Module 1: Romantic Fiction

The Romantic period saw the development of various genres of fiction, such as the epistolary novel, the romance, the gothic, the historical novel, the and the didactic novel.
Most of the fiction of the period were informed by the idea of sensibility and sentimentalism.
One of the most prominent authors of the Romantic period, Jane Austen’s principal themes include romance, domesticity, property, class, and social order.
The Romantic age saw the publishing of major essays and works of criticism. This includes the ‘Preface’ to the Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria ans Percy Shelley’s A Defense of Poetry.
The genre of the historical novel was dominated by Walter Scott.
Walter Scott’s fiction documented the transformations of the Scottish gentry, its agricultural practices, its landscape as in topography, class divide and the Jacobite rebellions - all with a degree of realism.
A key genre of the Romantic period is the Gothic novel, characterised by the darker side of human sentiments and passions and set in spaces such as dungeons, passages, attics, graveyards and abandoned rooms.