115-) English Literature

115-) English Literature

Romanticism

Romanticism

Romanticism (also known as the Romantic movement or Romantic era) is an artistic and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century. For most of the Western world, it was at its peak from approximately 1800 to 1850. Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism as well as glorification of the past and nature, preferring the medieval to the classical. Romanticism was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, and the prevailing ideology of the Age of Enlightenment, especially the scientific rationalization of Nature. It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature; it also had a major impact on historiography, education, chess, social sciences, and the natural sciences. It had a significant and complex effect on politics: Romantic thinking influenced conservatism, liberalism, radicalism, and nationalism.

The movement emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience. It granted a new importance to experiences of sympathy, awe, wonder, and terror, in part by naturalizing such emotions as responses to the "beautiful" and the "sublime". Romantics stressed the nobility of folk art and ancient cultural practices, but also championed radical politics, unconventional behavior, and authentic spontaneity. In contrast to the rationalism and classicism of the Enlightenment, Romanticism revived medievalism and juxtaposed a pastoral conception of a more "authentic" European past with a highly critical view of recent social changes, including urbanization, brought about by the Industrial Revolution.

Many Romantic ideals were first articulated by German thinkers in the Sturm und Drang movement, which elevated intuition and emotion above Enlightenment rationalism. The events and ideologies of the French Revolution were also direct influences on the movement; many early Romantics throughout Europe sympathized with the ideals and achievements of French revolutionaries. Romanticism lionized the achievements of "heroic" individuals – especially artists, who began to be represented as cultural leaders (one Romantic luminary, Percy Bysshe Shelley, described poets as the "unacknowledged legislators of the world" in his "Defence of Poetry"). Romanticism also prioritized the artist's unique, individual imagination above the strictures of classical form. In the second half of the 19th century, Realism emerged as a response to Romanticism, and was in some ways a reaction against it. Romanticism suffered an overall decline during this period, as it was overshadowed by new cultural, social, and political movements, many of them hostile to the perceived illusions and preoccupations of the Romantics. However, it has had a lasting impact on Western civilization, and many "Romantic", "neo-Romantic", and "post-Romantic" artists and thinkers created their most enduring works after the end of the Romantic Era as such.

Defining Romanticism

Romanticism, attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized many works of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography in Western civilization over a period from the late 18th to the mid-19th century. Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism in general and late 18th-century Neoclassicism in particular. It was also to some extent a reaction against the Enlightenment and against 18th-century rationalism and physical materialism in general. Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.

Basic characteristics

Among the characteristic attitudes of Romanticism were the following: a deepened appreciation of the beauties of nature; a general exaltation of emotion over reason and of the senses over intellect; a turning in upon the self and a heightened examination of human personality and its moods and mental potentialities; a preoccupation with the genius, the hero, and the exceptional figure in general and a focus on his or her passions and inner struggles; a new view of the artist as a supremely individual creator, whose creative spirit is more important than strict adherence to formal rules and traditional procedures; an emphasis upon imagination as a gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual truth; an obsessive interest in folk culture, national and ethnic cultural origins, and the medieval era; and a predilection for the exotic, the remote, the mysterious, the weird, the occult, the monstrous, the diseased, and even the satanic.

Romanticism placed the highest importance on the freedom of the artist to authentically express their sentiments and ideas. Romantics like the German painter Caspar David Friedrich believed that an artist’s emotions should dictate their formal approach; Friedrich went as far as declaring that "the artist's feeling is his law". The Romantic poet William Wordsworth, thinking along similar lines, wrote that poetry should begin with "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings", which the poet then "recollect[s] in tranquility", enabling the poet to find a suitably unique form for representing such feelings.

The Romantics never doubted that emotionally motivated art would find suitable, harmonious modes for expressing its vital content—if, that is, the artist steered clear of moribund conventions and distracting precedents. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and others thought there were natural laws the imagination of born artists followed instinctively when these individuals were, so to speak, "left alone" during the creative process. These "natural laws" could support a wide range of different formal approaches: as many, perhaps, as there were individuals making personally meaningful works of art. Many Romantics believed that works of artistic genius were created "ex nihilo", "from nothing", without recourse to existing models. This idea is often called "romantic originality". Translator and prominent Romantic August Wilhelm Schlegel argued in his Lectures on Dramatic Arts and Letters that the most valuable quality of human nature is its tendency to diverge and diversify.

According to Isaiah Berlin, Romanticism embodied

a new and restless spirit, seeking violently to burst through old and cramping forms, a nervous preoccupation with perpetually changing inner states of consciousness, a longing for the unbounded and the indefinable, for perpetual movement and change, an effort to return to the forgotten sources of life, a passionate effort at self-assertion both individual and collective, a search after means of expressing an unappeasable yearning for unattainable goals.

Romantic artists also shared a strong belief in the importance and inspirational qualities of Nature. Romantics were distrustful of cities and social conventions. They deplored Restoration and Enlightenment Era artists who were largely concerned with depicting and critiquing social relations, thereby neglecting the relationship between people and Nature. Romantics generally believed a close connection with Nature was beneficial for human beings, especially for individuals who broke off from society in order to encounter the natural world by themselves.

Romantic literature was frequently written in a distinctive, personal "voice". As critic M. H. Abrams has observed, "much of romantic poetry invited the reader to identify the protagonists with the poets themselves." This quality in Romantic literature, in turn, influenced the approach and reception of works in other media; it has seeped into everything from critical evaluations of individual style in painting, fashion, and music, to the auteur movement in modern filmmaking.

Etymology

The founders of Romanticism, critics (and brothers) August Wilhelm Schlegel and Friedrich Schlegel, began to speak of romantische Poesie ("romantic poetry") in the 1790s, contrasting it with "classic" but in terms of spirit rather than merely dating. Friedrich Schlegel wrote in his 1800 essay Gespräch über die Poesie ("Dialogue on Poetry"):

I seek and find the romantic among the older moderns, in Shakespeare, in Cervantes, in Italian poetry, in that age of chivalry, love and fable, from which the phenomenon and the word itself are derived.

The modern sense of the term spread more widely in France by its persistent use by Germaine de Staël in her De l'Allemagne (1813), recounting her travels in Germany. In England Wordsworth wrote in a preface to his poems of 1815 of the "romantic harp" and "classic lyre", but in 1820 Byron could still write, perhaps slightly disingenuously,

I perceive that in Germany, as well as in Italy, there is a great struggle about what they call 'Classical' and 'Romantic', terms which were not subjects of classification in England, at least when I left it four or five years ago.

It is only from the 1820s that Romanticism certainly knew itself by its name, and in 1824 the Académie française took the wholly ineffective step of issuing a decree condemning it in literature.