Post your articles online and promote your website for free! Boost your sites ranking by linking it from the ArticleZap database! Free Article directory and instant translation publishing!
Romanticism, the sweeping revolt against reason, science, authority and tradition, and order and discipline that convulsed Western civilization over a period that can be roughly dated from the late 18th to mid-i 9th century. It manifested itself in social, political, and moral reforms, but above all in the arts, in which changes of such a profound nature were introduced that Romanticism has been established with classicism as one of the two major polarities of art: all subsequent art movements have been generally regarded to be related to one or the other.
Romanticism had early anticipations in the back-to-nature philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his cult of sensibility and his doctrine of man’s natural goodness. Romanticism proper, however, originated in Germany and England.
In both countries, the gothic novel, mingling horror and evil with poetic descriptions of natural beauty; the renewed interest in Shakespeare and in the folk ballad; and the popularity of the poetry of Ossian, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, and James Thomson were all signals of the coming change. Its first major manifestation was the hectic brilliance of the German Sturm und Drang period (1770—80). English Romanticism is usually dated from the publication of William Wordsworth’s and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798), a collection of poems with a dualism that consisted in straining at once toward a popular common-speech poetry and toward a supernatural poetry using a calculated diction, These two aims introduced what was to become a typical Romantic dichotomy. Wordsworth’s “Preface” to the second edition (1800) of Lyrical Ballads, in which he described poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling,” became the manifesto of the English Romantics.
In that same year the French writer Madame de Stael published her prospectus on Romanticism, De Ia littérature, in which she argued that a work must express the moral and historical reality—the Zeitgeist—of the nation in which it is conceived. In this work and in De l’Allemagne (1810; “Of Germany”), she introduced the themes of Romantic nationalism that became an important aspect of the movement.
The reaction against the Enlightenment was also a reaction against the universality of French cultural domination and against the restrictions of French Neoclassicism, a style that was always worn uneasily in England and Germany.
Poets began to seek inspiration in native themes. The Napoleonic Wars quickened Romantic nationalism, and throughout Europe there was a return to local origins. This went beyond a revival of themes and forms to a rebirth of the use of an inhibited language (Tuscan, Flemish, Erse, Welsh, Breton, Provençal, Czech, Magyar) in literature. Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814), glorifying Scotland’s national past, was one of the most influential works of the era. Soon every European nation had its Scott.
Another upsurge of Romanticism can be dated from 1830 with changes of political regimes in Greece, Belgium, and France; the Polish and Italian risings; and the English Reform Act (1832). This phase saw the beginning of Romantic Realism in the theatre and the novel and a closer identification with political liberalism and Socialism. Romanticism gradually declined after 1848; but its spirit returned at the end of the century in such movements as Neoromanticism, Symbolism, Futurism, and Expressionism.
Historically, Romanticism can be seen as a period of restless experiment. The spirit of the age was so strong that certain literatures that then took shape (those of the United States, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Provence, and Ireland) have remained basically Romantic.
Romanticism represents no single tendency but rather the simultaneous pressure of many different, often conflicting, principles in a stage of European history that is not yet over. The permanent heritage of Romanticism is its emphasis on individuality, particularity, subjective touchstones, and self-expression. By accepting the fact that man is an irrational animal, it has enlarged the compass of art to include areas excluded by the harmonious rationalism of Neoclassicism—the dualism of human nature, the death wish along with the affirmation of life (John Keats, Coleridge, Novalis, Edgar Allan Poe), the Janus-face of good and evil (William Blake, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Fyodor Dostoyevsky). Although Romantic art was weakened by striving toward a superhuman totality beyond any individual’s powers and resulted, paradoxically, in excessive fragmentation, the Romantic protest continues to arise against the threat of any mechanical system that would limit the potentials of human experience.
