THE ROMANTIC AGE
THE ROMANTIC AGE
The Romantic Period in English literature is taken to begin with the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge`s Lyrical Ballads and end with the death of the novelist, Sir Walter Scott. The historical and literary contexts and effects covered a broader time span. No other period in English literature displays more variety in style, theme, and content than the Romantic Movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Furthermore, no period has been the topic of so much disagreement and confusion over its defining principles and aesthetic.
In England, Romanticism had its greatest influence from the end of the eighteenth century up to 1832, all the way up to about 1870. Its primary vehicle of expression was in poetry.
Because the expression Romanticism is a phenomenon of immense scope, embracing as it does, literature, politics, history, philosophy and the arts in general, there has never been much agreement and much confusion as to what the word means Romanticism is a movement in art and literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in revolt against the Neoclassicism of the previous centuries.
The German poet Friedrich Schlegel, who is given credit for first using the term romantic to describe literature, defined it as "literature depicting emotional matter in an imaginative form." Romanticism is a movement in art and literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in revolt against the Neoclassicism of the previous centuries.
The German poet Friedrich Schlegel, who is given credit for first using the term romantic to describe literature, defined it as "literature depicting emotional matter in an imaginative form."
The collection of poems published as Lyrical Ballads in 1798 by William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) has traditionally been seen as the birthplace of English Romanticism. The other English Romantic poets are William Blake (1757-1827), George Byron (1788-1824), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822), John Keats (17951821).
The word romantic (ism) has a complex and interesting history. In the Middle Ages 'romance' denoted the new vernacular languages derived from Latin - in contradistinction to Latin itself, which was the language of learning. Enromancier, romancar, romanz meant to compose or translate books in the vernacular. The work produced was then called romanz, roman, romanzo and romance A roman or romant came to be known as an imaginative work and a 'courtly romance'.
The terms also signified, By the 17th century in Britain and France, 'romance' has acquired the derogatory connotations of fanciful, bizarre, exaggerated, chimerical. In France a distinction was made between romanesque (also derogatory) and romantique (which meant 'tender', 'gentle', 'sentimental' and 'sad'). It was used in the English form in these latter senses in the 18th century. 'popular book'. There are early suggestions that it was something new, different, divergent. In Germany the word romantism was used in the 17th century in the French sense of romanesque, and then, increasingly from the middle of the 18th century, in the English sense of 'gentle', 'melancholy'.
It is one of the curiosities of literary history that the strongholds of the Romantic Movement were England and Germany, not the countries of the romance languages themselves, Our colloquial use of "romance" and "romantic" to describe intense emotional experiences can be traced back to this medieval sense of the word, and so can the 18th and 19th century concept of "Romanticism” as an intellectual experience
“Romantic" has in fact been used since the Renaissance to suggest free expression of the imagination in the arts, but mainly in a negative sense. Romantic imaginings were thought to interfere with the clarity of the art form, and so lay beyond the bounds of proper subject-matter. The term is used in many senses, a recent favorite being that which sees in the romantic mood a psychological desire to escape from unpleasant realities.
Thanks to the influence of late 18th century German cultural theorists, "Romanticism" was adopted across Europe and the New World as a convenient description for distinctively contemporary modes of thought, losing in the process many of its negative connotations.
Romanticism: a movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that marked the reaction in literature, philosophy, art, religion, and politics from the neoclassicism and formal orthodoxy of the preceding period. Romanticism arose so gradually and exhibited so many phases that a satisfactory definition is not possible. The aspect most stressed in France is reflected in Victor Hugo's phrase "liberalism in literature," meaning especially the freeing of the artist and writer from restrains and rules and suggesting that phase of individualism marked by the encouragement of revolutionary political ideas. Thus it is from the historians of English and German literature that we inherit the convenient set of terminal dates for the Romantic period, beginning in 1798, the year of the first edition of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge and of the composition of Hymns to the Night by Novalis, and ending in 1832, the year which marked the deaths of both Sir Walter Scott and Goethe
However, as an international movement affecting all the arts, Romanticism begins at least in the 1770's and continues into the second half of the nineteenth century, later for American literature than for European, and later in some of the arts, like music and painting, than in literature. This extended chronological spectrum (1770-1870) also permits recognition as Romantic the poetry of William Blake in England and the great period of influence for Rousseau's writings throughout Europe
The early Romantic period thus coincides with what is often called the "age of revolutions"--including, the American (1776) and the French (1789) revolutions--an age of upheavals in political, economic, and social traditions, the age which witnessed the initial transformations of the Industrial Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.
Comments