Art Movement That Originated in Europe Towards the End of the 18th Century
Definition of Romanticism
Romanticism (also the Romantic era or the Romantic menses) is an creative, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the terminate of the 18th century and was at its peak in the approximate flow from 1800 to 1850.
Romanticism is characterized by its accent on emotion and individualism also as glorification of all the past and nature, preferring the medieval rather than the classical. Information technology is a reaction to the ideas of the Industrial Revolution, the aloof social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment, and the scientific rationalization of nature.
The pregnant of romanticism has changed with time. In the 17th century, "romantic" meant imaginative or fictitious due to the nascence of a new literary genre : the novel. Novels, that is to say texts of fiction, were written in vernacular (romance languages), as opposed to religious texts written in Latin.
In the 18th century, romanticism is eclipsed past the Age of Enlightenment, where everything is perceived through the prism of science and reason.
In the 19th century, "romantic" ways sentimental : lyricism and the expression of personal emotions are emphasized. Feelings and sentiments are very much present in romantic works.
Thus, so many things are called romantic that information technology is difficult to run into the common points between the novels past Victor Hugo, the paintings by Eugène Delacroix or the music by Ludwig Von Beethoven.
The romantic international
Romanticism is not express to ane country, it was an international vision of the world.
The romantic international started in Frg at the stop of the 18th century with "Storm and Stress". The two most famous poets are Goethe and Schiller and many philosophers such as Fichte, Schlegel, Schelling and Herder.
Romanticism was then adopted in England. Poets are divided in two generations :
- first generation : William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
- second generation : George Byron, Percy Shelley, John Keats.
Romanticism reached France at the starting time of the 19th century with François-René de Chateaubriand – Atala (1801), René (1802), Le Génie du Christianisme (1802) – and Germaine de Staël : De 50'Allemagne (1813).
Romanticism was a renewal, a revolution is creative forms in paintings, literature and theatre. In Deutschland and Russia, romanticism created the national literature. It influenced the whole vision of fine art.
It was too the origin of contemporary ideas : modernistic individualism, the vision of nature, the vision of the work of art equally an isolated object.
Political dimension : the birth of Romanticism
Romanticism represents a suspension with the universalistic outlook of the Enlightenment. Reason is something universal and the Enlightenment institute its models in classical France and Rome : all men are the same considering there are all reasonable. Romanticism if a fragmentation of consciousness, with no universalistic ideas left.
The French Revolution was characterized past universalistic ideas such as all men are created equal. Information technology corresponds to the philosophy of the Enlightenment. The nation is born out of a social contract : information technology ways that you are costless to cull to belong to 1 nation or some other.
It is different in Germany where you don't cull your country, that is where you were built-in (organic nation).
In that location's a difference between the first and second generation of poets. British poets were rather progressive and close to dissenters.
The French Revolution was full of hope of equality but it speedily changed when in 1793, information technology gave way to the Terror and the beheading of the King.
The offset generation of British romantic poets
Only William Blake remained a radical, unlike Wordsworth and Coleridge. There was an incredible pressure in England at the fourth dimension. The Prime Minister, Pitts, suspended the Habeas Corpus and adopted the Sedition Deed, which was meant to prevent the liberty of press. It turned away the starting time generation from their ethics.
Blake wrote a visionary, imaginary poetry, actually difficult to empathize. Wordsworth and Coleridge were reactionary to the French Revolution.
Wordsworth turned away from the excesses of the revolution and wrote a simple verse in a democratic manner.
Coleridge was inspired by the Middle Ages and High german thought and was a reactionary Christian nationalist.
The 2nd generation of British romantic poets
The second generation remains more radical but the political climate was so oppressive that the radicals left England or made more indirect political comments.
The Mask of Chaos by Shelley was inspired by the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. In Prometheus Unbound, a man fights against political and religious oppression.
Romanticism was connected with politics of the fourth dimension. Romantic poets could exist either conservative or progressive, depending on their vision of the world.
Main romantic themes
From society to nature
There is an intellectual shift from society to nature. During the Enlightenment, thinkers had a metropolitan consciousness: the intellectual life took place in cities – London and Edinburgh were highly-regarded cultural centres.
The Enclosure Motility
Nature was thought as humanized, transformed by man with agronomics. The Enclosure Motion was a push in the 18th and 19th centuries to take country that had formerly been owned in common by all members of a village, or at least available to the public for grazing animals and growing food, and change it to privately owned state, usually with walls, fences or hedges around it.
The almost well-known Enclosure Movements were in the British Isles, but the exercise had its roots in the Netherlands and occurred to some caste throughout Northern Europe and elsewhere equally industrialization spread.
Some modest number of enclosures had been going on since the 12th century, especially in the n and west of England, only it became much more common in the 1700's, and in the next century Parliament passed the General Enclosure Human activity of 1801 and the Enclosure Act of 1845, making enclosures of certain lands possible throughout England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.
The English regime and elite started enclosing land challenge it would allow for better raising of crops and animals (particularly sheep for their wool).
They claimed that large fields could be farmed more efficiently than individual plots allotted from common land — and the profit could be kept by the aristocrats who now endemic the legally confiscated land. Some claim this was the outset of commercial farming.
Poor people had no style of subsistence apart from working for the country owners. Information technology brought virtually more poverty and poor people drifted from the countryside to the cities, where the Industrial Revolution had begun, based on the steam engine and the creation of factories where poor people were employed in bad working conditions, pollution, criminality and corruption.
The paradox was that more and more people moved into the cities when they all had terrible living atmospheric condition.
An idealization of nature
Nature became idealized equally life in the country was more virtuous. Romantic poets did non talk about cities (but realists did). Nature was a source of poetic inspiration and gave a spiritual dimension to life, based on the organic connection betwixt man and nature in traditional rural society, which was dying fast because of the Industrial Revolution (opposition between the organic/natural and the mechanical engineering science).
There was a regeneration of human life destroyed by cities, an idealized vision of nature : they were looking for a renewed humanity.
after a Thunderstorm (1836)
Wordsworth and Coleridge left the city for the Lake Commune. In America, transcendentalists such as Emerson or Thoreau did the same. Thoreau went out in the wilderness to Walden Pond to write Walden in 1854.
They discovered the American identity : the civilization was European. In that location is a kind of individualism that refuses every kind of moral convention (who you really are) and pantheism (belief that Nature is divine and has a soul).
The expression of personal feelings, energy and passion
Nature was not only peaceful and meditative but also stormy, tempestuous and too big for man (sublime).
In Shelley's Ode to the West Wind, the poet starts by identifying himself with the air current : he wants to have the same ability and the same liberty. As such, it can be considered a political verse form. The "west wind" is the current of air from America, from the Revolution.
The romantic world is a dynamic world of alter. When there is dazzler, information technology's always ephemeral. What creates the changes are the elemental forces (tempest, power, etc).
Energy tin come from homo beings too. Romanticism is the emphasis of feelings, passions and intuitions. It differs from the 18th century, which was based on reason and reflection.
Reason is universal, everyone uses the same logic : it is non personal. On the other mitt, feelings, passion and intuition are what make people different from each other; it is very individualistic and selfish.
Passion is one of the dynamic elements of romanticism, it'south a cistron of change for the individual and a gene of historical change as Hegel once said "cipher corking was accomplished in history without passion".
Passion is likewise extremely changing : nothing is closer to beloved than hate. It alternates between exaltation and melancholy, between nostalgia and optimism.
I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the heart's angel and the truth of imagination.
John Keats
The romantic vision of love is best because intense when impossible : destiny, death, social differences – as in Romeo and Juliet.
Keats' Isabella or the Pot of Basil happens in the Centre Ages in Italy. The lover is killed by Isabella's brothers. She digs his grave, cuts his caput and hides it in a pot of basil with a flower in it. As she cries everyday, information technology turns to a cute flower. It is Bocaccio'due south story and Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir : a connection betwixt beloved (Eros) and death (Thanatos).
Co-ordinate to Nietsche, passion is "beyond good and evil", it does not care about morality.
A dualistic world
Contrasts, dichotomies tin be seen on all levels betwixt reason and emotion, beautiful and sublime, reality and imagination.
Dialectics are the dynamic principle behind everything and could be seen as a rational monism (the antonym of "pluralism") with the religious revival and the visionary style. E.1000 : Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, Jane Eyre past Charlotte Brontë, Anne Greyness by Anne Brontë.
Wuthering Heights takes place in Yorkshire moors. Catherine Earnshaw hesitates between Heathcliff and Edgar Linton. She chooses Edgar only Heathcliff comes dorsum rich. There is a conflict between what men stand for and what places represent. It's the conflict of "the children of calm, the children of the storm".
The dualism is a catholic matter between at-home and quietness, storm and passion. It's the thought of homo duplex : human is double in a "double simultaneous postulation".
A rediscovery of history and exoticism
In that location is a rediscovery of history and exoticism through local colour : few details to testify yous are not at home (for instance, if you lot write virtually Asia, add some geishas in kimonos).
With romanticism, there is an outburst of cultural nationalism : German romanticism was a flowering of vernacular literatures. The colloquial is the language spoken by the people; it'due south different from the language spoken past the cultural aristocracy (French, Latin). It was good enough to produce good literature. There was also a going dorsum to folklore, legends, and fairy tales.
Wordsworth and Coleridge both wrote lyrical ballads in 1798. In The Rhyme of the Aboriginal Mariner, Coleridge worked on the supernatural and tells the story of a mariner who killed an albatross, which is a very bad omen for mariners : they are all doomed.
In The Idiot Boy, Wordsworth dealt with the ordinary life and tells the story of a adult female who needs medicine for her child. She sends the idiot male child. His aim was to represent the essential passions of human nature, to use simple language, "the select of a language, really used by men". He abandoned the artificiality of poetic diction and the political dimension criticized by many people.
Wordsworth besides wrote "conversation poems" such as Frost every bit midnight: bare verse monologues addressing the listener as in a conversation. The listener is in fact the reader.
Regional verse is some other way to use the vernacular : vernacular in Scotland is different from the colloquial in S England. Encounter Walter Scott and Robert Burns.
Walter Scott invented the historical novel with Waverley (1814) and Ivanhoe (1819). He gave a sense of history with accurate details and characters' destinies influenced by historical faces. The plot tells a clash of values, of choices fabricated in a crucial moment by a young and romantic man, through the arcadian prototype of a united nation. Scott tried to show reconciliation betwixt idealism and reality.
In the U.s.a., James Fenimore Cooper'due south The Concluding of the Mohicans (1826) tells about the disharmonize between France and Britain in the American colonies. The epitome of the Native American is that of a noble savage, yet a "vanishing Indian" because of the progress of the American civilization.
Aesthetic dimension
See Todorov'south Théories du Symbole (1977). Romanticism emphasizes imagination (equally opposed to the 18th century).
Before, art was imitation and mimesis (cf. Aristotle). In that location was a process of selection of things that were worth representing and a correction of nature co-ordinate to the prototype of beauty you lot had in mind (harmony in parts and whole).
On the other manus, with romanticism, art is creation; information technology's an autonomous whole. Information technology does non imitate nature merely recreates it. It is not a mirror but a unlike reality. This parallel world is based on the necessary creative relations betwixt the different organic parts.
Thus, it is useless, there is no purpose except of recreating reality. It is complimentary, autonomous, dissimilar before when it was fabricated to instruct and entertain with a moral quality. At that place is no morality in fine art for the romantics.
Like nature, a work of art is an organic totality in form and significant. The faculty it creates is imagination. Coleridge defined fancy and imagination in The Biographia Literaria, ane of his main critical studies.
Imagination is an artistic and secondary imagination. It'south the principle of unity in a work of fine art and assimilates into a unifying vision. Chief imagination is the basis of perception and God-like quality:
The IMAGINATION so, I consider either as primary, or secondary. The chief IMAGINATION I hold to exist the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal deed of creation in the space I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider every bit an echo of the former, co-existing with the witting will, nevertheless still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing merely in degree, and in the style of operation. Information technology dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet all the same at all events information technology struggles to idealise and unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.
Fancy is associational logic, you practise not create simply associate ideas :
FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, merely fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Retention emancipated from the order of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical miracle of the volition, which we express by the word Option. But every bit with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the law of association.
In Coleridge's Kubla Khan (1816), there's a dissimilarity betwixt microcosm and macrocosm : the wedlock of contraries makes a synthetic whole thanks to symbols, polysemy and allegories.
In Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851), the white whale is an albinos and there is an opposition between nature and man (captain Ahab) showing the irreducible forces of nature.
The paradigm of the artist tin accept several forms. He can exist like a God, a creator but it comes with strings attached such as the problem of transgression or curse.
If you are similar a God, you're likely to go punished for your hubris or your disobedience to the catholic laws, just similar Prometheus. The artist tin also prefer the image of the "poète maudit".
Source: https://www.skyminds.net/the-19th-century-romanticism-in-art-and-literature/
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