those rewards. The Romantic movement in literature tended to focus on pastoral scenes that reconfigures Medieval Romance and held up nature as the ultimate ruler of rhyme and reason. Too much progress too quickly was seen as dangerous, and the living conditions of those straining under the weight of industrialization was proof of that. And so it spawned a form of literary escapism that looked away from the dark and dank cities that were grinding its lower class citizens underfoot in the name of progress. 

You may be wondering, who are these Romanticists and are their works still relevant? Some may view the Romanticists’ style as outdated and melodramatic, but they were great storytellers who captured the zeitgeist. Sweeping revenge epics, pining away for lost lovers, brutal and tragic ends to characters both good and bad. All you have to do is think of the windswept moors of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights or the unending search for revenge in Alexandre Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo or even the questioning of what it means to be human in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Each of these authors, and their contemporaries, created stories that were referencing the past while looking toward the future. Their literary output has inspired countless other stories, movies, and television shows that reinterpret the past for contemporary audiences. While these stories may not be the first thing you think of when you’re browsing the shelves this Valentine’s Day, it can still be fun to return to them when you’re feeling a bit Romantic.

Abrams, M. H. The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism. W.W. Norton & Company,

1984.

Barzun, Jacques. Classic, Romantic, and Modern. The University of Chicago Press, 1975.