During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the term romanticism was quite uncommon in discussions about Icelandic literature. It was mainly applied to a few poets who challenged the rational literature of the Enlightenment with their aesthetic and patriotic view of Icelandic nature, and uneven and sometime unexpected poetic language. Around and after 1900, influential critics even claimed that proper European romanticism had never reached Iceland. Icelandic romanticism barely deserved its name. Since then, the term romanticism has gradually gained approval as a synonym for various artistic and ideological interventions that emerged in Icelandic literature in the first decade of the nineteenth century and prevailed until the latter part of the 1870s when a new generation of…
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Citation: Óskarsson, Þórir. "Icelandic Romanticism". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 04 June 2024 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/stopics.php?rec=true&UID=19718, accessed 21 November 2024.]
