Humboldtian science
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual avant-garde movement that originated in 18th century Western Europe. In part a revolt against aristocratic, social, and political norms of the Enlightenment period (see counter-enlightenment) and a reaction against the rationalization of nature, in art and literature it stressed strong emotion as a source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror, and the awe experienced in confronting the sublimity of nature. It elevated folk art, nature and custom, as well as arguing for an epistemology based on nature, which included human activity conditioned by nature in the form of language, custom and usage. It was influenced by ideas of the Enlightenment and elevated medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived to be from the medieval period. The name "romantic" itself comes from the term "romance" which is a prose or poetic heroic narrative originating in medieval literature and romantic literature.
The ideologies and events of the French Revolution are thought to have influenced the movement. Romanticism elevated the achievements of what it perceived as misunderstood heroic individuals and artists that altered 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 in the representation of its ideas.
Key writers of the darker strains of Romanticism include E. T. A. Hoffmann in Germany, Lord Byron in England, Edgar Allan Poe in the United States and Charles Baudelaire in France.
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Characteristics
In a general sense, Romanticism refers to several groups of artists, poets, writers, and musicians as well as political, philosophical and social thinkers and trends of the late 18th and early 19th centuries in Europe. But a precise characterization and a specific description of Romanticism have been objects of intellectual history and literary history for all of the twentieth century without any great measure of consensus emerging. Arthur Lovejoy attempted to demonstrate the difficulty of this problem in his seminal article "On The Discrimination of Romanticisms" in his Essays in the History of Ideas (1948); some scholars see romanticism as completely continuous with the present, some see it as the inaugural moment of modernity, some see it as the beginning of a tradition of resistance to the Enlightenment, and still others date it firmly in the direct aftermath of the French Revolution. Another definition comes from Charles Baudelaire: "Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in a way of feeling."
Many intellectual historians have seen Romanticism as a key moment in the Counter-Enlightenment, a reaction against the Age of Enlightenment. Whereas the thinkers of the Enlightenment emphasized the primacy of deductive reason, Romanticism emphasized intuition, imagination, and feeling, to a point that has led to some Romantic thinkers being accused of irrationalism.
See also
- Dark romanticism
- American Romanticism
- French Romanticism
- German Romanticism
- Romantic hero
- Romantic poetry
- Romantic nationalism
- Romantic realism
- Romantic period in music
- Romanticism in science
- Neo-romanticism
- List of romantics
- Folklore
- Middle Ages in history - Romanticism and images of the Middle Ages
- War of the Romantics
Terms sometimes taken as related
Terms sometimes taken as opposed
Movements associated with Romanticism
- Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
- Sturm und Drang
- Hudson River School
- Düsseldorf School
- Hellenism (neoclassicism)
Scholars associated with Romanticism
