The Edwardian Period (1901-1914)
The span between the death of Victoria (1901) and the beginning of World War I (1914)
is named for King Edward VII, who reigned from 1901 to 1910. Poets writing at the time
included Thomas Hardy (who gave up novels for poetry at the beginning of the century),
Alfred Noyes, William Butler Yeats, and Rudyard Kipling; dramatists included Henry
Arthur Jones, Arthur Wing Pinero, James Barrie, John Galsworthy, George Bernard
Shaw, and the playwrights of the Celtic Revival such as Lady Gregory, Yeats, and John
M. Synge. Many of the major achievements were in prose fiction—works by Thomas
Hardy, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, John Galsworthy, H. G. Wells, Rudyard
Kipling, and Henry James, who published his major final novels, The Wings of the Dove,
The Ambassadors, and The Golden Bowl, between 1902 and 1904.
H. G. Wells, who stands in a symbolic relation to the Edwardian period as Wilde stood
in a symbolic relation to the 1890s, wrote that Queen Victoria sat on England like a great
paperweight, and that after her death things blew all over the place. This expresses well
the excitement, the new sense of freedom, and the lack of direction, in Wells himself and
in Arnold Bennett, Galsworthy, E. M. Forster, and other liberal writers of the period.
Strongly traditional themes support the still current alternative sense of the word
'Edwardian', referring to a period of sunlit prosperity and opulent confidence preceding
the cataclysm of the Great War. Those include the empire as a source of national pride,
the countryside as the custodian of national values, the upper-class house party
representing the whole of English life in the writing of the period.
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Neo-Romanticism (1880s- 1960s)
Neo-romanticism is a broad movement crossing artistic boundaries that gave more
importance to the representation of
internal feelings. It started as a
reaction to naturalism in the 19th
century and harked back to the
Romantic era, but it has since
become a reaction to modernism
and post-modernism. Neo-
romanticism began in Britain
around 1880, but later spread to
other parts of the world including
Untitled C’, lithograph by Graham Sutherland, one of the first
Eastern Europe, America and even pioneers of Neo-Romanticism
India. It covers painting, literature and
music.
Characteristics of neo-romanticism include the expression of strong emotions such as
terror, awe, horror and love. The movement sought to revive romanticism and
medievalism by promoting the power of imagination, the exotic and the unfamiliar. Other
characteristics include the promotion of supernatural experiences, the use and interest in
Jungian archetypes and the semi-mystical conjuring of home and nation.
Human emotions were as important as the supernatural. Neo-romanticism sought to
promote ideas such as perfect love, the beauty of youth, heroes and romantic deaths; these
included the romantic traditions of Lord Byron.
In terms of style, paintings tended to veer towards the historical and the natural. There
was a conscious and intellectual movement away from the ugly machinery of the
industrial revolution and towards the simplified beauty of a bygone era. Most of this was
nostalgia mixed with fantasy, ideas of the past shorn of their grim realities.
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Neo-romanticism continued into the 20th and 21st centuries in painting. They perhaps
reached their pinnacle after World War I and again after World War II, when the style
was used to represent the sombre experiences of war. Such paintings include Keith
Vaughn’s “Communication of Hate” and John Caxton’s “Dreamer in Landscape.” Other
renowned neo-romantic painters include Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland and Eugene
Berman.
Writers and poets from Lewis Carroll to Alan Ginsberg have been considered neo-
romantics. Other writers include J.R.R. Tolkien and Dylan Thomas. Tolkien, influenced
by the landscapes of the village of Sarehole in comparison to the industrial revolution’s
ravaging of nearby Birmingham. This juxtaposition greatly influenced his writing and the
“Lord of the Rings” contains a number of neo-romantic characteristics including
comparing the love of nature seen in the Hobbits and Rohan against the industrialization
imposed by Saruman.
Works cited
Abrams, M. H. (1999). A Glossary of Literary Terms. Seventh Edition. USA: Cornwell
University.
Drabble, M. (2000). The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Sixth edition. Great
Britain: Oxford University Press 2000
Image taken from https://discover.goldmarkart.com/brief-history-neo-romanticism/
