ABSTRACT
Our survey of the literature of the second half of the eighteenth century has touched on many a tendency anticipatory of the Romantic Movement. Much that was new and distinctive in the work of Burns and Crabbe, Cowper and Chatterton, Radcliffe and Walpole, marked them as precursors of Romanticism. Extensions of literary concern in the direction of passion and mystery, imagination and creativity, and towards the fuller exploration of man and Nature, may be subsumed under the label ‘Romantic’. So too may movements away from the conventionalized forms of eighteenth-century literary expression. The concept ‘Romantic’ is wide because the movement was a rich one, involving some of the most exciting literary personalities of our history.
