Romantic literature.

[bgmnts]

Does anyone here like and/or know much about Romantic literature? Prose or poetry, but mainly prose if possible.

Thinking about getting stuck into it because I like nature and shit, and want to try and find something emotionally evocative before I croak. You're all well-read weirdos so fill this thread up with Romantic shit.

[Video Game Fan 2000]

Rousseau kicks arse, people who hate him don't know what they're on about. sad such a reactionary, tory opinion has become so widespread
Hamann if you count him was an interesting figure
reading Lyrical Ballads at university changed my perceptions on writing and made me realised how closed my worldview as before
Goethe aint half bad
Tristam Shandy counts
Northanger Abbey is just the best, maybe the best english language satirical novel. i love it to bits and my heart sinks when its glossed over as a parody
Fichte is wonderful
although its not a work of romanticism itself, the best bringing-together of literary and philosophical concerns accomplished in the 20th century - Hyppolite's soul-stirring The Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit - can be read as a powerful vindication romanticism's themes and influence, proven all the more by its author's still predominant influence over how we think about the interactions between art, culture and society
wanted to start Stendhal but never have

[Kankurette]

One thing that surprised me about Jane Austen: she's very funny in a dry, snarky sort of way. Not read Northanger Abbey but have read Pride & Prejudice, Emma and Sense & Sensibility. Emma is my favourite, although it helps that I liked Clueless.

[buttgammon]

Popular culture gets Austen very wrong, to the extent that I was put off reading her for a long time and I was very pleasantly surprised when I came round to Emma and Northanger Abbey. She is indeed a very funny writer and there's something about her sense of humour that still feels very fresh to me

[Vodkafone]

Does The Tenant of Wildfell Hall count? If so, I'd recommend that. Far less polite and more progressive than I was expecting.

[buttgammon]

Does The Tenant of Wildfell Hall count? If so, I'd recommend that. Far less polite and more progressive than I was expecting.

I'm not sure where you'd place it in terms of Romanticism - it's really not my area - but it's a fantastic book, maybe the best of all the Brontë novels. There is a remarkable directness to how it confronts abuse and violence.

[AliasTheCat]

A bit of an outlier suggestion, but I really enjoyed both volumes of the recent NYRB translation of Chateaubriand's Memoires d'Outre-Tombe

They were referenced twice in quick succession for me when reading first Auster's The Book of Illusions and then Sebald's amazing The Rings of Saturn and piqued my interest, so when I saw that a new translation had been published I picked it up.

He really did live a fascinating life during an extraordinary period and wrote about it beautifully in a way that was incredibly influential on the nascent French romantics. In short, he writes about the grand sweep of the history he lived through alongside the most exquisite, tiniest of moments he experienced.  Also he had a steak named after him.

   

[Video Game Fan 2000]

Popular culture gets Austen very wrong,

agreed, going back to the dawn of it with Twain

[Astronaut Omens]

Might post a fairly well-known thing...

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

— Percy Shelley, "Ozymandias"

[touchingcloth]

I've had A Suitable Boy on my list for years, which at over 1,300 pages is also what it will take me to get through it.

[Papa Wheelie]

Riders by Jilly Goulden