Literature - Romanticism

Romanticism: Characteristics and Development in Literature

• Romanticism was an intellectual and artistic movement in Western civilization from the late 18th to the mid-19th century.
• It rejected the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality of Classicism and Neoclassicism.
• Romanticism emphasized the individual, subjective, irrational, imaginative, personal, emotional, visionary, and transcendental.
• It was a reaction against the Enlightenment and against 18th-century rationalism and physical materialism in general.
• Romanticism had a deepened appreciation of the beauties of nature and a general exaltation of emotion over reason and of the senses over intellect.
• It was preoccupied with the genius, the hero, and the exceptional figure in general and focused on his or her passions and inner struggles.
• Romanticism saw the artist as a supremely individual creator, whose creative spirit is more important than strict adherence to formal rules and traditional procedures.
• Imagination was seen as a gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual truth.
• Romanticism had an obsessive interest in folk culture, national and ethnic cultural origins, and the medieval era.
• Romanticism in English literature began with the publication of the Lyrical Ballads of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the 1790s.
• The second phase of Romanticism, comprising the period from about 1805 to the 1830s, was marked by a quickening of cultural nationalism and a new attention to national origins.
• The second phase of Romanticism in Germany was dominated by Achim von Arnim, Clemens Brentano, Joseph von Görres, and Joseph von Eichendorff.