19th Century Romanticism Art American Realism Art 19th Century
Definition of Romanticism
Romanticism (besides the Romantic era or the Romantic period) is an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the terminate of the 18th century and was at its peak in the guess menstruum from 1800 to 1850.
Romanticism is characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism also as glorification of all the by and nature, preferring the medieval rather than the classical. It is a reaction to the ideas of the Industrial Revolution, the aloof social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment, and the scientific rationalization of nature.
The meaning of romanticism has changed with time. In the 17th century, "romantic" meant imaginative or fictitious due to the birth of a new literary genre : the novel. Novels, that is to say texts of fiction, were written in vernacular (romance languages), as opposed to religious texts written in Latin.
In the 18th century, romanticism is eclipsed past the Age of Enlightenment, where everything is perceived through the prism of science and reason.
In the 19th century, "romantic" ways sentimental : lyricism and the expression of personal emotions are emphasized. Feelings and sentiments are very much nowadays in romantic works.
Thus, so many things are called romantic that it is difficult to run across the common points betwixt the novels past Victor Hugo, the paintings by Eugène Delacroix or the music by Ludwig Von Beethoven.
The romantic international
Romanticism is not express to one state, it was an international vision of the earth.
The romantic international started in Germany at the end of the 18th century with "Storm and Stress". The ii most famous poets are Goethe and Schiller and many philosophers such as Fichte, Schlegel, Schelling and Herder.
Romanticism was then adopted in England. Poets are divided in ii generations :
- first generation : William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
- 2d generation : George Byron, Percy Shelley, John Keats.
Romanticism reached France at the beginning of the 19th century with François-René de Chateaubriand – Atala (1801), René (1802), Le Génie du Christianisme (1802) – and Germaine de Staël : De l'Allemagne (1813).
Romanticism was a renewal, a revolution is artistic forms in paintings, literature and theatre. In Germany and Russia, romanticism created the national literature. It influenced the whole vision of fine art.
It was besides the origin of gimmicky ideas : modernistic individualism, the vision of nature, the vision of the work of art as an isolated object.
Political dimension : the birth of Romanticism
Romanticism represents a interruption with the universalistic outlook of the Enlightenment. Reason is something universal and the Enlightenment constitute its models in classical France and Rome : all men are the same because there are all reasonable. Romanticism if a fragmentation of consciousness, with no universalistic ideas left.
The French Revolution was characterized past universalistic ideas such as all men are created equal. It corresponds to the philosophy of the Enlightenment. The nation is born out of a social contract : it means that y'all are free to choose to belong to one nation or another.
It is different in Federal republic of germany where you lot don't choose your country, that is where you lot were born (organic nation).
There'southward a difference between the first and second generation of poets. British poets were rather progressive and close to dissenters.
The French Revolution was full of hope of equality merely it quickly changed when in 1793, information technology gave way to the Terror and the beheading of the King.
The beginning generation of British romantic poets
Only William Blake remained a radical, dissimilar Wordsworth and Coleridge. There was an incredible pressure in England at the time. The Prime Minister, Pitts, suspended the Habeas Corpus and adopted the Sedition Act, which was meant to preclude the liberty of press. Information technology turned away the first generation from their ideals.
Blake wrote a visionary, imaginary poetry, really difficult to understand. Wordsworth and Coleridge were reactionary to the French Revolution.
Wordsworth turned away from the excesses of the revolution and wrote a simple poetry in a democratic style.
Coleridge was inspired by the Middle Ages and German thought and was a reactionary Christian nationalist.
The 2nd generation of British romantic poets
The second generation remains more radical simply the political climate was and then oppressive that the radicals left England or made more indirect political comments.
The Mask of Chaos by Shelley was inspired past the Peterloo Massacre of 1819. In Prometheus Unbound, a man fights against political and religious oppression.
Romanticism was connected with politics of the fourth dimension. Romantic poets could be either conservative or progressive, depending on their vision of the world.
Main romantic themes
From society to nature
There is an intellectual shift from society to nature. During the Enlightenment, thinkers had a metropolitan consciousness: the intellectual life took place in cities – London and Edinburgh were highly-regarded cultural centres.
The Enclosure Movement
Nature was thought as humanized, transformed by human with agronomics. The Enclosure Motility was a push button in the 18th and 19th centuries to have land that had formerly been owned in mutual past all members of a village, or at least bachelor to the public for grazing animals and growing nutrient, and change information technology to privately owned land, normally with walls, fences or hedges around it.
The virtually well-known Enclosure Movements were in the British Isles, merely the practice had its roots in holland and occurred to some degree throughout Northern Europe and elsewhere equally industrialization spread.
Some small number of enclosures had been going on since the 12th century, especially in the north and westward of England, only information technology became much more common in the 1700'southward, and in the adjacent century Parliament passed the General Enclosure Act of 1801 and the Enclosure Act of 1845, making enclosures of sure lands possible throughout England, Wales, Scotland, and Republic of ireland.
The English language government and aristocracy started enclosing country challenge it would allow for better raising of crops and animals (particularly sheep for their wool).
They claimed that large fields could be farmed more than efficiently than individual plots allotted from mutual land — and the profit could be kept by the aristocrats who now owned the legally confiscated country. Some claim this was the beginning of commercial farming.
Poor people had no way of subsistence apart from working for the country owners. It brought most more poverty and poor people drifted from the countryside to the cities, where the Industrial Revolution had begun, based on the steam engine and the creation of factories where poor people were employed in bad working conditions, pollution, criminality and abuse.
The paradox was that more and more people moved into the cities when they all had terrible living conditions.
An idealization of nature
Nature became idealized equally life in the country was more virtuous. Romantic poets did not talk about cities (but realists did). Nature was a source of poetic inspiration and gave a spiritual dimension to life, based on the organic connection between human and nature in traditional rural guild, which was dying fast because of the Industrial Revolution (opposition betwixt the organic/natural and the mechanical engineering).
There was a regeneration of human being life destroyed by cities, an idealized vision of nature : they were looking for a renewed humanity.
after a Thunderstorm (1836)
Wordsworth and Coleridge left the city for the Lake District. In America, transcendentalists such as Emerson or Thoreau did the aforementioned. Thoreau went out in the wilderness to Walden Swimming to write Walden in 1854.
They discovered the American identity : the culture was European. In that location is a kind of individualism that refuses every kind of moral convention (who you actually are) and pantheism (belief that Nature is divine and has a soul).
The expression of personal feelings, energy and passion
Nature was not only peaceful and meditative merely also stormy, tempestuous and too large for man (sublime).
In Shelley'due south Ode to the West Wind, the poet starts by identifying himself with the current of air : he wants to have the same power and the same freedom. Every bit such, information technology tin be considered a political poem. The "west wind" is the current of air from America, from the Revolution.
The romantic world is a dynamic earth of change. When there is dazzler, it'southward ever ephemeral. What creates the changes are the elemental forces (storm, power, etc).
Energy can come from homo beings besides. Romanticism is the emphasis of feelings, passions and intuitions. It differs from the 18th century, which was based on reason and reflection.
Reason is universal, everyone uses the same logic : it is not personal. On the other paw, feelings, passion and intuition are what brand people dissimilar from each other; it is very individualistic and selfish.
Passion is one of the dynamic elements of romanticism, it'due south a factor of alter for the individual and a factor of historical modify as Hegel once said "nothing keen was achieved in history without passion".
Passion is also extremely irresolute : nothing is closer to dear than hate. Information technology alternates between exaltation and melancholy, between nostalgia and optimism.
I am certain of naught but of the holiness of the heart's affections and the truth of imagination.
John Keats
The romantic vision of love is all-time because intense when impossible : destiny, decease, social differences – as in Romeo and Juliet.
Keats' Isabella or the Pot of Basil happens in the Centre Ages in Italia. The lover is killed past Isabella's brothers. She digs his grave, cuts his caput and hides it in a pot of basil with a flower in it. As she cries everyday, it turns to a beautiful blossom. It is Bocaccio's story and Stendhal'due south Le Rouge et le Noir : a connectedness between love (Eros) and death (Thanatos).
According to Nietsche, passion is "beyond good and evil", it does not care nearly morality.
A dualistic world
Contrasts, dichotomies can be seen on all levels betwixt reason and emotion, beautiful and sublime, reality and imagination.
Dialectics are the dynamic principle behind everything and could be seen as a rational monism (the antonym of "pluralism") with the religious revival and the visionary style. Due east.thousand : Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë, Anne Grey by Anne Brontë.
Wuthering Heights takes place in Yorkshire moors. Catherine Earnshaw hesitates between Heathcliff and Edgar Linton. She chooses Edgar only Heathcliff comes back rich. At that place is a disharmonize between what men correspond and what places represent. It'due south the conflict of "the children of calm, the children of the storm".
The dualism is a catholic affair between calm and quietness, storm and passion. It's the idea of homo duplex : man is double in a "double simultaneous postulation".
A rediscovery of history and exoticism
There is a rediscovery of history and exoticism through local colour : few details to show you are not at home (for instance, if you write nearly Asia, add some geishas in kimonos).
With romanticism, there is an outburst of cultural nationalism : German language romanticism was a flowering of vernacular literatures. The vernacular is the language spoken by the people; it'due south different from the language spoken by the cultural elite (French, Latin). It was good enough to produce good literature. In that location was also a going back to folklore, legends, and fairy tales.
Wordsworth and Coleridge both wrote lyrical ballads in 1798. In The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, Coleridge worked on the supernatural and tells the story of a mariner who killed an albatross, which is a very bad omen for mariners : they are all doomed.
In The Idiot Boy, Wordsworth dealt with the ordinary life and tells the story of a woman who needs medicine for her child. She sends the idiot male child. His aim was to represent the essential passions of human nature, to employ simple language, "the select of a language, really used past men". He abandoned the artificiality of poetic diction and the political dimension criticized by many people.
Wordsworth also wrote "chat poems" such every bit Frost as midnight: bare verse monologues addressing the listener every bit in a conversation. The listener is in fact the reader.
Regional poesy is another fashion to utilize the vernacular : vernacular in Scotland is different from the colloquial in South England. Come across Walter Scott and Robert Burns.
Walter Scott invented the historical novel with Waverley (1814) and Ivanhoe (1819). He gave a sense of history with accurate details and characters' destinies influenced by historical faces. The plot tells a clash of values, of choices fabricated in a crucial moment by a young and romantic man, through the idealized epitome of a united nation. Scott tried to prove reconciliation between idealism and reality.
In the USA, James Fenimore Cooper's The Final of the Mohicans (1826) tells about the conflict between France and Britain in the American colonies. The image of the Native American is that of a noble barbarous, yet a "vanishing Indian" because of the progress of the American civilisation.
Aesthetic dimension
Run across Todorov's Théories du Symbole (1977). Romanticism emphasizes imagination (as opposed to the 18th century).
Before, art was imitation and mimesis (cf. Aristotle). There was a process of selection of things that were worth representing and a correction of nature co-ordinate to the image of beauty you had in mind (harmony in parts and whole).
On the other hand, with romanticism, fine art is creation; it'south an autonomous whole. It does not imitate nature but recreates information technology. It is non a mirror merely a different reality. This parallel world is based on the necessary artistic relations between the different organic parts.
Thus, it is useless, there is no purpose except of recreating reality. It is gratuitous, democratic, unlike before when it was made to instruct and entertain with a moral quality. There is no morality in art for the romantics.
Like nature, a piece of work of art is an organic totality in form and meaning. The kinesthesia it creates is imagination. Coleridge defined fancy and imagination in The Biographia Literaria, 1 of his main critical studies.
Imagination is an artistic and secondary imagination. Information technology'due south the principle of unity in a work of art and assimilates into a unifying vision. Primary imagination is the basis of perception and God-similar quality:
The IMAGINATION so, I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Ability and prime number Agent of all human being Perception, and equally a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal human activity of cosmos in the infinite I AM. The secondary Imagination I consider as an repeat of the former, co-existing with the conscious volition, yet notwithstanding as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in caste, and in the way of performance. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in lodge to recreate; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealise and unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.
Fancy is associational logic, you lot practise not create but associate ideas :
FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with, only fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Retention emancipated from the social club of time and space; while it is blended with, and modified by that empirical phenomenon of the volition, which we express by the word CHOICE. Only equally with the ordinary memory the Fancy must receive all its materials ready made from the constabulary of association.
In Coleridge'southward Kubla Khan (1816), there's a contrast between microcosm and macrocosm : the union of contraries makes a constructed whole thanks to symbols, polysemy and allegories.
In Herman Melville'southward Moby Dick (1851), the white whale is an albinos and there is an opposition between nature and man (helm Ahab) showing the irreducible forces of nature.
The image of the artist tin take several forms. He can exist like a God, a creator but it comes with strings attached such as the trouble of transgression or curse.
If yous are like a God, you're likely to become punished for your hubris or your disobedience to the cosmic laws, just like Prometheus. The artist can also prefer the prototype of the "poète maudit".
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