ABSTRACT
By the time the Romantic movement as such manifested itself with the formation of a group round the brothers Schlegel in Germany in the closing years of the eighteenth century. The German Romantics fall into two distinct generations known as the Fruhromantik and the Hochromantik or, sometimes, die jungere Romantik. The English Romantics cannot be as neatly categorized as the Gennans or even the French despite the efforts of some earlier critics. The difficulties which the French Romantics had to combat detennined their ideas to a considerable extent. The Romantic narrative tended to concentrate in two areas: the 'confessional' and the historical. The former is patently indebted to the eighteenth-century sentimental novel in its use of the narrative as a vehicle for the exploration of emotion. Few periods in literary history have, in a comparable time-span, produced as great an array of works as the Romantic movement.
