We can divide Roamantic novels in:
- The novel of manners with Jane Austen. Her best novels(Sense and Sensibility, 1811; Pride and Prejudice, 1813) are set in provincial middle-class England and are based on simple plots usually centred on love stories between genteel young women and men. Austen is considered the first great English woman novelist, portraying female characters from the middle-class,
- The novel of purpose , written with the purpose to spread ideas — especially social and political ones-. The novel of purpose often took over the plots and devices of the novels of adventure and Gothic horror. The best-known example is Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley on the creation of artificial life but also isolation and social injustice.
-The historical novell: Scott inaugurated the ‘historical novel’, that is a story set in the past where the actions and lives of colourful characters are set against great historical events (Waverly, 1814; Ivanhoe, 1820). A model for European writers, such as Alessandro Manzoni and Victor Hugo.
ROMANTIC THEMES
- For Romantic artists feeling and emotion were essential steps towards a true knowledge of things.
- For the Romantics the imagination was the central point of the creative process,a creative power, the only means of knowing reality. Romantic writers endowed nature with life, passion and feeling. They talked about nature in terms once used for God, A description of a landscape leads to thoughts about man and his role in the universe.
-The universe was a living entity that could reveal itself to man on two levels: the visible (nature) and the invisible (the supernatural). Dreams, nightmares, visions were all cultivated by the Romantics.
- The Romantics gave great importance to individualism. The first-person lyric became the major genre. In |prose, individual character was at the centre of everything, in isolation from society, in revolt against the establishment.
- The Romantic writers showed a fascination with the strange, the uncommon, the forbidden.They were attracted by the outlaws of religion, myth, legend or history.
- What in the past had been unacceptable now became glorious, something for which life was worth living. The impossible task of searching the infinite served to awaken the |common man and make him realize both the potential of the human mind and the |healing qualities of nature. Romantics are prophet-like figures.