THE THREE TRENDS IN EARLY ROMANTIC POETRY - NOTES

John Constable

In the second half of the 18th century the new  trends in poetry  had bonds to the Augustan tradition but proposed new ideas and feelings which paved the way to the Romantic generations of poets.

AN OVERVIEW OF LATE 18th - EARLY 19th CENTURY FICTION

The last three decades of the 18th century saw a great amount of new fiction written and published in England. The novel had risen at the beginning of the  century to respond to the needs of culture and education of the new ascending social class: the bourgeoisie. A new sensibility was now spreading and , though the audience was still made up of upper and middle-class readers, the novelists offered a great variety of new genres rooted in and indebted to the previous production of Richardson, Fielding or Sterne but different and original in many ways

If you have a look at the chart below, you’ll immediately realize that the major representatives of the three main kinds of novel wrote or published more or less in the same years.