Critical Approaches to Romanticism

Abstract

Romanticism has never been theory-neutral territory. All the Romantic poets and some of the novelists and dramatists of the period were critical theorists, avant la lettre, who demonstrated in their prefaces, letters, and essays a self-conscious awareness of theoretically and historically-informed ways of reading and writing literature, including their own work. Neither have subsequent generations of readers and critics been neglectful of the significance of critical approaches to their subject, especially in the modern era. The period stretching from the so-called ‘theory wars’ of the 1980s to the present has witnessed a proliferation of critical approaches unparalleled in the history of Romantic criticism. This essay represents the range and diversity of modern theoretical approaches to Romanticism, with a focus on some of the key critical approaches that have risen to dominance over the last few decades: deconstruction, new historicism, psychoanalysis, post-colonial criticism, gender theory, and ecological criticism.