British Literature Romanticism to Present

British Lit. Romanticism to Present Following the liberating Age of Reason, the Enlightenment, the age when humanity was triumphing through literature and Rousseau's philosophy was inspiring revolutions, the age of Romanticism saw the birth of some genius writers of its own. Among them, Lord Byron, a man who lived his thirty-six years with the intensity of one who wants to know it all and do it all, was a prolific writer whose works were the expression of his time.

Lord Byron was the restless soul who burnt every resource he had in his inquiries about the meaning of life. He traveled extensively and, like most of his fellow artists, was enchanted with the exotic of the East. Byron was both blessed and haunted by his genius. His image on the seashore, watching the fire lit to burn Shelly's body at Via Reggio, in Italy, is one of those images most illustrative for the Romantic period.

Romanticism is a period full of excesses, contradictions, conflicts, search within the human soul and desperate attempts to escape materialism and find the essence, the meaning of life. In every romantic author's work, Lord Byron's, most of all, there is a cry for finding a higher meaning of life than what reality could offer. The industrial revolution brought splendor and riches for some countries like England, but even here, they were still in stark contrast with the darkness of poverty.

Lord Byron was essentially aristocratic in his behavior and the image he projected of himself, but he was also thirsty of seeing justice being done to those who were suffering from oppression.

Byron admired the greatness of the classics, but he never ceased to deplore the vanity of human existence: "We- we have seen the intellectual race / Of giants, stand, like Titans, face-to-face / …But where are they- the rivals! A few feet / Of sullen earth divide each winding sheet " (http://books.google.ro/books?id=D0onB1xe_kYC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Byron+works&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ii2fUtrSBY6jhgf5soHQBQ&ved=0CEsQ6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q=Byron%20works&f=false) The Romantic period in English literature will make way for a very interesting epoch: the Victorian era.

Writers such as Dickens have made famous mainly one of the features related to this era: its bleakness. Others, such as Tennyson, have left the world indelible features that marked the era, such as: the thirst for knowledge, the love for beauty expressed thorough art. But among these writers, Oscar Wilde stands as the one who is not only one of the most famous writers of the Victorian era, but also one of the most vocal and representative at the same time.

There is continuity between the Romanticism and Victorian art, with the Romantic artists bearing a strong influence on their successors. The British society was going on the way to progress and shifting from a predominantly agrarian to a predominantly industrial society. This important shift meant that the majority's views and the public taste were dramatically changing. Life in the city inevitably attracted big masses willing to leave the fields in the countryside and settle for.