In my previous posts about Romanticism and fantasy, I looked at British literature in the 18th century through to 1789, and tried to track the emergence of a certain kind of fantastic fiction. In order to understand what happens in British writing (and politics) after 1789, though, we have to look at what happens in France. Before continuing, I need to emphasise: I am not an academic, or a professional historian. I’ve read a fair amount about the period, and…

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Last week, I described the neo-classical attitudes of the Age of Reason, which dominated English literature through most of the 18th century. This week I want to take a look at how and when things changed. In 1798 William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, a collection of poetry that some critics have pointed to as the start of Romanticism in English literature. In fact, you can fairly easily find precursors to one aspect…

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