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Romanticism
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Romanticism is a difficult historical label. Most writers and artists did not think of themselves as living in the "Romantic" age or even of constituting an historic movement. In addition, scholars disagree about when Romanticism occurred, partly because notable characteristics occurred at different places at different times. Chronological boundaries ... depend on what media one is defining. Music scholars, for example, see almost all of the 19th century as the Romantic period while art historians sometimes define the last decades of the 18th century through the first half of the 19th century as Romantic. In contrast, British literary historians only define the first three decades of the 19th century as Romantic.
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In a general sense, the term "Romanticism" has been used to refer to certain artists, poets, writers, musicians, as well as political, philosophical and social thinkers of the late eighteenth and early to mid nineteenth centuries. It has equally been used to refer to various artistic, intellectual, and social trends of that era. Despite this general usage of the term, a precise characterization and specific definition of Romanticism have been the subject of debate in the fields of intellectual history and literary history throughout the twentieth century, without any great measure of consensus emerging. Arthur Lovejoy attempted to demonstrate the difficulty of this problem in his seminal article "On The Discrimination of Romanticisms" in his Essays in the History of Ideas (1948); some scholars see romanticism as essentially continuous with the present, some see in it the inaugural moment of modernity, some see it as the beginning of a tradition of resistance to the Enlightenment— a Counter-Enlightenment— and still others place it firmly in the direct aftermath of the French Revolution. An earlier definition comes from Charles Baudelaire: "Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in a way of feeling."
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Romanticism, Unit Four in the full course sequence for American Literature, has fifteen lessons. This unit includes a study of the literature from the Fireside Poets, Irving, and others. The unit includes discussion, writing assignments, Internet activities, research, and a project.
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Romanticism in English literature began in the 1790s with the publication of the Lyrical Ballads of William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordsworth's “Preface” to the second edition (1800) of Lyrical Ballads, in which he described poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” became the manifesto of the English Romantic movement in poetry. William Blake was the third principal poet of the movement's early phase in England. The first phase of the Romantic movement in Germany was marked by innovations in both content and literary style and by a preoccupation with the mystical, the subconscious, and the supernatural. A wealth of talents, including Friedrich Hölderlin, the early Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jean Paul, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, A.W. and Friedrich Schlegel, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, and Friedrich Schelling, belong to this first phase.
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Associated with free and idealistic expression of and attitudes towards the passions and individuality, Romanticism is ... an extremely vague term, more familiar in analysis of the arts than of politics. In literature, the adjective ‘romantic’ first appeared in French towards the end of the seventeenth century, and referred to a form of narrative fiction, involving passions rather than reason, which eventually became known in English as the novel. Romanticism as an explicit system of ideas appeared at the end of the eighteenth century, in Germany, as a critique of neoclassical aesthetics, an aspect of Enlightenment thought. It came to include history, philosophy, music, the plastic arts, and politics, as well as literature. The meaning in politics often seems to be a reflection of literary classifications, and Romanticism cannot be associated with any specific political system or ideology. Some Romantics supported the French Revolution, some opposed it, and some changed their minds about it.
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Romanticism has been defined in various ways, both by its advocates and by its opponents, and, indeed, by the historians who sought to be impartial. It was plainly a revolt against the enforcement of the rules which had been framed in the golden age of French literature as representing the best practice of the best writers. But these rules had been interpreted in a narrow spirit and enforced in an arbitrary manner by succeeding generations of critics. Scant allowance was made for the necessary growth of language, and for the introduction of new ideas and forms of thought. The classic literature belonged to the court and was modeled by strict rules of etiquette, which were out of harmony with the wider view of life and nature struggling for expression. Romanticism gave liberty to the author to express his thought in such terms as seemed to him most appropriate, without regard to what his predecessors had said.
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