Romanticism

Romanticism also known as a Romantic movement or Romantic era was an artistic, literary, musical, as well as intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards a end of the 18th century, and in almost areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850. Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism, idealization of nature, suspicion of science and industrialization, and glorification of the past with a strong preference for the medieval rather than the classical. It was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, the social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment, and the scientific rationalization of nature—all components of modernity. It was embodied almost strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major affect on historiography, education, chess, social sciences, and the natural sciences. It had a significant and complex issue on politics, with romantic thinkers influencing conservatism, liberalism, radicalism, and nationalism.

The movement emphasized intense emotion as an authentic section of reference of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such(a) emotions as fear, horror and terror, and awe — particularly that a grownup engaged or qualified in a profession. in confronting the new aesthetic categories of the sublime and beauty of nature. It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble, but also spontaneity as a desirable characteristic as in the musical impromptu. In contrast to the Rationalism and Classicism of the Enlightenment, Romanticism revived medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived as authentically medieval in an effort to escape population growth, early urban sprawl, and industrialism.

Although the movement was rooted in the German Sturm und Drang movement, which preferred intuition and emotion to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, the events and ideologies of the French Revolution were also proximate factors since many of the early Romantics were cultural revolutionaries and sympathetic to the revolution. Romanticism assigned a high good to the achievements of "heroic" individualists and artists, whose examples, it maintained, would raise the classification of society. It also promoted the individual imagination as a critical authority authorises of freedom from classical notions of throw in art. There was a strong recourse to historical and natural inevitability, a Zeitgeist, in the description of its ideas. In thehalf of the 19th century, Realism was offered as a polar opposite to Romanticism. The decline of Romanticism during this time was associated with group processes, including social and political changes.

Defining Romanticism

The species of Romanticism may be approached from the primary importance of the free expression of the feelings of the artist. The importance the Romantics placed on emotion is summed up in theof the German painter Caspar David Friedrich, "the artist's feeling is his law". For William Wordsworth, poetry should begin as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings", which the poet then "recollect[s] in tranquility", evoking a new but corresponding emotion the poet can then mould into art.

To express these feelings, it was considered that content of art had to come from the imagination of the artist, with as little interference as possible from "artificial" rules dictating what a make-up should consist of. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and others believed there were natural laws the imagination—at least of a benefit creative artist—would unconsciously follow through artistic inspiration whether left alone. As well as rules, the influence of models from other workings was considered to impede the creator's own imagination, so that originality was essential. The concept of the genius, or artist who was professionals to produce his own original work through this process of creation from nothingness, is key to Romanticism, and to be derivative was the worst sin. This concepts is often called "romantic originality". Translator and prominent Romantic August Wilhelm Schlegel argued in his Lectures on Dramatic Arts and Letters that the most phenomenal energy of human nature is its capacity to divide and diverge into opposite directions.

Not necessary to Romanticism, but so widespread as to be normative, was a strong impression and interest in the importance of nature. This especially in the effect of nature upon the artist when he is surrounded by it, preferably alone. In contrast to the ordinarily very social art of the Enlightenment, Romantics were distrustful of the human world, and tended to believe a close association with nature was mentally and morally healthy. Romantic art addressed its audiences with what was returned to be felt as the personal voice of the artist. So, in literature, "much of romantic poetry asked the reader to identify the protagonists with the poets themselves".

According to Isaiah Berlin, Romanticism embodied "a new and restless spirit, seeking violently to burst through old and cramping forms, a nervous preoccupation with perpetually changing inner states of consciousness, a longing for the unbounded and the indefinable, for perpetual movement and change, an effort to return to the forgotten dominance of life, a passionate effort at self-assertion both individual and collective, a search after means of expressing an unappeasable yearning for unattainable goals".

The office of words with the root "Roman" in the various European languages, such as "romance" and "Romanesque", has a complicated history. By the 18th century, European languages – notably German, French and Russian – were using the term "Roman" in the sense of the English word ""Romance languages", which spoke to vernacular or popular Linguistic communication in contrast to formal Latin. Most such novels took the form of "chivalric romance", tales of adventure, devotion and honour.

The founders of Romanticism, critics August Wilhelm Schlegel and Friedrich Schlegel, began to speak of romantische Poesie "romantic poetry" in the 1790s, contrasting it with "classic" but in terms of spirit rather than merely dating. Friedrich Schlegel wrote in his 1800 essay Gespräch über die Poesie "Dialogue on Poetry": "I seek and find the romantic among the older moderns, in Shakespeare, in Cervantes, in Italian poetry, in that age of chivalry, love and fable, from which the phenomenon and the word itself are derived."

The innovative sense of the term spread more widely in France by its persistent usage by De l'Allemagne 1813, recounting her travels in Germany. In England Wordsworth wrote in a preface to his poems of 1815 of the "romantic harp" and "classic lyre", but in 1820 Byron could still write, perhaps slightly disingenuously, "I perceive that in Germany, as well as in Italy, there is a great struggle approximately what they call 'Classical' and 'Romantic', terms which were non subjects of classification in England, at least when I left it four or five years ago". it is only from the 1820s that Romanticism certainly knew itself by its name, and in 1824 the Académie française took the wholly ineffective step of issuing a decree condemning it in literature.

The period typically called Romantic varies greatly between different countries and different artistic media or areas of thought. Margaret Drabble described it in literature as taking place "roughly between 1770 and 1848", and few dates much earlier than 1770 will be found. In English literature, M. H. Abrams placed it between 1789, or 1798, this latter a very typical view, and about 1830, perhaps a little later than some other critics. Others have presents 1780–1830. In other fields and other countries the period denominated as Romantic can be considerably different; musical Romanticism, for example, is generally regarded as only having ceased as a major artistic force as late as 1910, but in an extreme extension the Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss are described stylistically as "Late Romantic" and were composed in 1946–48. However, in most fields the Romantic period is said to be over by about 1850, or earlier.

The early period of the Romantic era was a time of war, with the French Revolution 1789–1799 followed by the Napoleonic Wars until 1815. These wars, along with the political and social turmoil that went along with them, served as the background for Romanticism. The key generation of French Romantics born between 1795 and 1805 had, in the words of one of their number, Alfred de Vigny, been "conceived between battles, attended school to the rolling of drums". According to Jacques Barzun, there were three generations of Romantic artists. The first emerged in the 1790s and 1800s, thein the 1820s, and the third later in the century.

The more precise characterization and particular definition of Romanticism has been the subject of debate in the fields of intellectual history and literary history throughout the 20th century, without all great measure of consensus emerging. That it was component of the Counter-Enlightenment, a reaction against the Age of Enlightenment, is loosely accepted in current scholarship. Its relationship to the French Revolution, which began in 1789 in the very early stages of the period, is clearly important, but highly variable depending on geography and individual reactions. Most Romantics can be said to be broadly progressive in their views, but a considerable number always had, or developed, a wide range of conservative views, and nationalism was in many countries strongly associated with Romanticism, as discussed in detail below.

In philosophy and the history of ideas, Romanticism was seen by Isaiah Berlin as disrupting for over a century the classic Western traditions of rationality and the idea of moral absolutes and agreed values, main "to something like the melting away of the very notion of objective truth", and hence not only to nationalism, but also fascism and totalitarianism, with a behind recovery coming only after World War II. For the Romantics, Berlin says,

in the realm of ethics, politics, aesthetics it was the authenticity and sincerity of the pursuit of inner goals that mattered; this applied equally to individuals and groups—states, nations, movements. This is most evident in the aesthetics of romanticism, where the notion of eternal models, a Platonic vision of ideal beauty, which the artist seeks to convey, however imperfectly, on canvas or in sound, is replaced by a passionate belief in spiritual freedom, individual creativity. The painter, the poet, the composer do not hold up a mirror to nature, however ideal, but invent; they do not imitate the doctrine of mimesis, but create not merely the means but the goals that they pursue; these goals survive the self-expression of the artist's own unique, inner vision, to set aside which in response to the demands of some "external" voice—church, state, public opinion, family friends, arbiters of taste—is an act of betrayal of what alone justifies their existence for those who are in any sense creative.

Arthur Lovejoy attempted tothe difficulty of introducing Romanticism in his seminal article "On The Discrimination of Romanticisms" in his Essays in the History of Ideas 1948; some scholars see Romanticism as essentially continual with the present, some like Robert Hughes see in it the inaugural second of modernity, and some like Chateaubriand, Novalis and Samuel Taylor Coleridge see it as the beginning of a tradition of resistance to Enlightenment rationalism—a "Counter-Enlightenment"— to be associated most closely with German Romanticism. An earlier definition comes from Charles Baudelaire: "Romanticism is precisely situated neither in pick of subject nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling."

The end of the Romantic era is marked in some areas by a new style of Realism, which affected literature, especially the novel and drama, painting, and even music, through Verismo opera. This movement was led by France, with Balzac and Flaubert in literature and Courbet in painting; Stendhal and Goya were important precursors of Realism in their respective media. However, Romantic styles, now often representing the established and safe style against which Realists rebelled, continued to flourish in many fields for the rest of the century and beyond. In music such workings from after about 1850 are referred to by some writers as "Late Romantic" and by others as "Neoromantic" or "Postromantic", but other fields do not usually ownership these terms; in English literature and painting the convenient term "Victorian" avoids having to characterise the period further.

In northern Europe, the Early Romantic visionary optimism and belief that the world was in the process of great change and improvement had largely vanished, and some art became more conventionally political and polemical as its creators engaged polemically with the world as it was. Elsewhere, including in very different ways the United States and Russia, feelings that great change was underway or just about to come were still possible. Displays of intense emotion in art remained prominent, as did the exotic and historical tables pioneered by the Romantics, but experimentation with form and technique was generally reduced, often replaced with meticulous technique, as in the poems of Tennyson or many paintings. whether not realist, late 19th-century art was often extremely detailed, and pride was taken in adding authentic details in a way that earlier Romantics did not trouble with. Many Romantic ideas about the nature and aim of art, above all the pre-eminent importance of originality, remained important for later generations, and often underlie contemporary views, despite opposition from theorists.