- Date:
- c.
1790 -
c.
1850
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.
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 proper was preceded by several related developments from the mid-18th century on that can be termed
Pre-Romanticism
. Among such trends was a new appreciation of the medieval romance, from which the
Romantic
movement derives its name. The romance was a tale or ballad of chivalric adventure whose emphasis on individual heroism and on the exotic and the mysterious was in clear contrast to the elegant formality and artificiality of prevailing Classical forms of literature, such as the French Neoclassical
tragedy
or the English
heroic couplet
in poetry. This new interest in relatively unsophisticated but overtly emotional literary expressions of the past was to be a dominant note in Romanticism.
Romanticism in
English literature
began in the 1790s with the publication of the
Lyrical Ballads
of
William Wordsworth
and
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
. Wordsworth’s “Preface” to the second edition (1800) of
Lyrical Ballads
, in which he described poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” became the
manifesto
of the English Romantic movement in poetry.
William Blake
was the third principal poet of the movement’s early phase in England. The first phase of the Romantic movement in
Germany
was marked by
innovations
in both content and literary style and by a preoccupation with the mystical, the subconscious, and the supernatural. A wealth of talents, including
Friedrich Holderlin
, the early
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
,
Jean Paul
,
Novalis
,
Ludwig Tieck
,
August Wilhelm
and
Friedrich von Schlegel
,
Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder
, and
Friedrich Schelling
, belong to this first phase. In
Revolutionary France
,
Francois-Auguste-Rene, vicomte de Chateaubriand
, and
Madame de Stael
were the chief initiators of Romanticism, by virtue of their influential historical and theoretical writings.
The second phase of Romanticism,
comprising
the period from about 1805 to the 1830s, was marked by a quickening of cultural
nationalism
and a new attention to national origins, as attested by the collection and imitation of native
folklore
, folk ballads and poetry,
folk dance
and music, and even previously ignored medieval and Renaissance works. The revived historical appreciation was translated into imaginative writing by
Sir Walter Scott
, who is often considered to have invented the
historical novel
. At about this same time English Romantic
poetry
had reached its zenith in the works of
John Keats
,
Lord Byron
, and
Percy Bysshe Shelley
.
A notable
by-product
of the Romantic interest in the emotional were works dealing with the
supernatural
, the weird, and the horrible, as in
Mary Shelley
’s
Frankenstein
and works by
Charles Robert Maturin
, the
Marquis de Sade
, and
E.T.A. Hoffmann
. The second phase of Romanticism in Germany was dominated by
Achim von Arnim
,
Clemens Brentano
,
Joseph von Gorres
, and
Joseph von Eichendorff
.
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By the 1820s Romanticism had broadened to embrace the literatures of almost all of
Europe
. In this later, second, phase, the movement was less universal in approach and concentrated more on exploring each nation’s historical and cultural inheritance and on examining the passions and struggles of exceptional individuals. A brief survey of Romantic or Romantic-influenced writers would have to include
Thomas De Quincey
,
William Hazlitt
, and
Charlotte
,
Emily
, and
Anne Bronte
in England;
Victor Hugo
,
Alfred de Vigny
,
Alphonse de Lamartine
,
Alfred de Musset
,
Stendhal
,
Prosper Merimee
,
Alexandre Dumas
, and
Theophile Gautier
in France;
Alessandro Manzoni
and
Giacomo Leopardi
in Italy;
Aleksandr Pushkin
and
Mikhail Lermontov
in Russia;
Jose de Espronceda
and
Angel de Saavedra
in Spain;
Adam Mickiewicz
in Poland; and almost all of the important writers in pre-Civil War
America
.
Visual arts
In the 1760s and ’70s a number of British artists at home and in Rome, including
James Barry
,
Henry Fuseli
, John Hamilton Mortimer, and
John Flaxman
, began to paint subjects that were at odds with the strict
decorum
and classical historical and mythological subject matter of conventional figurative art. These artists favoured themes that were bizarre, pathetic, or extravagantly heroic, and they defined their images with tensely linear drawing and bold contrasts of light and shade.
William Blake
, the other principal early Romantic painter in England, evolved his own powerful and unique visionary images.
In the next generation the great
genre
of English Romantic
landscape painting
emerged in the works of
J.M.W. Turner
and
John Constable
. These artists emphasized
transient
and dramatic effects of light, atmosphere, and colour to portray a
dynamic
natural world capable of evoking awe and grandeur.
In France the chief early Romantic painters were
Baron Antoine Gros
, who painted dramatic tableaus of contemporary incidents of the
Napoleonic Wars
, and
Theodore Gericault
, whose depictions of individual heroism and suffering in
The Raft of the Medusa
and in his portraits of the insane truly inaugurated the movement around 1820. The greatest French Romantic painter was
Eugene Delacroix
, who is notable for his free and expressive brushwork, his rich and sensuous use of colour, his dynamic
compositions
, and his exotic and adventurous subject matter, ranging from North African Arab life to revolutionary politics at home.
Paul Delaroche
,
Theodore Chasseriau
, and, occasionally,
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres
represent the last, more academic phase of Romantic painting in France. In Germany Romantic painting took on symbolic and allegorical overtones, as in the works of
Philipp Otto Runge
.
Caspar David Friedrich
, the greatest German Romantic artist, painted eerily silent and stark landscapes that can induce in the beholder a sense of mystery and religious awe.
Romanticism expressed itself in architecture primarily through imitations of older architectural styles and through
eccentric
buildings known as “follies.” Medieval
Gothic architecture
appealed to the Romantic imagination in England and Germany, and this renewed interest led to the
Gothic Revival
.