Abstract
In the eighteenth century, the term ‘Romantic’ was applied to a resurgence of wild narratives similar to those of Medieval and Renaissance Europe, from Sir Thomas Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur (1485) to Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene (1590–96). Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando furioso (1516) and Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata (1581) were ranked as masterpieces of romance. Anne Radcliffe's Gothic Romance and Sir Walter Scott's Historical Romance contributed further to the popular permutations of the genre. Among the poets who persisted in attributing sublime grandeur to the traditional romance, Wordsworth recognized in the romance a model for exploring the subjective spaces of fantasy and dream. A ‘cavern of romance’ is one of Wordsworth's repeated metaphors for the retreat into the imagination. ‘Caverns there were within my mind which sun/ Could never penetrate’ (Prelude 3:246–249). He also delineates, however, an intruding ‘glimpse/ Of daylight’ which exposes the illusion and enables his cultivation of ‘romantic perception’.
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