Talk:Romanticism/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Khazar2 (talk · contribs) 14:51, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

• I'll be glad to handle this review. I'll start in the next 2-3 days. -- Khazar2 (talk) 14:51, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

First readthrough

First, let me apologize that this took me a few days longer to start than I'd said; I've been dealing with some health issues and haven't been doing much serious editing in the meantime.

Overall this is a very strong article. It's wide in scope but distills the important ideas, with abundant but not excessive examples. I'm a literature PhD who's read a fair amount about romanticism, but this explains it more clearly than any text I've previously encountered. Really excellent work.

The biggest issue I see in my initial reading is a lack of citations for matters of critical interpretation and opinion (X is more important than Y, Z is the greatest work of the period, A is the biggest influence on B, etc.); most of these will have to be addressed to fulfill criteria 2b and 2c. I'll give you some initial action points below; once the majority of these are taken care of, we can move along to later sections.

Lead, sections 1-2

• "in the long term its effect on the growth of nationalism was probably more significant." -- this judgement needs a citation. The section on Romantic nationalism seems to be almost entirely without citations, which is problematic.
• This isn't a factor for a GA review, but per WP:REPEATLINK, avoid linking terms and names more than once after the lead section.
• This article is weak in citations, and some paragraphs appear to have no citations at all, including some that include critical judgments. If Romanticism is so difficult to define, for example, how can we say for sure that neither Burns or Moore "had a fully Romantic approach to life or their work"? A sentence like "In the discussion of English literature, the Romantic period is often regarded as finishing around the 1820s, or sometimes even earlier, although many authors of the succeeding decades were no less committed to Romantic values" also feels like original research without a citation.
• " Byron had equal success with the first part of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in 1812, followed by four "Turkish tales", all in the form of long poems, starting with The Giaour in 1813, drawing from his Grand Tour which had reached Ottoman Europe, and orientalizing the themes of the Gothic novel in verse. " Consider breaking up this long sentence.
• "Several spent much time abroad"-- several what? English Romantics, I'm guessing?
• " whose collapse" -- French Revolution shouldn't be a "who"--reword.
• " with Shelley's The Cenci perhaps the best work produced" -- this opinion definitely needs attribution.
• "The first major figure " ... in French Romanticism?
• "alongside French authors, several of whom began to write in the late 1820s" -- I don't quite understand this phrase--is it worth a mention that several unnamed French playwrights started writing in this period? (It seems like any half-decade will have a few playwrights begin writing.)
• "an important manifesto of French Romanticism" --provide a citation for the judgement "important"
• "with his play on the life of the English poet Chatterton (1835) perhaps his best work" -- provide a citation for this judgement
• "both for her novels and criticism and her affairs with Chopin and several others" -- the "both" here causes this sentence to read confusingly, as it reads as "both her novels and criticism" on first pass; consider rewording.
• "Stendhal is today probably the most highly regarded French novelist of the period" --provide a citation for this judgement
• "but he stands in a complex relation with Romanticism" --ditto
• "his eventual recognition as Russia's greatest poet." -- the source hedges a bit, saying that he's "generally recognized"; this statement should probably be hedged likewise.
• "Other Russian poets include" -- perhaps add "of the period", "of the movement", something to specify.
• "Baratynsky's style was fairly classical in nature, dwelling on the models of the previous century." -- so what's his connection to Romanticism?
• "Modern Portuguese poetry develops its character from the work of its Romantic epitome, Almeida Garrett, a very prolific writer who helped shape the genre with the masterpiece" -- provide source for both the general claim (all modern Port. poetry stems from him) as well as the superlatives.
• "However, an early Portuguese expression of Romanticism is found already in Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage, especially in his sonnets dated at the end of the 18th century." -- provide source for this judgement
• "the greatest writer of this period is Castro Alves" -- attribute this judgement in-text as well as with the footnote.
• "The poetry of Emily Dickinson—nearly unread in her own time—and Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick can be taken as epitomes of American Romantic literature." -- could definitely use a source for the Dickinson part. I don't claim to be an expert in Dickinson, but this isn't how I was taught her poetry in university; our featured article on her doesn't even mention the word "Romanticism", and only mentions her as a Transcendalist once, in a disputed context.
• "In the United States, romantic Gothic literature made an early appearance with Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820) and Rip Van Winkle (1819), followed from 1823 onwards by the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper, with their emphasis on heroic simplicity and their fervent landscape descriptions of an already-exotic mythicized frontier peopled by "noble savages", similar to the philosophical theory of Rousseau, exemplified by Uncas, from The Last of the Mohicans." -- Consider breaking up this long sentence.
• "Romantic literature was personal, intense, and portrayed more emotion " -- revise for parallelism (currently the list has adjective, adjective, verb)
• "Romantic literature was personal, intense, and portrayed more emotion than ever seen in neoclassical literature. America's preoccupation with freedom became a great source of motivation for Romantic writers as many were delighted in free expression and emotion without so much fear of ridicule and controversy." -- add citation for these statements, particularly the "than ever seen in neoclassical literature", which is rather absolute. -- Khazar2 (talk) 21:59, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

Since this one's been a week without action, I'm closing this review and not promoting to Good Article status at this time. I'd encourage editors of this article to fill in the missing citations and renominate, however; this article is excellent in many respects, and is probably close to Good Article status already. Thanks to everybody for their work! -- Khazar2 (talk) 15:35, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Sorry your time was wasted on this drive-by nom. I'd check that someone intends to do any work before starting a review myself. Many of the points you make relate to stuff by long-vanished editors that the recent editors are not able to ref etc - especially Romance literature etc. All good points I'm sure. Johnbod (talk) 13:02, 23 March 2013 (UTC)

It's not a problem at all--it's a subject I enjoyed reading in detail about, and the comments can hopefully give a start to an editor at some point down the road. Cheers, -- Khazar2 (talk) 13:13, 23 March 2013 (UTC)