Romanticism

Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, 1818
Eugène Delacroix, Death of Sardanapalus, 1827, taking its Orientalist subject from a play by Lord Byron
Philipp Otto Runge, The Morning, 1808

Romanticism (also known as the Romantic movement or Romantic era) was an artistic and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century. For most of the Western world, it was at its peak from approximately 1800 to 1850. Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism as well as glorification of the past and nature, preferring the medieval over the classical. Romanticism was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution,[1] and the prevailing ideology of the Age of Enlightenment, especially the scientific rationalization of Nature.[2] It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature; it also had a major impact on historiography,[3] education,[4] chess, social sciences, and the natural sciences.[5] It had a significant and complex effect on politics: Romantic thinking influenced conservatism, liberalism, radicalism, and nationalism.[6][7]

The movement emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience. It granted a new importance to experiences of sympathy, awe, wonder, and terror, in part by naturalizing such emotions as responses to the "beautiful" and the "sublime".[8][9] Romantics stressed the nobility of folk art and ancient cultural practices, but also championed radical politics, unconventional behavior, and authentic spontaneity. In contrast to the rationalism and classicism of the Enlightenment, Romanticism revived medievalism[10] and juxtaposed a pastoral conception of a more "authentic" European past with a highly critical view of recent social changes, including urbanization, brought about by the Industrial Revolution.

Many Romantic ideals were first articulated by German thinkers in the Sturm und Drang movement, which elevated intuition and emotion above Enlightenment rationalism.[11] The events and ideologies of the French Revolution were also direct influences on the movement; many early Romantics throughout Europe sympathized with the ideals and achievements of French revolutionaries.[12] Romanticism lionized the achievements of "heroic" individuals – especially artists, who began to be represented as cultural leaders (one Romantic luminary, Percy Bysshe Shelley, described poets as the "unacknowledged legislators of the world" in his "Defence of Poetry"). Romanticism also prioritized the artist's unique, individual imagination above the strictures of classical form. In the second half of the 19th century, Realism emerged as a response to Romanticism, and was in some ways a reaction against it. Romanticism suffered an overall decline during this period, as it was overshadowed by new cultural, social, and political movements, many of them hostile to the perceived illusions and preoccupations of the Romantics. However, it has had a lasting impact on Western civilization, and many "Romantic", "neo-Romantic", and "post-Romantic" artists and thinkers created their most enduring works after the end of the Romantic Era as such.

  1. ^ Encyclopædia Britannica. "Romanticism. Retrieved 30 January 2008, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online". Britannica.com. Archived from the original on 13 October 2005. Retrieved 2010-08-24.
  2. ^ Casey, Christopher (October 30, 2008). ""Grecian Grandeurs and the Rude Wasting of Old Time": Britain, the Elgin Marbles, and Post-Revolutionary Hellenism". Foundations. Volume III, Number 1. Archived from the original on May 13, 2009. Retrieved 2014-05-14.
  3. ^ David Levin, History as Romantic Art: Bancroft, Prescott, and Parkman (1967)
  4. ^ Gerald Lee Gutek, A history of the Western educational experience (1987) ch. 12 on Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi
  5. ^ Ashton Nichols, "Roaring Alligators and Burning Tygers: Poetry and Science from William Bartram to Charles Darwin", Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 2005 149(3): 304–15
  6. ^ Morrow, John (2011). "Romanticism and political thought in the early 19th century" (PDF). In Stedman Jones, Gareth; Claeys, Gregory (eds.). The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Political Thought. The Cambridge History of Political Thought. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University. pp. 39–76. doi:10.1017/CHOL9780521430562. ISBN 978-0-511-97358-1. Retrieved 10 September 2017.
  7. ^ Guliyeva, Gunesh (2022-12-15). "Traces of Romanticism in the Creativity of Bahtiyar Vahabzade" (PDF). Metafizika (in Azerbaijani). 5 (4): 77–87. eISSN 2617-751X. ISSN 2616-6879. OCLC 1117709579. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2022-11-14. Retrieved 2022-10-14.
  8. ^ Coleman, Jon T. (2020). Nature Shock: Getting Lost in America. Yale University Press. p. 214. ISBN 978-0-300-22714-7.
  9. ^ Barnes, Barbara A. (2006). Global Extremes: Spectacles of Wilderness Adventure, Endless Frontiers, and American Dreams. Santa Cruz: University of California Press. p. 51.
  10. ^ Perpinya, Núria. Ruins, Nostalgia and Ugliness. Five Romantic perceptions of Middle Ages and a spoon of Game of Thrones and Avant-garde oddity Archived 2016-03-13 at the Wayback Machine. Berlin: Logos Verlag. 2014
  11. ^ Hamilton, Paul (2016). The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 170. ISBN 978-0-19-969638-3.
  12. ^ Blechman, Max (1999). Revolutionary Romanticism: A Drunken Boat Anthology. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books. pp. 84–85. ISBN 0-87286-351-4.

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