Romanticism
(from late 18th century to early 19th)
Romanticism, according to Wikipedia, was “an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated around the middle of the 18th century in Western Europe, and gained strength during the Industrial Revolution. It was partly a revolt against aristocratic, social, and political norms of the Enlightenment period and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature in art and literature. The movement stressed strong emotion as a source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror, and the awe experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature. It elevated folk art, nature and custom, as well as arguing for an epistemology based on nature, which included human activity conditioned by nature in the form of language, custom and usage. It was influenced by ideas of the Enlightenment and elevated medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived to be from the medieval period. The name "romantic" itself comes from the term "romance" which is a prose or poetic heroic narrative originating in medieval literature and romantic literature. The ideologies and events of the French Revolution and Industrial Revolution are thought to have influenced the movement. Romanticism elevated the achievements of what it perceived as misunderstood heroic individuals and artists that altered society. It also legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority which permitted freedom from classical notions of form in art. There was a strong recourse to historical and natural inevitability in the representation of its ideas.”
As follows, I will show you other summary about Romanticism, short but good (it has been extracted from: http://www.keats-shelley-house.org/romanticist.php):
The age of Romanticism broadly spans the period between the French Revolution in 1789 and the coronation of Queen Victoria in 1837. Never a unified and self-conscious movement, it resists definition.
Romanticism does, however, have certain characteristics that distinguish it from the preceding age of Enlightenment. Where the Enlightenment emphasised objectivity and reason, Romanticism looked to the more subjective and irrational parts of human nature: emotion, the imagination, genius, introspection, our response to the natural world.
The Romantic age produced an extraordinary wealth of writers, artists and composers throughout Europe – in literature, figures such as Goethe, Rousseau, Pushkin and Hugo; in art, Turner, Constable, Delacroix, Géricault and Friedrich; and in music, Beethoven, Schubert and Berlioz.
In English poetry there were six outstanding figures: William Blake, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge from the first generation, and Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats from the second.
These writers – none of whom would have thought of himself as a Romantic poet – produced varied and individually very distinctive work. They shared, nevertheless, a feeling that they were contributing to a period of enormous political, social and intellectual change.
‘ The literature of England’, wrote Shelley in A Defence of Poetry, ‘has arisen as it were from a new birth … we live among such philosophers and poets as surpass beyond comparison any who have appeared since the last national struggle for civil and religious liberty.’
In conclusion, Romanticism was an important movement from 18th century to early 19th century characteristic for its changes referring us to an industrial, social, political and philosophical level, a movement that shook everything.
References:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_byron#Character -- it’s the Wikipedia, it isn’t necessary to say nothing more.
- http://www.keats-shelley-house.org/romanticist.php -- a site dedicated to Romanticism.