Individualism in British Romantic Literature Essay Example

values; that desire, they argue, while directed to the past, can be used as the basis for a critique of the quantifying and alienating authority of capitalism. For Sayre and Lowy, romanticism constitutes a challenge to, and points a way out of, capitalism's reduction of human life to so many economic units.( Coleridge, p.79) The individualistic romanticism is best understood as a cultural response to the historical triumph of industrial capitalism in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is remarkably erudite and persuasive; but it does not adequately consider the complicated ways that British romanticism, even in its most utopian moments, remains deeply entangled within the social and cultural conditions of both feudalism and capitalism.

The attachment of romanticism to feudal and aristocratic subject matter is too fond to be seen only as a rejection of capitalist values; that attachment constitutes as well a historical residue that marks the continuing hold of an aristocratic worldview on at least a portion of the romantic imagination. At the time romanticism emerges, alongside industrial capitalism, feudalism has not yet entirely let go its hold on the cultural imagination, a fact that forces a more careful consideration than Sayre and Lowy have provided of the dialectical warfare between the residual cultural claims of feudalism, the emergent economic-cultural demands of capitalism, and the place of romanticism within this turbulent situation. ...