Romanticism

Romanticism (or the Romantic era/Period) was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe and strengthened in reaction to the Industrial Revolution. In part, it was a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature. It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on historiography, education and natural history.

The movement validated strong emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror and terror and awe—especially that which is experienced in confronting the sublimity of untamed nature and its picturesque qualities, both new aesthetic categories. It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble, made spontaneity a desirable characteristic (as in the musical impromptu), and argued for a "natural" epistemology of human activities as conditioned by nature in the form of language and customary usage.

Romanticism reached beyond the rational and Classicist ideal models to elevate a revived medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived to be authentically medieval, in an attempt to escape the confines of population growth, urban sprawl, and industrialism, and it also attempted to embrace the exotic, unfamiliar, and distant in modes more authentic than Rococo chinoiserie, harnessing the power of the imagination to envision and to escape.

The modern sense of a romantic character may be expressed in Byronic ideals of a gifted, perhaps misunderstood loner, creatively following the dictates of his inspiration rather than the standard ways of contemporary society.

Although the movement was rooted in the German Sturm und Drang movement, which prized intuition and emotion over Enlightenment rationalism, the ideologies and events of the French Revolution laid the background from which both Romanticism and the Counter-Enlightenment emerged. 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 19th century, "Realism" was offered as a polarized opposite to Romanticism. Romanticism elevated the achievements of what it perceived as heroic individualists and artists, whose pioneering examples would elevate 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.

Characteristics

In a basic sense, the term "Romanticism" has been used to refer to certain artists, poets, writers, musicians, as well as political, philosophical and social thinkers of the late 18th and early to mid 19th centuries. It has equally been used to refer to various artistic, intellectual, and social trends of that era. Despite this general usage of the term, a precise characterization and specific definition of Romanticism have been the subject of debate in the fields of intellectual history and literary history throughout the 20th century, without any great measure of consensus emerging.

Arthur Lovejoy attempted to demonstrate the difficulty of defining Romanticism in his seminal article "On The Discrimination of Romanticisms" in his Essays in the History of Ideas (1948); some scholars see romanticism as essentially continuous with the present, some like Robert Hughes see in it the inaugural moment of modernity, some like Chateaubriand, 'Novalis' and Samuel Taylor Coleridge see it as the beginning of a tradition of resistance to Enlightenment rationalism—a 'Counter-Enlightenment'— to be associated most closely with German Romanticism. Still others place it firmly in the direct aftermath of the French Revolution. An earlier definition comes from Charles Baudelaire: "Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling."

Counter-Enlightenment

Many intellectual historians have seen Romanticism as a key movement in the Counter-Enlightenment, a reaction against the Age of Enlightenment. Whereas the thinkers of the Enlightenment emphasized the primacy of reason, Romanticism emphasized intuition, imagination, and feeling, to a point that has led to some Romantic thinkers being accused of irrationalism.

Romanticism focuses on Nature: a place free from society's judgment and restrictions. Romanticism blossomed after the age of Rationalism, a time that focused on scientific reasoning.

Genius, originality, authorship

The Romantic movement developed the idea of the absolute originality and artistic inspiration by the individual genius, which performs a "creation from nothingness;" this is the so-called Romantic ideology of literary authorship, which created the notion of plagiarism and the guilt of a derivativeness. This idea is often called "romantic originality." The romantic poets' turned their beliefs on originality into "the institution of originality." The English poet John Milton, who lived in the 17th century, was part of the origin of the concept.

This idea was in contrast with the preceding artistic tradition, in which copying had been seen as a fundamental practice of the creative process; and has been especially challenged since the beginning of the 20th century, with the boom of the modernist and postmodern movements.

Romanticism and music

See also: Romantic music

Ludwig van Beethoven

Although the term "Romanticism" when applied to music has come to imply the period roughly from the 1820s until around 1900, the contemporary application of "romantic" to music did not coincide with this modern interpretation. In 1810 E.T.A. Hoffmann called Mozart, Haydn and Beethoven the three "Romantic Composers", and Ludwig Spohr used the term "good Romantic style" to apply to parts of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Technically, Mozart and Haydn are considered Classical composers, and by most standards, Beethoven represents the start of the musical Romantic period. By the early 20th century, the sense that there had been a decisive break with the musical past led to the establishment of the 19th century as "The Romantic Era", and it is referred to as such in the standard encyclopedias of music.

Frédéric Chopin

The traditional modern discussion of the music of Romanticism includes elements, such as the growing use of folk music, which are also directly related to the broader current of Romantic nationalism in the arts as well as aspects already present in 18th-century music, such as the cantabile accompanied melody to which Romantic composers beginning with Franz Schubert applied restless key modulations.

Niccolò Paganini

The heightened contrasts and emotions of Sturm und Drang (German for "turbulence and urge(ncy)") seem a precursor of the Gothic novel in literature, or the sanguinary elements of some of the operas of the period of the French Revolution. The libretti of Lorenzo da Ponte for Mozart's eloquent music convey a new sense of individuality and freedom. The romantic generation viewed Beethoven as their ideal of a heroic artist—a man who first dedicated a symphony to Consul Bonaparte as a champion of freedom and then challenged Emperor Napoleon by striking him out from the dedication of the Eroica Symphony. In Beethoven's Fidelio he creates the apotheosis of the 'rescue operas' which were another feature of French musical culture during the revolutionary period, in order to hymn the freedom which underlay the thinking of all radical artists in the years of hope after the Congress of Vienna.

Franz Liszt

In the contemporary music culture, the romantic musician followed a public career depending on sensitive middle-class audiences rather than on a courtly patron, as had been the case with earlier musicians and composers. Public persona characterized a new generation of virtuosi who made their way as soloists, epitomized in the concert tours of Paganini and Liszt.

Beethoven's use of tonal architecture in such a way as to allow significant expansion of musical forms and structures was immediately recognized as bringing a new dimension to music. His later piano music and string quartets, especially, showed the way to a completely unexplored musical universe. E.T.A. Hoffmann was able to write of the supremacy of instrumental music over vocal music in expressiveness, a concept which would previously have been regarded as absurd. Hoffmann himself, as a practitioner both of music and literature, encouraged the notion of music as "programmatic" or narrative, an idea which new audiences found attractive. Early 19th century developments in instrumental technology—iron frames for pianos, wound metal strings for string instruments—enabled louder dynamics, more varied tone colours, and the potential for sensational virtuosity. Such developments swelled the length of pieces, introduced programmatic titles, and created new genres such as the free-standing concert overture or tone poem, the piano fantasia, nocturne and rhapsody, and the virtuosic concerto, which became central to musical romanticism.

Richard Wagner

In opera, a new Romantic atmosphere combining supernatural terror and melodramatic plot in a folkloric context was first successfully achieved by Weber's Der Freischütz (1817, revised 1821). Enriched timbre and color marked the early orchestration of Hector Berlioz in France, and the grand operas of Meyerbeer. Amongst the radical fringe of what became mockingly characterised (adopting Wagner's own words) as "artists of the future", Liszt and Wagner each embodied the Romantic cult of the free, inspired, charismatic, perhaps ruthlessly unconventional individual artistic personality.

The Romantic-era ballet freed itself both from opera, in which a ballet interlude retained an essential role only in Paris, and from court fêtes, and independently paralleled the developments of opera with explicit narrative libretti, expressed in lengthy passages of mime, the universal presence of impetuous or ill-fated young love, the supremacy of the ballerina and the choice often of supernatural subjects: Giselle (1841) remains the supreme example.

It is the period of 1815 to 1848 which must be regarded as the true age of Romanticism in music – the age of the last compositions of Beethoven (d. 1827) and Schubert (d. 1828), of the works of Schumann (d. 1856) and Chopin (d.1849), of the early struggles of Berlioz and Richard Wagner, of the great virtuosi such as Paganini (d. 1840), and the young Liszt and Thalberg. Now that we are able to listen to the work of Mendelssohn (d. 1847) stripped of the Biedermeier reputation unfairly attached to it, he can also be placed in this more appropriate context. After this period, with Chopin and Paganini dead, Liszt retired from the concert platform at a minor German court, Wagner effectively in exile until he obtained royal patronage in Bavaria, and Berlioz still struggling with the bourgeois liberalism which all but smothered radical artistic endeavour in Europe, Romanticism in music was surely past its prime—giving way, rather, to the period of musical romantics.

Romantic literature

See also: Romantic poetry

In literature, Romanticism found recurrent themes in the evocation or criticism of the past, the cult of "sensibility" with its emphasis on women and children, the heroic isolation of the artist or narrator, and respect for a new, wilder, untrammeled and "pure" nature. Furthermore, several romantic authors, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, based their writings on the supernatural/occult and human psychology. Romanticism also helped in the emergence of new ideas and in the process led to the emergence of positive voices that were beneficial for the marginalized sections of the society.

The roots of romanticism in poetry go back to the time of Alexander Pope (1688–1744). Early pioneers include Joseph Warton (headmaster at Winchester College) and his brother Thomas Warton, professor of Poetry at Oxford University. Joseph maintained that invention and imagination were the chief qualities of a poet. The "poet's poet" Thomas Chatterton is generally considered to be the first Romantic poet in English. The Scottish poet James Macpherson influenced the early development of Romanticism with the international success of his Ossian cycle of poems published in 1762, inspiring both Goethe and the young Walter Scott.

Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770), the first Romantic poet in the English language

An early German influence came from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, whose 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther had young men throughout Europe emulating its protagonist, a young artist with a very sensitive and passionate temperament. At that time Germany was a multitude of small separate states, and Goethe's works would have a seminal influence in developing a unifying sense of nationalism. Another philosophic influence came from the German idealism of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Schelling, making Jena (where Fichte lived, as well as Schelling, Hegel, Schiller and the brothers Schlegel) a center for early German romanticism ("Jenaer Romantik"). Important writers were Ludwig Tieck, Novalis (Heinrich von Ofterdingen, 1799), Heinrich von Kleist and Friedrich Hölderlin. Heidelberg later became a center of German romanticism, where writers and poets such as Clemens Brentano, Achim von Arnim, and Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff met regularly in literary circles.

Important motifs in German Romanticism are travelling, nature, and ancient myths. The later German Romanticism of, for example, E. T. A. Hoffmann's Der Sandmann (The Sandman), 1817, and Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff's Das Marmorbild (The Marble Statue), 1819, was darker in its motifs and has gothic elements.

Early Russian Romanticism is associated with the writers Konstantin Batyushkov (A Vision on the Shores of the Lethe, 1809), Vasily Zhukovsky (The Bard, 1811; Svetlana, 1813) and Nikolay Karamzin (Poor Liza, 1792; Julia, 1796; Martha the Mayoress, 1802; The Sensitive and the Cold, 1803). However the principal exponent of Romanticism in Russia is Alexander Pushkin (The Prisoner of the Caucasus, 1820–1821; The Robber Brothers, 1822; Ruslan and Ludmila, 1820; Eugene Onegin, 1825–1832). Pushkin's work influenced many writers in the 19th century and led to his eventual recognition as Russia's greatest poet. Other Russian poets include Mikhail Lermontov (A Hero of Our Time, 1839), Fyodor Tyutchev (Silentium!, 1830), Yevgeny Baratynsky's (Eda, 1826), Anton Delvig, and Wilhelm Küchelbecker.

Influenced heavily by Lord Byron, the foremost British Romantic poet of the time period, Lermontov sought to explore the Romantic emphasis on metaphysical discontent with society and self, while Tyutchev's poems often described scenes of nature or passions of love. Tyutchev commonly operated with such categories as night and day, north and south, dream and reality, cosmos and chaos, and the still world of winter and spring teeming with life. Baratynsky's style was fairly classical in nature, dwelling on the models of the previous century.

Konstantin Batyushkov (1787-1855)-one of the notable poets of Russian Romantism

In Spain, the Romantic movement developed a well-known literature with a huge variety of poets and playwrights. The most important Spanish poet during this movement was José de Espronceda. After him there were other poets like Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Mariano José de Larra and the dramatist José Zorrilla, author of Don Juan Tenorio. Before them may be mentioned the pre-romantics José Cadalso and Manuel José Quintana.

Spanish Romanticism also influenced regional literatures. For example, in Catalonia and in Galicia there was a national boom of writers in the local languages, like the Catalan Jacint Verdaguer and the Galician Rosalía de Castro, the main figures of the national revivalist movements Renaixença and Rexurdimento, respectively.

Brazilian Romanticism is characterized and divided in three different periods. The first one is basically focused in the creation of a sense of national identity, using the ideal of the heroic Indian. Some examples include José de Alencar, who wrote "Iracema" and "O Guarani", and Gonçalves Dias, renowned by the poem "Canção do Exílio" (Song of the Exile). The second period is marked by a profound influence of European themes and traditions, involving the melancholy, sadness and despair related to unobtainable love. Goethe and Lord Byron are commonly quoted in these works. The third cycle is marked by social poetry, especially the abolitionist movement; the greatest writer of this period is Castro Alves.

Romanticism in British literature developed in a different form slightly later, mostly associated with the poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose co-authored book Lyrical Ballads (1798) sought to reject Augustan poetry in favour of more direct speech derived from folk traditions. Both poets were also involved in utopian social thought in the wake of the French Revolution. The poet and painter William Blake is the most extreme example of the Romantic sensibility in Britain, epitomised by his claim “I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's.” Blake's artistic work is also strongly influenced by Medieval illuminated books. The painters J. M. W. Turner and John Constable are also generally associated with Romanticism. Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley, John Keats and John Clare constitute another phase of Romanticism in Britain.

In predominantly Roman Catholic countries Romanticism was less pronounced than in Germany and Britain, and tended to develop later, after the rise of Napoleon. François-René de Chateaubriand is often called the "Father of French Romanticism". In France, the movement is associated with the 19th century, particularly in the paintings of Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix, the plays, poems and novels of Victor Hugo (such as Les Misérables and Ninety-Three)(also, Victor Hugo, in the preface to "Cromwell" states that " there are no rules, or models" in Romanticism), and the novels of Alexandre Dumas and Stendhal.

Modern Portuguese poetry definitely develops its outstanding character from the work of its Romantic epitome, Almeida Garrett, a very prolific writer who helped shape the genre with the masterpiece Folhas Caídas (1853). This late arrival of a truly personal Romantic style would linger on to the beginning of the 20th century, notably through the works of poets such as Cesário Verde and António Nobre, segueing seamlessly to Modernism. However, an early Portuguese expression of Romanticism is found already in the genius of Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage, especially in his sonnets dated at the end of the 18th century.

In the United States, romantic Gothic literature made an early appearance with Washington Irving's The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1820) and Rip Van Winkle (1819), followed from 1823 onwards by the Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper, with their emphasis on heroic simplicity and their fervent landscape descriptions of an already-exotic mythicized frontier peopled by "noble savages", similar to the philosophical theory of Rousseau, exemplified by Uncas, from The Last of the Mohicans. There are picturesque "local color" elements in Washington Irving's essays and especially his travel books. Edgar Allan Poe's tales of the macabre and his balladic poetry were more influential in France than at home, but the romantic American novel developed fully in Nathaniel Hawthorne's atmosphere and melodrama. Later Transcendentalist writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson still show elements of its influence and imagination, as does the romantic realism of Walt Whitman. The poetry of Emily Dickinson—nearly unread in her own time—and Herman Melville's novel Moby-Dick can be taken as epitomes of American Romantic literature. By the 1880s, however, psychological and social realism was competing with romanticism in the novel.

Influence of European Romanticism on American writers

The European Romantic movement reached America in the early 19th century. American Romanticism was just as multifaceted and individualistic as it was in Europe. Like the Europeans, the American Romantics demonstrated a high level of moral enthusiasm, commitment to individualism and the unfolding of the self, an emphasis on intuitive perception, and the assumption that the natural world was inherently good, while human society was filled with corruption.

Romanticism became popular in American politics, philosophy and art. The movement appealed to the revolutionary spirit of America as well as to those longing to break free of the strict religious traditions of early settlement. The Romantics rejected rationalism and religious intellect. It appealed to those in opposition of Calvinism, which includes the belief that the destiny of each individual is preordained. The Romantic movement gave rise to New England Transcendentalism which portrayed a less restrictive relationship between God and Universe. The new religion presented the individual with a more personal relationship with God. Transcendentalism and Romanticism appealed to Americans in a similar fashion, for both privileged feeling over reason, individual freedom of expression over the restraints of tradition and custom. It often involved a rapturous response to nature. It encouraged the rejection of harsh, rigid Calvinism, and promised a new blossoming of American culture.

American Romanticism embraced the individual and rebelled against the confinement of neoclassicism and religious tradition. The Romantic movement in America created a new literary genre that continues to influence American writers. Novels, short stories, and poems replaced the sermons and manifestos of yore. Romantic literature was personal, intense, and portrayed more emotion than ever seen in neoclassical literature. America's preoccupation with freedom became a great source of motivation for Romantic writers as many were delighted in free expression and emotion without so much fear of ridicule and controversy. They also put more effort into the psychological development of their characters, and the main characters typically displayed extremes of sensitivity and excitement.

Influence of war on Romantic writings

The Romantic Era is a time in history that was surrounded by war. The Seven Years' War (1756–1763), the French and Indian War (1754–1763), and the American Revolution (1775–1783)—which directly preceded the French Revolution (1789–1799)—are all examples.

These wars, along with the political and social turmoil that went along with them, served as the background for Romanticism. The strong feelings that wartime produces served as a catalyst for an outpouring of art and literature, the likes of which had never been seen before. The writing was so different in fact, that it sparked its own new "era": The Romantic Era

The works of the Romantic Era are a vast and unique collection of literary works. However, they can all be said to have at least these characteristics: A love of nature, a sense of nationalism, and a sense of exoticism/the supernatural. These simple characteristics can be linked back to the fact that these works were being written in time of political turmoil. For example, the nationalism seen in Romantic works may be attributed to the fact that the authors of the time took pride in their country, their people, and their “cause”. It was the writers’ way of contributing to the fight.

The works of the Romantic Era also differed from preceding works in that they spoke to the “common” people. Romantics strove towards literature and arts that were for everyone, not just wealthy aristocracy. Much of the writing predating the Romantic Era was written for, and in the style of, only the wealthy upper classes. Romantics had a hand in changing this around—and it may have been because they were trying to connect with the commoners. In a time of war and political uneasiness, the writers were reaching out for a connection with their equals, not to those above them, the ones fueling the wars.

During the Romantic period there was an increase in female authors as well. This can be attributed to the fact that this period was submerged in wartime. The women were at home, without a way to express their feelings, fight for the cause, or even connect to those around them. The writings of female Romantic writers, such as Mary Favret, are infused with feeling, and sometime even reference the war itself, e.g. Favret's War in the Air.

Romantic visual arts

See also: German Romanticism, Victorian architecture, and Gothic Revival architecture

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  Francisco Goya, The Third of May 1808, 1814
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  Théodore Géricault, The Raft of the Medusa, 1819
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  Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People 1830
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  J.M.W. Turner, The Fighting Téméraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up, 1839

Théodore Chassériau, Othello and Desdemona in Venice, 1850, oil on wood, 25 x 20 cm, in the Louvre, Paris, (inspired by Shakespeare). Chassériau was an influence on the Symbolists.

In European painting, led by a new generation of the French school, the Romantic sensibility contrasted with the neoclassicism being taught in the academies. In a revived clash between color and design, the expressiveness and mood of color, as in works of J.M.W. Turner, Francisco Goya, Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix, emphasized in the new prominence of the brushstroke and impasto the artist's free handling of paint, which tended to be repressed in neoclassicism under a self-effacing finish.

As in England with J.M.W. Turner and Samuel Palmer, Russia with Orest Kiprensky, Ivan Aivazovsky and Vasily Tropinin, Germany with Caspar David Friedrich, Norway with J.C. Dahl and Hans Gude, Spain with Francisco Goya, and France with Théodore Géricault, Eugène Delacroix, Théodore Chassériau, and others; literary Romanticism had its counterpart in the American visual arts, most especially in the exaltation of an untamed American landscape found in the paintings of the Hudson River School. Painters like Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church and others often expressed Romantic themes in their paintings. They sometimes depicted ancient ruins of the old world, such as in Fredric Edwin Church’s piece Sunrise in Syria. These works reflected the Gothic feelings of death and decay. They also show the Romantic ideal that Nature is powerful and will eventually overcome the transient creations of men. More often, they worked to distinguish themselves from their European counterparts by depicting uniquely American scenes and landscapes. This idea of an American identity in the art world is reflected in W. C. Bryant’s poem, To Cole, the Painter, Departing for Europe, where Bryant encourages Cole to remember the powerful scenes that can only be found in America. This poem also shows the tight connection that existed between the literary and visual artists of the Romantic Era.

Some American paintings promote the literary idea of the “noble savage” (Such as Albert Bierstadt’s The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak) by portraying idealized Native Americans living in harmony with the natural world.

Thomas Cole's paintings feature strong narratives as in The Voyage of Life series painted in the early 1840s that depict man trying to survive amidst an awesome and immense nature, from the cradle to the grave (see below).

Voyage of Life

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  Thomas Cole, 1842, The Voyage of Life
  Childhood
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  Thomas Cole, 1842, The Voyage of Life
  Youth
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  Thomas Cole, 1842, The Voyage of Life
  Manhood
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  Thomas Cole, 1842, The Voyage of Life
  Old Age

Theology

To insulate theology from reductionism in science, 19th century post-Enlightenment German theologians moved in a new direction, led by Friedrich Schleiermacher and Albrecht Ritschl. They took the Romantic approach of rooting religion in the inner world of the human spirit, so that it is a person's feeling or sensibility about spiritual matters that comprises religion.

Romantic nationalism

Main article: Romantic nationalism

Akseli Gallen-Kallela, The Forging of the Sampo, 1893. An artist from Finland deriving inspiration from the compilation the Kalevala.

Egide Charles Gustave Wappers, Episode of the Belgian Revolution of 1830, 1834, Musée d'Art Ancien, Brussels a romantic vision by a Belgian painter

Hans Gude, Fra Hardanger, 1847. Example of Norwegian romantic nationalism.

One of Romanticism's key ideas and most enduring legacies is the assertion of nationalism, which became a central theme of Romantic art and political philosophy. From the earliest parts of the movement, with their focus on development of national languages and folklore, and the importance of local customs and traditions, to the movements which would redraw the map of Europe and lead to calls for self-determination of nationalities, nationalism was one of the key vehicles of Romanticism, its role, expression and meaning.

Early Romantic nationalism was strongly inspired by Rousseau, and by the ideas of Johann Gottfried von Herder, who in 1784 argued that the geography formed the natural economy of a people, and shaped their customs and society.

The nature of nationalism changed dramatically, however, after the French Revolution with the rise of Napoleon, and the reactions in other nations. Napoleonic nationalism and republicanism were, at first, inspirational to movements in other nations: self-determination and a consciousness of national unity were held to be two of the reasons why France was able to defeat other countries in battle. But as the French Republic became Napoleon's Empire, Napoleon became not the inspiration for nationalism, but the object of its struggle. In Prussia, the development of spiritual renewal as a means to engage in the struggle against Napoleon was argued by, among others, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a disciple of Kant. The word Volkstum, or nationality, was coined in German as part of this resistance to the now conquering emperor. Fichte expressed the unity of language and nation in his address "To the German Nation" in 1806:

Those who speak the same language are joined to each other by a multitude of invisible bonds by nature herself, long before any human art begins; they understand each other and have the power of continuing to make themselves understood more and more clearly; they belong together and are by nature one and an inseparable whole. ...Only when each people, left to itself, develops and forms itself in accordance with its own peculiar quality, and only when in every people each individual develops himself in accordance with that common quality, as well as in accordance with his own peculiar quality—then, and then only, does the manifestation of divinity appear in its true mirror as it ought to be.

This view of nationalism inspired the collection of folklore by such people as the Brothers Grimm, the revival of old epics as national, and the construction of new epics as if they were old, as in the Kalevala, compiled from Finnish tales and folklore, or Ossian, where the claimed ancient roots were invented. The view that fairy tales, unless contaminated from outside literary sources, were preserved in the same form over thousands of years, was not exclusive to Romantic Nationalists, but fit in well with their views that such tales expressed the primordial nature of a people. For instance, the Brothers Grimm rejected many tales they collected because of their similarity to tales by Charles Perrault, which they thought proved they were not truly German tales; Sleeping Beauty survived in their collection because the tale of Brynhildr convinced them that the figure of the sleeping princess was authentically German.

Romanticism played an essential role in the national awakening of many Central European peoples lacking their own national states, not least in Poland, which had recently lost its independence when Russia's army crushed the Polish Uprising under Nicholas I. Revival and reinterpretation of ancient myths, customs and traditions by Romantic poets and painters helped to distinguish their indigenous cultures from those of the dominant nations and crystallise the mythography of Romantic nationalism. Patriotism, nationalism, revolution and armed struggle for independence also became popular themes in the arts of this period. Arguably, the most distinguished Romantic poet of this part of Europe was Adam Mickiewicz, who developed an idea that Poland was the Messiah of Nations, predestined to suffer just as Jesus had suffered to save all the people.

Gallery

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  Joseph Vernet, 1759, Shipwreck , Groeninge Museum, Bruges
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  Joseph Wright, 1774, Cave at evening, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts
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  Henry Fuseli, 1781, The Nightmare, Detroit Institute of Arts
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  Philip James de Loutherbourg, Coalbrookdale by Night, 1801, Science Museum, London
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  Joseph Anton Koch, Waterfalls at Subiaco 1812–1813, National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, Oslo
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  James Ward, 1814–1815, Gordale Scar
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  John Constable, 1821, The Hay Wain
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  J. C. Dahl, 1826, Outbreak of the Vesuvius, Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt am Main
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  William Blake, c. 1824–27, The Wood of the Self-Murderers: The Harpies and the Suicides, Tate
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  Isaac Levitan, Pacific, 1898, State Russian Museum, St.Petersburg
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  J. M. W. Turner, The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons (1835), Philadelphia Museum of Art
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  Hans Gude, Winter Afternoon, 1847, National Gallery of Norway, Oslo
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  Ivan Aivazovsky, 1850, "The Ninth Wave", State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
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  John Martin, 1852, The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Laing Art Gallery
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  Frederic Edwin Church, 1860, Twilight in the Wilderness, Cleveland Museum of Art
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  Albert Bierstadt, 1863, The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak
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  Ivan Shishkin, 1891, The Forest of Countess Mordvinova, The Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow
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  Samuel Palmer, c.1864, A Dream in the Apennine Tate Britain
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  Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, c. 1867, Ville d’Avray National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.
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  John William Waterhouse, 1888, The Lady of Shalott, Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

Romantic authors

• Joanna Baillie
• Anna Barbauld
• William Blake
• Robert Burns
• Brontë family
• Lord Byron
• Thomas Carlyle
• François-René de Chateaubriand
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• Maria Edgeworth
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• José de Espronceda
• William Godwin
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• William Hazlitt
• Heinrich Heine
• Victor Hugo
• Leigh Hunt
• Elizabeth Inchbald
• Washington Irving
• John Keats
• James Kenney
• Charles Lamb
• Mikhail Lermontov
• Adam Mickiewicz
• Hannah More
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Alexander Pushkin
• Mary Robinson (poet)
• Friedrich Schleiermacher
• Walter Scott
• Mary Shelley
• Percy Shelley
• Stendhal
• Henry David Thoreau
• Mary Wollstonecraft
• William Wordsworth
• Ann Yearsley

Romantic scholars

• M. H. Abrams
• Donald Ault
• Harold Bloom
• James Chandler
• Jeffrey N. Cox
• Northrop Frye
• Peter Kitson
• Jerome McGann
• Anne K. Mellor
• René Wellek
• Susan J. Wolfson

Romantic societies

• British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS)
• International Conference on Romanticism (ICR)
• NASSR

See also

Related terms

• Bohemianism
• Expressionism
• Humboldtian
• Nationalism
• Sentimentalism
• Surrealism
• Symbolism
• Transcendentalism

Opposing terms

• Classicism
• Positivism
• Rationalism
• Realism
• The Academy
• The Enlightenment
• Utilitarianism

Related subjects

• Dark Romanticism
• Folklore
• Gothic fiction
• List of romantics
• Mal du siècle
• Middle Ages in history
• Neo-romanticism
• Post-romanticism
• Romantic hero
• Romantic realism
• Romanticism in science
• Ultra-Romanticism

Related movements

• Düsseldorf School
• German Romanticism
• Hellenism (neoclassicism)
• Hudson River School
• List of Hudson River School artists
• Nazarene movement
• Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
• Sturm und Drang
• Norwegian romantic nationalism
• Vegetarianism and Romanticism

References

• Eco, Umberto (1990) Interpreting Serials in The limits of interpretation, pp. 83–100, excerpt
• Friedlaender, Walter, David to Delacroix, (Originally published in German; reprinted 1980) 1952.
• Gregory, Elizabeth (1997) Quotation and Modern American Poetry: Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads
• Joachimides, Christos M. and Rosenthal, Norman and Anfam, David and Adams, Brooks (1993) American art in the 20th century: painting and sculpture 1913-1993
• Macfarlane, Robert (2007) `Romantic' Originality, in Original copy: plagiarism and originality in nineteenth-century literature, March 2007, pp. 18–50(33)
• Reidhead et al., Norton Anthology of English Literature, The Romantic Period – Volume D (W.W. Norton & Company Ltd.) 2006
• Ruthven, K. K. (2001) Faking Literature
• Smith, Logan Pearsall (1924) Four words: romantic, originality, creative, genius, Oxford, Clarendon Press
• Spearing, A. C. (1987) Introduction section to Chaucer's The Franklin's Prologue and Tale
• Spearing, A. C. (1989) Readings in medieval poetry
• Steiner, George (1998) After Babel, ch.6 Topologies of culture, 3rd revised edition
• Waterhouse, Francis A. (1926) Romantic 'Originality' in The Sewanee Review, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Jan., 1926), pp. 40–49

Further reading

• Abrams, Meyer H. (1971). The Mirror and the Lamp. London: O. U. P. ISBN 0195014715.
• Abrams, M.H., Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: W.W. Norton, 1973).
• Berlin, Isaiah (1999). The Roots of Romanticism. London: Chatto & Windus. ISBN 0691086621.
• Blanning, Tim. The Romantic Revolution: A History (2011) 272pp
• Breckman, Warren, European Romanticism: A Brief History with Documents. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2007. "European Romanticism: A Brief History with Documents". Amazon.com. Retrieved 2010-08-24.
• Marcel, Brion (1966). Art of the Romantic Era. Henry Holt & Company, Inc. ISBN 0275420906.
• Ciofalo, John J. "The Ascent of Genius in the Court and Academy." The Self-Portraits of Francisco Goya. Cambridge University Press, 2001.
• Fay,Elizabeth, Romantic Medievalism. History and the Romantic Literary Ideal. Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002.
• Gillespie, Gerald / Manfred Engel / Bernard Dieterle (eds.), Romantic Prose Fiction (= A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages, Bd. XXIII; ed. by the International Comparative Literature Association). Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins 2008, pp. 263–295. ISBN 978-9027234568.
• Gossman, Lionel. “Making of a Romantic Icon: The Religious Context of Friedrich Overbeck’s ‘Italia und Germania.’” American Philosophical Society, 2007. ISBN 0871699753. Steve (2010-06-30). "Lionel Gossman's Making of a Romantic Icon: The Religious Context of Friedrich Overbeck's "Italia und Germania" (American Philosophical Society Transaction 97-5; ISBN 0871699753) « Diane Publishing's Blog". Dianepub.wordpress.com. Retrieved 2010-08-24.
• Grewe, Cordula, Painting the Sacred in the Age of German Romanticism. Burlington: Ashgate, 2009. "Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism". Amazon.com. Retrieved 2010-08-24.
• Holmes, Richard. The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science (2009) ISBN 978-1-4000-3187-0
• Honour, Hugh, Romanticism, (Westview Press) 1979.
• Lim, Cwisfa, Romanticism – The dawn of a new era, 2002. (reprinted 2006)
• Masson, Scott, 'Romanticism', Ch.7 in The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology, (Oxford University Press) 2007.
• Murray, Christopher, ed. Encyclopedia of the romantic era, 1760–1850 (2 vol 2004); 850 articles by experts; 1600pp
• Novotny, Fritz, Painting and Sculpture in Europe, 1780–1880, 1971. (2nd edition 1980)
• McCalman, Iain, ed. An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age (2009) online at Oxford Reference Online
• Rosenblum, Robert, Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko, (Harper & Row) 1975.
• Schenk, H.G., The Mind of the European Romantics: An Essay in Cultural History, (Constable) 1966.
• Tekiner, Deniz, Modern Art and the Romantic Vision, (University Press of America) 2000.
• Workman, Leslie J., "Medievalism and Romanticism," Poetica 39–40 (1994): 1–34.

External links

• The Romantic Poets
• Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Romanticism
• Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Romanticism in Political Thought
• Romantic Circles Electronic editions, histories, and scholarly articles related to the Romantic era