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Romanticism: American Literature
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Romanticism was a movement in literature that celebrated the individual. Romantics believed in humankind's innate goodness and eventual perfectibility. The genre accepted experimentation as an expression of an artist's individuality. For example, Romantic literature discarded the formality of the closed heroic couplet and embraced a lyrical openness of style. In essence, the Romantic view was egalitarian. Equal at birth, inherently good, valued as individuals, all people were encouraged toward self-development. Romanticism stressed the value of expressing humanabilities that were common to all from birth rather than from training. Thus, emotional, intuitive, and sensual elements of artistic, religious, and intellectual expression were counted in some ways more valid than the products of education and reason. Romanticism embraced nature as a model for harmony in society and art. Jean Jacques Rousseau is considered the father of Romanticism.
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Romanticism is a style of art, literature and music in the late 18th and early 19th century in Europe. This movement put importance on feelings, imagination, nature and old folk traditions such as legends and fairy tales.
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A[S] an intellectual and aesthetic phenomenon, Romanticism dominated cultural thought from the last decade of the 18th century well into the first decades of the 20th century. From its earliest manifestations in Germany with the "Sturm und Drang" Movement of the 1770's to its vibrant first flowering in England in the 1790's to its importation to American soil from the 1820's onward, Romanticism has exerted a powerful hold on Western thought and culture. The Age of Enlightenment, as the 18th century was named for its emphasis on reason and its optimistic faith in a perfectible material and spiritual universe, immolated itself in the flames of the revolutions which closed that century. And as Europe and America arose, phoenix-like from the ashes, a bold new vision had taken hold. The birth of Romanticism is, as historian Paul Johnson has written... the birth of the modern.
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The main literary and artistic currents of Romanticism are well known. This volume aims uniquely to set them in their wider contexts. Thirteen distinguished contributors examine the particular configurations of the Romantic movement within individual national contexts. Parallels, influences and differences are explored between the course of Romanticism in England, France, Germany and ten other European nations, and special emphasis is placed upon the interplay between Romantic culture and social, political and economic change. Narrow definitions of Romanticism are avoided: the contributors emphasize the Romantic strands within science, philosophy and political thinking as well as within art and literature. The book ... forms part of a sequence of collections of essays which started with The Enlightenment in National Context (1981).
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Romanticism marked a profound shift in European culture, a crisis in belief and a change in sensibility. It was a complex phenomenon which contained diverse and sometimes contradictory elements, developing along different lines within individual national cultures. In France it affected politics, philosophy, literature, music, and the fine arts.
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Painting was the greatest achievement of Romanticism in the visual arts. Less dependent on public approval than architecture or sculpture, painting was most suited to the individualism of the Romantic artist. It could ... better accommodate the themes and ideas of Romantic literature which now became a great source of inspriation for artists, providing them with a new range of subjects, emotions and attitudes. Moreover, painting permitted the most personal and dramatic visual expression of the cult of nature worship. Painters like Turner and Constable elevated the status of landscape painting to monumental status by giving heroic overtones to natural scenes. Both man and nature were seen as touched by the supernatural, and, according to the Romantics, man could tap this inner divinity by relying on instinct.
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