The Literary Romanticism is the main literary movement in Europe since the end of the 19th century until the middle of the 20th century. The term "romantic" was used by the first time in England in the 17th century to talk about the fantastic elements of the chivalrous novels.
Beginning in Germany and England in the 1770s, by the 1820s it swept through Europe.
The movement was deeply connected with the politics of the time, people's fears, hopes, and aspirations. It was the voice of revolution at the beginning of the 19th century and the voice of the Establishment at the end of it.
The bourgeoisie was the class that invented, fostered, and adopted as its own the romantic movement.
Some of the earliest stirrings of the Romantic movement are conventionally traced back to the mid-18th-century interest in folklore which arose in Germany. It existed the belief that products of the uncultivated popular imagination could equal or even surpass those of the educated court poets and composers.
The new romantic taste favoured simplicity and naturalness and these were thought to flow most clearly and abundantly from the "spontaneous" outpourings of the untutored common people. The Village represents the tradition.
It is the rise and spread of the reputation of William Shakespeare. Although he is regarded today as the epitome of the great writer, his reputation was at first very different. Shakespeare was a popular playwright who wrote for the commercial theatre in London. He was not college-educated, and although his company had the sponsorship of King James, his work was not entirely "respectable."
A good play should not mix comedy with tragedy, not proliferate plots and subplots... however Shakespeare's plays did all these things.
The romantics exalted Shakespeare's works as the greatest of their classics. His disregard for the classical rules inspired them. Writers like Friedrich von Schiller and Goethe created their own dramas inspired by Shakespeare.
Because Shakespeare was a popular rather than a courtly writer, the Romantics exaggerated his simple origins. In fact he had received an excellent education which, although it fell short of what a university could offer, went far beyond what the typical college student learns today about the classics. To the Romantics he was the essence of folk poetry, the ultimate vindication of their faith in spontaneous creativity.
Another quite distinct contribution to the Romantic movement was the Gothic romance. The modern horror novel and woman's romance are both descendants of the Gothic romance. A classic Gothic work is for example Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
Fairies, witches, angels and all the fantastic creatures of the Medieval popular imagination came back into the European arts in the Romantic period.
Another important aspect of Romanticism is the exotic. Romantics used to provide images situated in a distant past and in distant places. The distances need not be terribly great: for example Spain was a favourite "exotic" setting for French Romantics.
The Romantic age was a period in which Europeans travelled more than ever to examine the far lands of which they had read. Much of this tourism was heavily freighted with the attitudes fostered by European colonialism. Most "natives" were depicted as inevitably lazy, unable to govern themselves while those who aspired to European sophistication were often derided as "spoiled." Many male travellers viewed the women of almost any foreign land one could name as more sexually desirable and available than the women at home, and so they are depicted in fiction, drama, art, and opera.
For romantics, nature is very important. Europe had become more civilised, safer, and its citizens now felt freer to travel for the simple pleasure of it. Mountain passes and deep woods were no longer merely perilous hazards to be traversed, but views to be enjoyed and pondered. The violence of ocean storms came to be appreciated as an aesthetic object in any number of paintings, musical tone poems, and written descriptions.
None of this had been true of earlier generations, who had tended to view the human and the natural as opposite poles, with the natural sometimes exercising an evil power to degrade and dehumanise those who were to drawn to it. The Romantics, just as they cultivated sensitivity to emotion generally, especially cultivated sensitivity to nature. Much of the nature writing of the 19th century has a religious quality to it absent in any other period.
It was moment when the industrial revolution was destroying large tracts of woods and fields and creating an unprecedentedly artificial environment in Europe; but in fact it could probably have arisen in no other time. It is precisely people in urban environments aware of the stark contrast between their daily lives and the existence of the inhabitants of the wild who romanticise nature. They feel attracted to it precisely because they are no longer unselfconsciously part of it.
Imagination and subjectivity are very important characteristics for this movement. In the texts there are freedom of thought and expression and idealisation of the Nature.
So sensibility and imagination are over reason and intellectuality. The romantic man looks for freedom and tries to run away from all the imposed ways that stop this freedom, instinct and passion lead the human being to an exaggerated enthusiasm or to a deep pessimism. In the last case, the romantic wants to run away and there are two possible ways: the one of the travels or the one of the suicides.
Passion and instinct are the life’s law. Free nature and spontaneous impulse. That’s why it appears the figure of the savage.
There is metaphysical anguish: the romantic wants to reach a superior World. But the romantic finds that reality is not the answer to his illusions. So he feels disappointed. The World where he lives is too grey and as it is too difficult to accept it he rebels against it and run away. And as we have said before sometimes the only possible choice is the suicide.
Romantic Literature is subjective. It is common in texts the night, the Moon, the cemetery, the brave sea, the jungle...
The personality of the author is felt by himself so strongly that it finish crashing with everything that surrounds him.
Huge philosophical and political worries: in the works it appears the great metaphysical subjects: God, the soul, the sense of Life and Death... Idea of destiny. Together with this we find other important political or social worries: the happiness of Humanity, the rights of the Village, the idea of progress, the Future of the Nation... The main objective is to move the public.
It is used the contrast; the beautiful and the ugly, the wonderful and the horrible.
But throughout the Victorian period the wild, passionate, erotic, even destructive aspects of Romanticism continue in evidence in all the arts.
One of the most complex developments during this period is the transformation of religion into a subject for artistic treatment far removed from traditional religious art.
During the Romantic era many writers and artists were drawn to religious imagery in the same way they were drawn to Arthurian or other ancient traditions in which they no longer believed. Writers felt free to draw on Biblical themes with the same freedom as their predecessors had drawn on classical mythology, and with as little reverence.
One of the most important developments of this period is the rise in the importance of individualism. Before the 18th Century, few Europeans concerned themselves with discovering their own individual identities. They were what they had been born: nobles, peasants, or merchants. As mercantilism and capitalism gradually transformed Europe, however, it destabilised the old patterns. The changing economy not only made individualism attractive to the newly rich, it made possible a free market in the arts.
But the most influential exemplar of individualism for the 19th century was not a creative artist at all, but a military man: Napoleon Bonaparte.
Some products of the romantic movement: The notion that adolescence is naturally a time of rebellion in which one "finds oneself," the idea that the best path to faith is through individual choice and the idea that government exists to serve the individuals who have created it.
Romantic writers generally prized the more tender sentiments of affection, sorrow, and romantic longing.
Rousseau is an example of sentimentalism. He explored in his fiction the agonies of frustrated love (particularly in his successful novel The New Helois). The great minds of the 20th century have generally rejected sentimentalism.
Of all the emotions celebrated by the Romantics, the most popular was love. Although the great Romantic works often centre on terror or rage, the motive force behind these passions is most often a relationship between a pair of lovers. It was the romantics who first celebrated romantic love as the natural birthright of every human being, the most exalted of human sentiments, and the necessary foundation of a successful marriage.
So the conviction which continues to shape much of our thinking about relationships, marriage, and the family found its mature form during the Romantic age.
Hard-bitten naturalism in fiction and film coexist today with romanticism. The contemporary vogue for "Victorian" designs is just one of many examples of the frequent revivals of Romantic tastes and styles that have recurred throughout the twentieth century.
Romanticism was even very successful in changing history, changing the definition of what it means to be human.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians/hum
http://www.teleline.es/personal/mjserran/roman.htm
http://www.best.com/~mgmiken/mehap/mimi/TRAD/lit.html
http://www.cc.emory.edu/MUSIC/ARNOLD/WHATITIS.HTM
http://www.zimmerworks.com/Presentation31/tsld002.htm