A History of English Romanticism in the Nineteenth Century

by Henry Augustin Beers

"The present volume is a sequel to "A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century" (New York; Henry Holt & Co., 1899). References in the footnotes to "Volume I. " are to that work. The difficulties of this second part of my undertaking have been of a kind just opposite to those of the first. As it concerns my subject, the eighteenth century was an age of beginnings; and the problem was to discover what latent romanticism existed in the writings of a period whose spirit, upon the whole, was distinctly unromantic. But the temper of the nineteenth century has been, until recent years, prevailingly romantic in the wider meaning of the word. And as to the more restricted sense in which I have chosen to employ it, the mediaevalising literature of the nineteenth century is at least twenty times as great as that of the eighteenth, both in bulk and in value. Accordingly the problem here is one of selection; and of selection not from a list of half-forgotten names, like Warton and Hurd, but from authors whose work is still the daily reading of all educated readers."

308 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1910

Reviews

[Prisoner 071053 · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is what literary criticism should be--what it was before the poison of so-called "literary theory" was slipped into the wine of scholarship. Beers gives us a balance of history and criticism that probably no one is capable of today. He writes the kind of book that C S Lewis commends somewhere as one that sends us eagerly off to read and re-read the subjects of his study. Would God that all the Lord's people were prophets!