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Romanticism,
attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized many works of
literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography in
Western civilization over a period from the late 18th to the mid-19th
century. Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order,
calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism
in general and late 18th-century Neoclassicism
in particular. It was also to some extent a reaction against the
Enlightenment and against 18th-century rationalism and physical materialism
in general. Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the
irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional,
the visionary, and the transcendental.
Among the characteristic attitudes
of Romanticism were the following: a deepened appreciation of the beauties
of nature; a general exaltation of emotion over reason and of the senses
over intellect; a turning in upon the self and a heightened examination of
human personality and its moods and mental potentialities; a preoccupation
with the genius, the hero, and the exceptional figure in general, and a
focus on his passions and inner struggles; a new view of the artist as a
supremely individual creator, whose creative spirit is more important than
strict adherence to formal rules and traditional procedures; an emphasis
upon imagination as a gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual
truth; an obsessive interest in folk culture, national and ethnic cultural
origins, and the medieval era; and a predilection for the exotic, the
remote, the mysterious, the weird, the occult, the monstrous, the diseased,
and even the satanic.
Literature.
Romanticism proper was preceded by several related developments from the
mid-18th century on that can be termed Pre-Romanticism
(q.v.). Among such trends was a new appreciation of the medieval
romance, from which the Romantic movement derives its name. The romance was
a tale or ballad of chivalric adventure whose emphasis on individual heroism
and on the exotic and the mysterious was in clear contrast to the elegant
formality and artificiality of prevailing Classical forms of literature,
such as the French Neoclassical tragedy or the English heroic couplet in
poetry. This new interest in relatively unsophisticated but overtly
emotional literary expressions of the past was to be a dominant note in
Romanticism.
Romanticism in English
literature began in the 1790s with the publication of the Lyrical
Ballads of William
Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordsworth's
"Preface" to the second edition (1800) of Lyrical
Ballads, in which he described poetry as "the spontaneous overflow
of powerful feelings," became the manifesto of the English Romantic
movement in poetry. William Blake
was the third principal poet of the movement's early phase in England. The
first phase of the Romantic movement in Germany was marked by innovations in
both content and literary style and by a preoccupation with the mystical,
the subconscious, and the supernatural. A wealth of talents, including
Friedrich Hölderlin, the early Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jean Paul,
Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, A.W. and Friedrich Schlegel, Wilhelm Heinrich
Wackenroder, and Friedrich Schelling belong to this first phase. In
Revolutionary France, the Vicomte de Chateaubriand and Mme de
Staël were the chief initiators of Romanticism, by virtue of
their influential historical and theoretical writings. (see also German
literature)
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, as attested by the collection and
imitation of native folklore, folk ballads and poetry, folk dance and music,
and even previously ignored medieval and Renaissance works. The revived
historical appreciation was translated into imaginative writing by Sir
Walter Scott, who invented the historical novel. At about this same
time English Romantic poetry
had reached its zenith in the works of John Keats, Lord Byron, and Percy
Bysshe Shelley. (see also folk art)
A notable by-product of the Romantic
interest in the emotional were works dealing with the supernatural,
the weird, and the horrible, as in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein
and works by C.R. Maturin, the Marquis de Sade, and E.T.A. Hoffmann. The
second phase of Romanticism in Germany was dominated by Achim von Arnim,
Clemens Brentano, J.J. von Görres, and Joseph von Eichendorff.
By the 1820s Romanticism had
broadened to embrace the literatures of almost all of Europe. In this later,
second, phase, the movement was less universal in approach and concentrated
more on exploring each nation's historical and cultural inheritance and on
examining the passions and struggles of exceptional individuals. A brief
survey of Romantic or Romantic-influenced writers across the Continent would
have to include Thomas De Quincey, William Hazlitt, and the Brontë
sisters in England; Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, Alphonse de Lamartine,
Alfred de Musset, Stendhal, Prosper Mérimée, Alexandre Dumas
(Dumas Père), and Théophile Gautier in France; Alessandro
Manzoni and Giacomo Leopardi in Italy; Aleksandr Pushkin and Mikhail
Lermontov in Russia; José de Espronceda and Ángel de Saavedra
in Spain; Adam Mickiewicz in Poland; and almost all of the important writers
in pre-Civil War America.
Visual
arts.
In the 1760s and '70s a number of
British artists at home and in Rome, including James Barry, Henry Fuseli,
John Hamilton Mortimer, and John Flaxman, began to paint subjects that were
at odds with the strict decorum and classical historical and mythological
subject matter of conventional figurative art. These artists favoured themes
that were bizarre, pathetic, or extravagantly heroic, and they defined their
images with tensely linear drawing and bold contrasts of light and shade.
William Blake, the other principal early Romantic painter in England,
evolved his own powerful and unique visionary images. (see also painting)
In the next generation the great
genre of English Romantic landscape
painting emerged in the works of J.M.W.
Turner and John Constable.
These artists emphasized transient and dramatic effects of light,
atmosphere, and colour to portray a dynamic natural world capable of evoking
awe and grandeur.
In France the chief early Romantic
painters were Baron Antoine Gros,
who painted dramatic tableaus of contemporary incidents of the Napoleonic
Wars, and Théodore Géricault,
whose depictions of individual heroism and suffering in "The Raft of
the Medusa" and in his portraits of the insane truly inaugurated the
movement around 1820. The greatest French Romantic painter was Eugène
Delacroix, who is notable for his free and expressive brushwork, his
rich and sensuous use of colour, his dynamic compositions, and his exotic
and adventurous subject matter, ranging from North African Arab life to
revolutionary politics at home. Paul Delaroche, Théodore Chassériau,
and, occasionally, J.-A.-D. Ingres represent the last, more academic phase
of Romantic painting in France. In Germany Romantic painting took on
symbolic and allegorical overtones, as in the works of P.O. Runge. Caspar
David Friedrich, the greatest German Romantic artist, painted eerily
silent and stark landscapes that can induce in the beholder a sense of
mystery and religious awe.
Romanticism expressed itself in architecture
primarily through imitations of older architectural styles and through
eccentric buildings known as "follies." Medieval Gothic
architecture appealed to the Romantic imagination in England and
Germany, and this renewed interest led to the Gothic
Revival (q.v.).
Music.
Musical Romanticism was marked by
emphasis on originality and individuality, personal emotional expression,
and freedom and experimentation of form. Ludwig
van Beethoven and Franz
Schubert bridged the Classical and Romantic periods, for while their
formal musical techniques were basically Classical, their music's intensely
personal feeling and their use of programmatic elements provided an
important model for 19th-century Romantic composers. (see also music, history of)
The possibilities for dramatic
expressiveness in music were augmented both by the expansion and perfection
of the instrumental repertoire and by the creation of new musical forms,
such as the lied, nocturne, intermezzo, capriccio, prelude, and mazurka. The
Romantic spirit often found inspiration in poetic texts, legends, and folk
tales, and the linking of words and music either programmatically or through
such forms as the concert overture
and incidental music is
another distinguishing feature of Romantic music. The principal composers of
the first phase of Romanticism were Hector Berlioz, Frédéric
Chopin, Felix Mendelssohn, and Franz Liszt. These composers pushed
orchestral instruments to their limits of expressiveness, expanded the
harmonic vocabulary to exploit the full range of the chromatic
scale, and explored the linking of instrumentation
and the human voice. The middle phase of musical Romanticism is represented
by such figures as Antonín Dvorák, Edvard Grieg, and
Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky. Romantic efforts to express a particular nation's
distinctiveness through music was manifested in the works of the Czechs
Antonín Dvorák and Bedrich Smetana and by
various Russian, French, and Scandinavian composers.
Romantic opera
in Germany began with the works of Carl Maria von Weber, while Romantic
opera in Italy was developed by the composers Gaetano Donizetti, Vincenzo
Bellini, and Gioacchino Rossini. The Italian Romantic opera was brought to
the height of its development by Giuseppe Verdi. The Romantic opera in
Germany culminated in the works of Richard
Wagner, who combined and integrated such diverse strands of
Romanticism as fervent nationalism; the cult of the hero; exotic sets and
costumes; expressive music; and the display of virtuosity in orchestral and
vocal settings. The final phase of musical Romanticism is represented by
such late 19th-century and early 20th-century composers as Gustav Mahler,
Richard Strauss, Sir Edward Elgar, and Jean Sibelius.
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