Two new types of fiction were prominent in the late 18th century. One was the “Gothic Novel”, inaugurated in 1764 by Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto. The term derives from the setting of these tales in a gloomy castle of the middle Ages, but it has been extended to a larger group of novels which exploit mystery and terror, decaying mansions and stealthy ghosts.
The second fictional popular mode was the novel of purpose, written to propagate the new social and political theories. The best examples, as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, combine didactic intentions with elements of Gothic terror.
The Romantic period produced two major novelists, Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott.
JANE AUSTEN
Untouched by the political, intellectual, and artistic revolutions of her age, she stayed serenely within the culture and the literary traditions of the neoclassic past. Austen deliberately elected to work within the circumference of her own experience, the life of provincial gentlefolk, and to maintain the decorum of the ironic novel of manners. The narrative line in Sense and Sensibility balances impulsiveness against maturity. In Northanger Abbey and Pride and Prejudice first impressions, illusions and subjective opinions or prejudices give way to detachment, balance and reasonableness. Throughout her work and especially in Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion, she obliges readers to participate in the moral process of disciplined learning to judge.
WALTER SCOTT
The second fictional popular mode was the novel of purpose, written to propagate the new social and political theories. The best examples, as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, combine didactic intentions with elements of Gothic terror.
The Romantic period produced two major novelists, Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott.
JANE AUSTEN
Untouched by the political, intellectual, and artistic revolutions of her age, she stayed serenely within the culture and the literary traditions of the neoclassic past. Austen deliberately elected to work within the circumference of her own experience, the life of provincial gentlefolk, and to maintain the decorum of the ironic novel of manners. The narrative line in Sense and Sensibility balances impulsiveness against maturity. In Northanger Abbey and Pride and Prejudice first impressions, illusions and subjective opinions or prejudices give way to detachment, balance and reasonableness. Throughout her work and especially in Mansfield Park, Emma, and Persuasion, she obliges readers to participate in the moral process of disciplined learning to judge.
WALTER SCOTT
The interest in the past, typical of the Romantic period, led Walter Scott to engage in writing historical novels. His fiction was the opposite of Jane Austen’s. The descriptions of ruins and landscape with which his books abound contributed greatly to the shaping of Romanticism in England. Nowadays, his characters are dismissed as artificial and the plots as stilted and melodramatic. However, his undoubted merits lie in his humour, down-to-earth mastery of folklore (Ivanhoe), and the underlying seriousness of his preoccupation with history. The themes treated in his novels include the relations between the Normans and the Anglo Saxons after the Conquest (Ivanhoe), Jacobite rebellion (Waverley, Rob Roy) anti governmental riots in the 18th century in Edinburgh (The Heart of Midlothian) and Elizabethan England in Kenilworth. His descriptions are always full of detail and often picturesque.