Blackwell Reference Online

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The idea of preromanticism is common enough, but it is not always easy to find out what it means. For instance, Alastair Fowler's recent A History of English Literature does not mention preromanticism in the relevant chapter entitled ‘Later Classicism and the Enlightenment’; and two recent books on Sensibility have appeared in which preromanticism is absent. These books, G. J. Barker-Benfield's The Culture of Sensibility (1992) and Ann Jessie Van Sant's Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel (1993), seem to have been determined by a theory that the novel is to be divorced from Romanticism as such. However, I tend to agree with Stuart Atkins in his article in the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1965, 1974) that the novels of sensibility are amongst other works that ‘reveal a turning away from neoclassicism’ or, in England, Augustanism, and so are to be called preromantic. Such novels, especially, are those of Samuel Richardson: Pamela, Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison. Sterne encouraged sentimentalists but was not a preromantic writer, whatever his disciple Henry Mackenzie may have thought in such novels as The Man of Feeling. However, in this essay I shall deal more with poetry than with drama, painting, essays, and fiction.Fowler begins weightily by stating that what characterized the Enlightenment ‘everywhere was a commitment to clarity’. I shall argue that ... log in or subscribe to read full text