All about Romanticism

 

What Is Romanticism?

• Use creative imagination
• Focus on nature
• Importance of myth and symbolism
• Focus on feelings and intuition
• Freedom and spontaneity
• Simple language
• Personal experience, democracy and liberty
• Fascination with past

Revolt Against Neoclassicism

Neoclassic Trends   
• Stressed reason and
judgment
• Valued society
• Followed authority
• Maintained the
aristocracy
• Interested in science and
technology

Romantic Trends
• Stressed imagination
and emotion
• Valued individuals
• Strove for freedom
• Represented common
people
• Interested in
supernatural

Romanticism: conceptually
• 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.
• The Romantic Movement 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.
• The Romantic Movement 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 the Romantic Movement
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.

acknowledgement:

• Romanticism overview www.teachit.co.uk• Literature in Context: Romanticism, DavidStevens, Cambridge Press• Literature, Criticism and Style: Special Feature Romantic Poetry
• www.iteach.com.au