Romanticism

To situate us, I am going to describe in general the Romanticism, what it was, against what was fighting and some important points or topics you must to relate with the word “Romanticism”.

According to Wikipedia, Romanticism is a complex, self-contradictory 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 Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature, and was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music 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 in untamed nature and its qualities that are "Picturesque", both new aesthetic categories. It elevated folk art and custom, as well as arguing for a "natural" epistemology of human activities as conditioned by nature in the form of language, custom and usage. The name "romantic" itself comes from the term "romance" which is a genre of prose or poetic heroic narrative originating in medieval literature. Romanticism reached beyond the rational and Classicist ideal models to elevate medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived to be authentically medieval, and to embrace as well the exotic, unfamiliar and distant in modes more authentic than chinoiserie.

The ideologies and events of the French Revolution, rooted in Romanticism, affected the direction it was to take, and the confines of the Industrial Revolution also had their influence on Romanticism, which was in part an escape from modern realities; indeed, in the second half of the nineteenth century, "Realism" was offered as a polarized opposite to Romanticism. 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, a Zeitgeist, in the representation of its ideas.

 It’s true that, as we can found on The Norton English Literature page, the French Revolution demonstrates, intellectuals of the age were obsessed with the concept of violent and inclusive change in the human condition, and the writings of those we now consider the major Romantic poets cannot be understood, historically, without an awareness of the extent to which their distinctive concepts, plots, forms, and imagery were shaped first by the promise, then by the tragedy, of the great events in neighboring France.

The French Revolution was as an “enthusiastic bomb” for the romantic poets, it promised a new day, a new life, a new change with its force and high excitement of a religious awakening (because they interpreted the events in France in accordance with the apocalyptic prophecies in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures). But, when they discovered revolution had failed, they didn’t bury their hope for a radical reformation of humankind and its social and political world; instead, they transferred the basis of that hope from violent political revolution to a quiet but drastic revolution in the moral and imaginative nature of the human race (these fragments have been extracted from: http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/romantic/welcome.htm .)

Another important topic of this period was “The Gothic”, which is also a prominent and distinctive element in the writings of the Romantic Age. The mode had originated in novels of the mid-eighteenth century that, in radical opposition to the Enlightenment ideals of order, decorum, and rational control, had opened to literary exploration the realm of nightmarish terror, violence, aberrant psychological states, and sexual rapacity.

References:

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism - The Wikipedia

- http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/romantic/welcome.htm - The Norton Anthology of English Literature