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Romanticism: Society
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Romanticism repudiated contractual theories and often ascribed primacy to society over the individual. This desire to re-forge the social bond often involved viewing society as an organism—this was the hallmark of anti-democratic conservative thought (e.g. J. de Maistre, Lamennais). Conservative Romantics revered the past as the repository of truth and value, rehabilitated the Gothic Middle Ages, and respected the ordering power of medieval Christianity. In the early years of the century their arguments were resisted by the Idéologues, who defended the cause of moderate republicanism and individualism.
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Although Romanticism reached out for impassioned experience wherever it could be found and at whatever risk, there was ... a belief that feeling could lead to fresh experience and a new knowledge. There was a widely held belief in the doctrine of the free quest for self-identity, for a "reality deeper than convention and tradition, for the 'natural' man hidden beneath the conventional man formed by society." The persistence of the belief in freedom of inquiry and self-expression in our own time is an aspect of 19th century Romanticism that has never really ended.
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Hardy presents Romanticism as an unachievable ideal in this modern society. He constructs an imaginative ideal, but does so in order to show that it is not feasible in Jude's (or in Hardy's) society. In the face of a changing, and therefore an unfamiliar world, Hardy needed Romanticism as a touchstone, as a key to a formerly golden age. But in Jude, with its bleakness and desolation, Hardy shows the growing gap between Romanticism and reality.
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Frye's thesis on Romanticism, like the works of Jauss, entails a contrast with much earlier modes of thought. Where Jauss contrasted idioms of reception from an earlier society and culture, Frye identifies a shift "in the spatial projection of reality . . . [leading] to a different localizing of the various levels of that reality" (5). This leads Romantic poets to situate God "within" whereas earlier poets, even including Milton, situated God "up there" (8). This, of course, needs scrutiny in a historical-theological sense, in line with the work, for instance, of John Milbank, who examines the change from an Augustinian conception of earth and heaven to a medieval nominalist conception of self, soul, and place (see Milbank 1993:418-22).
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