Romanticism

1. Romanticism Jade, Daisy and Sarah

2. Origins: • Not only did the nature of Romanticism manifest itself quite differently in countries such as Germany, England and France, but it was expressed in diverse forms even within the work of individual painters of the period. Attitudes of life and art also fluctuated and varied from artist to artist. Writers such as Victor Hugo (who was in his own time labelled Romanticist) disassociated himself from the term. • In England, artists like Joseph Addison and Richard Steele examined archaic ballads as if they were high poetry. And so, these artists singled themselves out and set a fundamental principle for Romanticism; they believed that ideas of an unorthodox imagination was equal to or better than the ideas of educated court poets and composers who captured the attentions scholars and connoisseurs. • The Gothic romance origins: • Another quite distinct contribution to the Romantic movement was the Gothic romance. The first was Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto (1765),set in a haunted castle and containing various mysteries. Rejecting the Enlightenment ideal of balance and rationalism, readers eagerly sought out the hysterical, mystical, passionate adventures of terrified heroes and heroines in the clutches of frightening, mysterious forces. The modern horror novel and woman's romance are both descendants of the Gothic Romance, as shown through Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre and her sister Emily's Wuthering Heights. Another classic Gothic work, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, is often cited as a forerunner of modern science fiction. • 18th – 20th century AD • Romanticism went through virtually every country of Europe, the United States, and Latin America that lasted from about 1750 to 1870. However, the Romantic Movement did not reach France until the1820's. Changes in society, beginning in the 18th century and continuing into our own time, underlie the romantic movement. It starts as a reaction against the intellectualism of the Enlightenment, against the rigidity of social structures protecting privilege, and against the materialism of an age which, in the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, already showed signs of making workers the slaves of machinery and of creating squalid urban environments. It praised imagination over reason, emotions over logic, and intuition over science-making way for a vast body of literature of great sensibility and passion.

3. Historical Context • Romantic ideas arose both as implicit and explicit criticisms of 18th century Enlightenment which they felt was fraught with oversimplifications. • For the most part, these ideas were generated by a sense of inadequacy with the dominant ideals of the Enlightenment and of the society that produced them. They did not agree with the heartlessness of bourgeois liberalism as well as the nature of urban industrial society and revolted against aristocratic social and political norms and a reacted against the scientific rationalism of nature. • The Romantics attacked the Enlightenment because it blocked the free play of the emotions and creativity. They defined it as something to which they were clearly opposed. • Romantics yearned to reclaim human freedom. Habits, values, rules and standards imposed by a civilization grounded in reason and reason only had to be abandoned. "Man is born free and everywhere he is in chains," Rousseau had written. • The Romantics were similar to Renaissance humanists in that they both failed to perceive the meaning and importance of the cultural period which had preceded their own. • They rejected the idea of a science based on physics -- physics was inadequate to describe the reality of experience. This is shown through the Romantic ; John Keats, who said; "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know." Suggesting that one does not need to know Science, but only needs to know pleasure. • the age revived the unseen world, the supernatural, the mysterious, the world of medieval man. It is no accident that the first gothic novel appears early in the Romantic Age.

4. History:The Romantic Movement: • The Romantic movement in literature began around the end of the 18th century in Western Europe and flourished in the first half of the 19th century. It was in part a rebellion against the Enlightenment of the previous century and its focus on scientific and rational thought. Romantic literature is characterized by an emphasis on emotion, passion, and the natural world. Nationalism was an important factor in the Romantic movement, and many authors turned to folk tales and native mythologies as source material. A return to the aesthetics and ethos of the medieval period also featured strongly in the Romantic sensibility.

5. Emotions and Poetry: • Romanticism emphasis on the activity of the imagination and the importance of intuition, instincts, and feelings, and Romantics generally called for greater attention to the emotions as a necessary supplement to purely logical reason. • Wordsworth's definition of all good poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" marks a turning point in literary history. By locating the ultimate source of poetry in the individual artist, the tradition, stretching back to the ancients, of valuing art primarily for its ability to imitate human life was reversed. • In Romantic theory, art was valuable not so much as a mirror of the external world, but as a source of illumination of the world within. Among other things, this led to a prominence for first-person lyric poetry never accorded it in any previous period. The "poetic speaker" became less a persona and more the direct person of the poet.

6. Social: • Romantics were ambivalent toward the "real" social world around them. They were often politically and socially involved, but at the same time they began to distance themselves from the public. • Romantic artists interpreted things through their own emotions, and these emotions included social and political consciousness. • Their ideas reacted so strongly to oppression and injustice in the world. So artists sometimes took public stands, or wrote works with socially or politically oriented subject matter. Yet at the same time, another trend began to emerge, as they withdrew more and more from what they saw as the confining boundaries of bourgeois life. In their private lives, they often asserted their individuality and differences in ways that were to the middle class a subject of intense interest, but also sometimes of horror.

7. Culture:Art: • Beginning with the late -18th to the mid -19th century, new Romantic attitude begun to characterize culture and many art works in Western civilization. It started as an artistic and intellectual movement that emphasized a revulsion against established values (social order and religion). Romanticism exalted individualism, subjectivism, irrationalism, imagination, emotions and nature - emotion over reason and senses over intellect. Since they were in revolt against the orders, they favoured the revival of potentially unlimited number of styles (anything that aroused them.) • Romantic artists were fascinated by the nature, the genius, their passions and inner struggles, their moods, mental potentials, the heroes. They investigated human nature and personality, the folk culture, the national and ethnic origins, the medieval era, the exotic, the remote, the mysterious, the occult, the diseased, and even satanic. Romantic artist had a role of an ultimate egoistic creator, with the spirit above strict formal rules and traditional procedures. The imagination as a gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual truth. • While this view partly explains Romantic fascination with the Middle Ages, the actual causes of the Romantic movement itself correspond to the sense of rapid, dynamic social change that culminated in the French Revolution and the Napoleonic era.

8. Music: • In music, the period from about 1810 to around 1910 – that is, after the classical period. Classical composers had tried to create a balance between expression and formal structure; Romantic composers altered this balance by applying more freedom to the form and structure of their music, and using deeper, more intense expressions of moods, feelings, and emotions. An increased interest in literature, nature, the supernatural, and love, along with nationalistic feelings and the idea of the musician as visionary artist and hero (virtuoso) all added to the development of Romanticism. The movement reached its height in the late 19th century, as in the works of Robert Schumann and Richard Wagner. • 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 encyclopaedias of music.