What have the Romantics to offer us today?
British Romanticism is often circumscribed between two historical milestones: on the one end, the beginning of the French Revolution (1789), on the other, the Great Reform Act of 1832. Within this period, characterized by Eric Hobsbawm, among others, as the Age of Revolution, Britain witnessed a profound change in its system of belle-letters. While the first generation of romantic poets, with William Wordsworth at its head, set the aim to start poetry anew, leaving aside its common-place figures; the second generation – Byron, Shelley, and Keats – gave a different turn to classical allusions and Greek mythology. But changes were not exclusively to poetry. The prose writers of the age – working with fiction, non-fiction or forms that blurred such distinction – dwelt on social class divisions, the unconscious, nostalgia, and numberless other issues still pressing to this day. Therefore, and to a better comprehension of the period’s legacy, we put forward the question: What have the Romantics to offer us today? To answer it, we have invited a leading specialist on the topic: Professor Gregory Dart, from University College London.
Gregory Dart spent his undergraduate and graduate years (from 1986 to 1993)
at the University of Cambridge. Since 2000, he has been a professor at UCL (University College London). His books include: Rousseau, Robespierre and English Romanticism (1999), and Metropolitan Art and Literature, 1810-1840: Cockney Adventures (2012), both published by Cambridge University Press. His teaching range at UCL focuses on the Romantics and Victorians but also
includes twentieth-century literature and film, the eighteenth century, and
Shakespeare. Gregory Dart’s research, both current and prospective, is centrally
concerned with Romanticism, the City, and the history and development of
the essay from Montaigne to the modern period. He is currently Chair of the Hazlitt Society, and a member of the Charles LambSociety. For several years now Dart has been working on three volumes of a new six-volume Collected Edition of the Works of Charles and Mary Lamb, Oxford University Press, for which he is also General Editor. In addition to his literary interests, Dart has also written 16 essays for the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, for use in their programmes, DVDs and online.
