30 Great Myths about the Romantics 1st Edition by Duncan Wu (PDF)

Description

Brimming with the fascinating eccentricities of a complex and confusing movement whose influences continue to resonate deeply, 30 Great Myths About the Romantics adds great clarity to what we know – or think we know – about one of the most important periods in literary history.Explores the various misconceptions commonly associated with Romanticism, offering provocative insights that correct and clarify several of the commonly-held myths about the key figures of this eraCorrects some of the biases and beliefs about the Romantics that have crept into the 21st-century zeitgeist – for example that they were a bunch of drug-addled atheists who believed in free love; that Blake was a madman; and that Wordsworth slept with his sisterCelebrates several of the mythic objects, characters, and ideas that have passed down from the Romantics into contemporary culture – from Blake’s Jerusalem and Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn to the literary genre of the vampireEngagingly written to provide readers with a fun yet scholarly introduction to Romanticism and key writers of the period, applying the most up-to-date scholarship to the series of myths that continue to shape our appreciation of their work

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Hey, Guys,This is NOT a novel. It is literary criticism by an expert in Romantic literature.

⭐I rarely if ever would mention the cover of a book in a review, but the horrible, trite cover of this one almost kept me from reading it as I first assumed it was some kind of comic satire on the subject. (Not the reproduction of Byron, but the title & copy/text). What was the Publisher THINKING? However….the contents are a different story as Mr Wu is obviously a Scholar when it comes to the Romantics. , This book could be considered nothing less than an authoritative overview of the entire movement and the figures involved. Written in a highly readable way, this book could be used in a college course on the subject… interesting, expansive, and filled with brilliant unique ideas on the Romantics. Contents 5 Stars….Cover 1 Star.

⭐For those of us with an interest in the British Romantics this book is a real eye-opener. Duncan Wu clears out so much dead wood in the prevailing scholarship regarding Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Hazlitt, Keats, and their contemporaries that his slim volume culls enough tinder for a bonfire. “The biggest myth of all might be that the Romantics invented Romanticism in 1798, practiced it until 1830, and then died,” he writes, and, “What we call Romantic might more accurately be called Regency Wartime Literature, were we to backdate the Regency, as some historians do, to 1788.” Commentators since the late 1800s have imposed so many filters on our perceptions of the early 1800s that it is very difficult for us now to see these writers as they saw themselves, in the very different context of their own time. The best-selling poets of those decades, for example, were not the above writers (save Byron); their roster included the little-remembered Samuel Rogers, Thomas Campbell, Thomas Moore, and Robert Pollack. Amelia Opie’s Poems and Charlotte Smith’s Beachy Head both outsold Lyrical Ballads. The widespread assumption today that “the Romantics” saw themselves in opposition to “the Augustans” in general (or Pope in particular) is belied by the complexity of beliefs voiced by Byron, Wordsworth, and Hazlitt themselves. Time after time Professor Wu finds that received “truths” about these writers are in fact half-truths, quarter-truths, dubiously-sourced assertions, out-of-context attributions, uncritical acceptances of self-serving posturings, later re-castings of motivations not present at the time, or outright fictions. The latter, Wu documents, are frequently generated in the present hot-house atmosphere of pop-psychoanalyzing on matters of suppression, transgression, and sexual orientation, exemplifying, in Wu’s elegant phrase, a “readiness to impose upon the evidence interpretive grids designed to illustrate pre-existing agendas.” I think Hazlitt, were he around today, would relish this book: it gives us a fresh perspective “untrammeled” by the “prejudices” so characteristic of the spirit of our own age.

⭐I highly recommend this for anyone interested in the Romantic movement.

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