Romanticism
Definitions:
A romantic work has the following characteristics:
· a love of nature, to the point where nature is exalted,
· an exaltation of and deep belief in ‘the individual’ and the universally shared goodness of all humans (even if latent, goodness triumphs),
· an affinity for the unusual, unfamiliar, bizarre, exotic, picturesque, or surreal,
· an interest in the past, especially the medieval or primitive,
· a high value for the uniqueness of individual expression as it is constituted by life experiences (“I, me, my, mine, our, ours” are good),
· an emphasis on feeling and imagination, to the point where they are key to the development of aesthetic and ethical values rather than reason and intellect (feeling rather than just data),
· the heroic (‘ups’ and ‘downs’ of tragic heroes),
· With all of these, a revolt against authority or tradition is either apparent or inherent (getting out of scientific revolution).
In other words: The portrayal of people, scenes, and events as the writer or artist imagines them to be.
Other ways to think about it????
All encompassing: An artistic and intellectual movement originating in Europe in the late 18th century and characterized by a heightened interest in nature, emphasis on the individual’s expression of emotion and imagination, departure from the attitudes and forms of classicism, and rebellion against established social rules and conventions.
Its artistic and literary origins stem from Europe (Germany especially as the cradle) in the late 18th century. It was spurred, in part, by the libertarian and egalitarian ideals of the French Revolution.
Important figures: Goethe, Schiller, von Herder, Wilhelm, and von Schlegel. It spread through France and England, and it spread through literature, painting, and music.
Famous Brits: Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, P.B. Shelley, Byron, Scott, Austen, and Mary Shelley are the big hitters of British literature.
France: Rousseau, Hugo.
Implications of Romanticism for The United States:
For a long time, America was never given the international notoriety of having any literature. American romanticism was laughable in the eyes of most Europeans. Although much of the world denied American literature its due credit, the romantic era in American literature has proven to be the first literary movement that rivals the great literary cultures of Western civilization. The people usually credited with the emergence of the American romantic era are: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson. Surely, other influential romantic writers exist in American literature, but these are the big names most people identify.
Essayists and poets in America:
Romanticism in America coincided with the period of national expansion and the discovery of a distinctive American voice. The solidification of a national identity and the surging idealism and passion of romanticism nurtured the masterpieces of “the American Renaissance.”
Romantic ideas centered on art as inspirational, the spiritual and aesthetic dimension of nature, and metaphors of organic growth. Art could best express universal truth according to the romantics.
The development of the self became a major theme. Self and nature were one; self-awareness was not a selfish dead end but a mode of knowledge opening up the universe. If a self were one with all humanity, then the individual had a moral duty to reform social inequalities and relieve human suffering.
As the unique, subjective self became important, so did the realm of psychology. The “sublime,” an effect of beauty in grandeur (for example, a view from a mountaintop), produced feelings of awe, reverence, vastness, and a power beyond human comprehension.
Fiction writers in America:
The romantic vision tended to express itself in the heightened, emotional, and symbolic form of the novel. The romantic works from this period were not stories merely, but serious novels that used special techniques to communicate complex and subtle meanings.
The typical protagonists of the American romance are haunted, alienated individuals. They are lonely protagonists pitted against unknowable, dark fates that, in some mysterious way, grow out of their deepest unconscious selves. The symbolic plots reveal hidden actions of the anguished spirit.
American novelists were faced with a history of strife and revolution, geography of vast wilderness, and a fluid and comparatively classless democratic society. American novels frequently reveal a revolutionary absence of tradition.
The romance form is dark and forbidding, indicating how difficult it is to create an identity without a stable society. Most of the romantic heroes die in the end. The self-divided, tragic note in American literature became dominant in the novels. This is somewhat prophetic of the movement because the country eventually fell head-first into its own self-divided, nearly tragic (for the country) Civil War.
Keating 1
Hon. Am. Lit. I