English Romanticism and Modern Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays

The essential premise of this book is that there is a continuity from the English romantic era to our own. To understand properly some important twentieth-century writers of fiction, one must understand their connection with romanticism. To avoid this connection is to risk simplification or distortion of view about some major contemporaries. Scholars have established in general terms that romanticism marked a watershed in the early nineteenth century and then continued in subsequent years to shape the sensibilities of some important modern writers, especially twentieth-century poets. Yet the explicit connection has been ignored, and the essayists in this collection seek to demonstrate the impact of romanticism on six twentieth-century fictionists. In his introduction, Allan Chavkin writes that "we are still suffering from a warped view of twentieth-century literature as a result of a lingering anti-romantic prejudice of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and the Imagists, who, in their zeal to revitalize a literature stagnating in late Victorian imitation-romanticism, caricatured romanticism as softminded ... This collection of essays will help correct this distorted view by showing the centrality of English romanticism to modern fiction."