Genre

My name is Ross Wilson.

I'm lecturer in criticism in the Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge,

and I'm a fellow of Trinity College.

This is a series of lectures about romanticism,

and we're going to begin by thinking about romanticism and genre.

It might be useful to start by thinking about what genre is,

and we can think about this in a number of ways.

Genres are the categories into which certain literary works fit their

the sets of expectations and conventions that govern individual literary works.

For instance, the novel is a pretty large genre,

but we could also think of comedy or pastoral,

or even something like the Limerick as a genre in this way,

and that all these things are expectations and patterns

that fit certain works in different ways.

Now, why should we start thinking about romanticism by thinking about genre?

let's think about the ways in which we

chop up literary history and give different periods,

different labels.

We could think about the mediaeval period, the Renaissance period,

Augustine literature,

Victorian literature or modern and postmodern literature and art as well.

Now each of those designations is in a

different way a kind of historical designation.

Some of them are named after monarchs of the Victorian period,

some of them after ways of kind of

carving up religious history in the mediaeval period

and so on.

But romanticism is different.

It is not named after a king or queen or other historical designation,

but rather after a genre of literature.

The romance. Now what is the romance?

The romance, in many ways was a a genre that had its origins in the Middle Ages,

and there are a number of ways to describe it.

But broadly speaking, we might think of it as a fantastical tale,

often involving a quest or a saga of some sort,

often with elements of folklore and the fantastical magic and so on.

Now,

one early way of characterising romanticism was to think of

it simply as a revival of the romance tradition.

After it had been a suspect and depreciated somewhat during the 18th century,

the 18th century is often characterised caricatured,

some might say as being much more suspicious of all those

things that characterise the romance as a genre of folk lore,

of magic, of flights of fancy and and and the improbable

and so on.

So romanticism involves a revival of the

romance in particular end of these characteristics

Now we might take this further to think about

the complexity of genre in the romantic period,

because on the one hand,

romanticism has come to be associated with precisely a rejection of genre,

with a rejection of sets of expectations of rules if you like,

for writing works of literature in certain way

and of convention,

Romanticism rejects convention and conformity in favour of expression,

of originality, of genius and of the personality, as it were of the poet

the critic.

For instance, Barry Cornwall, that was a pseudonym for Brian Proctor,

who was a contemporary of Byron's, wrote in an essay of 18 25 on English poetry.

That genre really didn't matter, he said.

It is not very material. We think

that a poem should be built up according to rules,

many of which resulted in the caprice of former poets,

nor whether it be called an epic or a romance and epistle or a dirge,

an epitaph and owed an allergy, a sonnet or otherwise.

So for Cornwall,

all of these things are neither here nor there that the titles of

poems and the generic labels that they have don't matter according to Cornwall.

And genre, therefore in itself is indifferent,

really to the task and aims of poetry.

It is a Caprice.

This is an important word, and we'll come back to it in one of our later, uh,

sections in thinking about words with preface,

where he talks about the capricious habits of former

poets and Cornwall here in 18 25 years,

echoing words with I think so.

There's that position, which is that romanticism involves a rejection of genre,

despite in many ways being named after one.

On the other hand,

some of the greatest achievements of romanticism as a movement

consists in the recovery of neglected genres and forms.

We've already talked a little bit about the romance,

and it's certainly true that are a lot of romantic poets,

self consciously wrote things called romances and recovered

mediaeval and Renaissance romances as well, and were influenced by them.

Keats, for instance, is a very important figure

in that regard.

They also recovered and revived the sonnet,

which had fallen very much into obedience in the 18th century.

So figures like Mary Robinson,

Charlotte Smith John Keats,

William Wordsworth and Percy Shelley all revived the sonnet and son.

It was a very important feature of their poetic practise,

and they experimented with it a great deal.

And they wanted to recover a lot of the a

lot of writers whose sonics were central to them.

So Shakespeare, for instance, Milton Spencer and others as well.

The romantic period also sees the development in new

directions of genres and indeed the invention of,

um,

genres that had been really neglected or

not not fully developed in previous literature.

Perhaps above all, we might point to the autobiography.

We could think of a long list here of Rousseau's confessions.

Hazel, It's Libya amorous both very personally revealing books. Those,

uh,

Samuel Taylor Coleridge is great work of

literary criticism takes the form of autobiography,

his biography A Little area and Malouda.

Quijano's interesting narrative of his own life is

a really vitally important work in the tradition

of the emergence of autobiography and also an

important document in the history of slavery.

There are other genres as well that really emerged in the romantic period,

so the historical novel is one of these.

So Walter Scott is perhaps paramount in the

development of the historical novel at this period.

Another generic innovation,

Scott is also key

to the revival of another poetic form, a popular poetic form.

At this period, the ballot Scott collected ballads of the Scottish border,

the Minstrel C of the Scottish border in 18 oh two,

developing a number of tendencies from slightly earlier in the 18th century.

So Bishop Percy's Relics of 17 65 which attempted

to collect a lot of popular folkloric poetry,

uh, again, ballads with a form that many of those took

and, uh, this interest in the ballad.

This interest in popular poetry influenced a lot

of the major achievements of the romantic period,

including Thomas Chatterton as forgeries under the name of

Thomas Rowley of supposedly mediaeval ballads in 17 77.

And perhaps the paramount achievement in this form was within

Coleridge is lyrical ballads 17 98 and revised thereafter.

So what we can see, I think, from this consideration of romanticism and genre,

and this will be true.

I think of many of our considerations of

romanticism and a number of different topics is that

it's a very complex period on the one hand

is named after a genre and generic innovation,

and recovery is absolutely central to it.

On the other hand,

suppression and rejection and suspicion of genre in favour of originality,

expression,

uh, the expression of personality is vital to it as well.

So Romanticism looks both ways when it comes to the question of genre.