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Romanticism (also known as the Romantic movement or Romantic era) was an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that originated in
Europe
Europe is a large peninsula conventionally considered a continent in its own right because of its great physical size and the weight of its history and traditions. Europe is also considered a subcontinent of Eurasia and it is located entirel ...
towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850. Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and
individualism
Individualism is the moral stance, political philosophy, ideology and social outlook that emphasizes the intrinsic worth of the individual. Individualists promote the exercise of one's goals and desires and to value independence and self-reli ...
,
clandestine literature,
paganism, idealization of nature, suspicion of science and industrialization, and glorification of the past with a strong preference for the medieval rather than the classical. It was partly a reaction to the
Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in Great Britain, continental Europe, and the United States, that occurred during the period from around 1760 to about 1820–1840. This transition included going f ...
, the social and political norms of the
Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment or the Enlightenment; german: Aufklärung, "Enlightenment"; it, L'Illuminismo, "Enlightenment"; pl, Oświecenie, "Enlightenment"; pt, Iluminismo, "Enlightenment"; es, La Ilustración, "Enlightenment" was an intel ...
, and the scientific rationalization of nature.
It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a major impact on
historiography
Historiography is the study of the methods of historians in developing history as an academic discipline, and by extension is any body of historical work on a particular subject. The historiography of a specific topic covers how historians ha ...
, education,
chess
Chess is a board game for two players, called White and Black, each controlling an army of chess pieces in their color, with the objective to checkmate the opponent's king. It is sometimes called international chess or Western chess to dist ...
,
social sciences
Social science is one of the branches of science, devoted to the study of societies and the relationships among individuals within those societies. The term was formerly used to refer to the field of sociology, the original "science of so ...
, and the
natural sciences
Natural science is one of the branches of science concerned with the description, understanding and prediction of natural phenomena, based on empirical evidence from observation and experimentation. Mechanisms such as peer review and repeatab ...
. It had a significant and complex effect on politics, with romantic thinkers influencing
conservatism
Conservatism is a cultural, social, and political philosophy that seeks to promote and to preserve traditional institutions, practices, and values. The central tenets of conservatism may vary in relation to the culture and civilizati ...
,
liberalism
Liberalism is a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality and equality before the law."political rationalism, hostility to autocracy, cultural distaste for c ...
,
radicalism, and
nationalism
Nationalism is an idea and movement that holds that the nation should be congruent with the state. As a movement, nationalism tends to promote the interests of a particular nation (as in a group of people), Smith, Anthony. ''Nationalism: The ...
.
The movement emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as fear, horror, terror and awe — especially that experienced in confronting the new aesthetic categories of the sublime and beauty of nature. It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble, but also spontaneity as a desirable characteristic (as in the musical impromptu). In contrast to the
rationalism
In philosophy, rationalism is the epistemological view that "regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge" or "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification".Lacey, A.R. (1996), ''A Dictionary of Philosophy ...
and
classicism
Classicism, in the arts, refers generally to a high regard for a classical period, classical antiquity in the Western tradition, as setting standards for taste which the classicists seek to emulate. In its purest form, classicism is an aesthet ...
of the
Enlightenment, Romanticism revived
medievalism
Medievalism is a system of belief and practice inspired by the Middle Ages of Europe, or by devotion to elements of that period, which have been expressed in areas such as architecture, literature, music, art, philosophy, scholarship, and variou ...
and elements of art and narrative perceived as authentically medieval in an attempt to escape population growth, early
urban sprawl
Urban sprawl (also known as suburban sprawl or urban encroachment) is defined as "the spreading of urban developments (such as houses and shopping centers) on undeveloped land near a city." Urban sprawl has been described as the unrestricted growt ...
, and
industrialism
Industrialisation ( alternatively spelled industrialization) is the period of social and economic change that transforms a human group from an agrarian society into an industrial society. This involves an extensive re-organisation of an econom ...
.
Although the movement was rooted in the German ''
Sturm und Drang
''Sturm und Drang'' (, ; usually translated as "storm and stress") was a proto- Romantic movement in German literature and music that occurred between the late 1760s and early 1780s. Within the movement, individual subjectivity and, in particul ...
'' movement, which preferred intuition and emotion to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, the events and ideologies of the
French Revolution
The French Revolution ( ) was a period of radical political and societal change in France that began with the Estates General of 1789 and ended with the formation of the French Consulate in coup of 18 Brumaire, November 1799. Many of its ...
were also proximate factors since many of the early Romantics were cultural revolutionaries and sympathetic to the revolution. Romanticism assigned a high value to the achievements of "heroic" individualists and artists, whose examples, it maintained, would raise the quality of society. It also promoted the individual imagination as a critical authority allowed of freedom from classical notions of form in art. There was a strong recourse to historical and natural inevitability, a ''
Zeitgeist
In 18th- and 19th-century German philosophy, a ''Zeitgeist'' () ("spirit of the age") is an invisible agent, force or Daemon dominating the characteristics of a given epoch in world history.
Now, the term is usually associated with Georg W. ...
'', in the representation of its ideas. In the second half of the 19th century,
Realism
Realism, Realistic, or Realists may refer to:
In the arts
*Realism (arts), the general attempt to depict subjects truthfully in different forms of the arts
Arts movements related to realism include:
*Classical Realism
*Literary realism, a move ...
was offered as a polar opposite to Romanticism. The decline of Romanticism during this time was associated with multiple processes, including social and political changes.
Defining Romanticism
Basic characteristics
The nature of Romanticism may be approached from the primary importance of the free expression of the feelings of the artist. The importance the Romantics placed on emotion is summed up in the remark of the German painter
Caspar David Friedrich, "the artist's feeling is his law". For
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth (7 April 177023 April 1850) was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication '' Lyrical Ballads'' (1798).
Wordsworth's ' ...
, poetry should begin as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings", which the poet then "recollect
in tranquility", evoking a new but corresponding emotion the poet can then mould into art.
To express these feelings, it was considered that content of art had to come from the imagination of the artist, with as little interference as possible from "artificial" rules dictating what a work should consist of.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (; 21 October 177225 July 1834) was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake ...
and others believed there were natural laws the imagination—at least of a good creative artist—would unconsciously follow through
artistic inspiration
Inspiration (from the Latin ''inspirare'', meaning "to breathe into") is an unconscious burst of creativity in a literary, musical, or visual art and other artistic endeavours. The concept has origins in both Hellenism and Hebraism. The Greek ...
if left alone. As well as rules, the influence of models from other works was considered to impede the creator's own imagination, so that
originality
Originality is the aspect of created or invented works that distinguish them from reproductions, clones, forgeries, or substantially derivative works. The modern idea of originality is according to some scholars tied to Romanticism, by a notion t ...
was essential. The concept of the
genius
Genius is a characteristic of original and exceptional insight in the performance of some art or endeavor that surpasses expectations, sets new standards for future works, establishes better methods of operation, or remains outside the capabili ...
, or artist who was able to produce his own original work through this process of ''creation from nothingness'', is key to Romanticism, and to be derivative was the worst sin.
[Ruthven (2001) p. 40 quote: "Romantic ideology of literary authorship, which conceives of the text as an autonomous object produced by an individual genius."][Spearing (1987) quote: "Surprising as it may seem to us, living after the Romantic movement has transformed older ideas about literature, in the Middle Ages authority was prized more highly than originality."][Eco (1994) p. 95 quote:
Much art has been and is repetitive. The concept of absolute originality is a contemporary one, born with Romanticism; classical art was in vast measure serial, and the "modern" avant-garde (at the beginning of this century) challenged the Romantic idea of "creation from nothingness", with its techniques of collage, mustachios on the Mona Lisa, art about art, and so on.] This idea is often called "romantic originality". Translator and prominent Romantic
August Wilhelm Schlegel
August Wilhelm (after 1812: von) Schlegel (; 8 September 176712 May 1845), usually cited as August Schlegel, was a German poet, translator and critic, and with his brother Friedrich Schlegel the leading influence within Jena Romanticism. His trans ...
argued in his ''Lectures on Dramatic Arts and Letters'' that the most phenomenal power of human nature is its capacity to divide and diverge into opposite directions.
Not essential to Romanticism, but so widespread as to be normative, was a strong belief and interest in the importance of nature. This particularly in the effect of nature upon the artist when he is surrounded by it, preferably alone. In contrast to the usually very social art of the
Enlightenment, Romantics were distrustful of the human world, and tended to believe a close connection with nature was mentally and morally healthy. Romantic art addressed its audiences with what was intended to be felt as the personal voice of the artist. So, in literature, "much of romantic poetry invited the reader to identify the protagonists with the poets themselves".
According to
Isaiah Berlin, Romanticism embodied "a new and restless spirit, seeking violently to burst through old and cramping forms, a nervous preoccupation with perpetually changing inner states of consciousness, a longing for the unbounded and the indefinable, for perpetual movement and change, an effort to return to the forgotten sources of life, a passionate effort at self-assertion both individual and collective, a search after means of expressing an unappeasable yearning for unattainable goals".
Etymology
The group of words with the root "Roman" in the various European languages, such as "romance" and "Romanesque", has a complicated history. By the 18th century, European languages – notably German, French and Russian – were using the term "Roman" in the sense of the English word "
novel", i.e. a work of popular narrative fiction.
This usage derived from the term
"Romance languages", which referred to
vernacular
A vernacular or vernacular language is in contrast with a "standard language". It refers to the language or dialect that is spoken by people that are inhabiting a particular country or region. The vernacular is typically the native language, n ...
(or popular) language in contrast to formal
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
.
Most such novels took the form of "
chivalric romance
As a literary genre, the chivalric romance is a type of prose and verse narrative that was popular in the noble courts of High Medieval and Early Modern Europe. They were fantastic stories about marvel-filled adventures, often of a chivalri ...
", tales of adventure, devotion and honour.
The founders of Romanticism, critics
August Wilhelm Schlegel
August Wilhelm (after 1812: von) Schlegel (; 8 September 176712 May 1845), usually cited as August Schlegel, was a German poet, translator and critic, and with his brother Friedrich Schlegel the leading influence within Jena Romanticism. His trans ...
and
Friedrich Schlegel
Karl Wilhelm Friedrich (after 1814: von) Schlegel (; ; 10 March 1772 – 12 January 1829) was a German poet, literary critic, philosopher, philologist, and Indologist. With his older brother, August Wilhelm Schlegel, he was one of the main figure ...
, began to speak of ''romantische Poesie'' ("romantic poetry") in the 1790s, contrasting it with "classic" but in terms of spirit rather than merely dating. Friedrich Schlegel wrote in his 1800 essay ''Gespräch über die Poesie'' ("Dialogue on Poetry"): "I seek and find the romantic among the older moderns, in Shakespeare, in Cervantes, in Italian poetry, in that age of chivalry, love and fable, from which the phenomenon and the word itself are derived."
The modern sense of the term spread more widely in France by its persistent use by
Germaine de Staël
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein (; ; 22 April 176614 July 1817), commonly known as Madame de Staël (), was a French woman of letters and political theorist, the daughter of banker and French finance minister Jacques Necker and Suzan ...
in her ''
De l'Allemagne'' (1813), recounting her travels in Germany.
[Ferber, 7] In England Wordsworth wrote in a preface to his poems of 1815 of the "romantic harp" and "classic lyre",
but in 1820
Byron
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), known simply as Lord Byron, was an English romantic poet and peer. He was one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement, and has been regarded as among the ...
could still write, perhaps slightly disingenuously, "I perceive that in Germany, as well as in Italy, there is a great struggle about what they call 'Classical' and 'Romantic', terms which were not subjects of classification in England, at least when I left it four or five years ago". It is only from the 1820s that Romanticism certainly knew itself by its name, and in 1824 the
Académie française took the wholly ineffective step of issuing a decree condemning it in literature.
Period
The period typically called Romantic varies greatly between different countries and different artistic media or areas of thought.
Margaret Drabble described it in literature as taking place "roughly between 1770 and 1848", and few dates much earlier than 1770 will be found. In English literature,
M. H. Abrams
Meyer Howard Abrams (July 23, 1912 – April 21, 2015), usually cited as M. H. Abrams, was an American literary critic, known for works on romanticism, in particular his book ''The Mirror and the Lamp''. Under Abrams's editorship, ''The Norton An ...
placed it between 1789, or 1798, this latter a very typical view, and about 1830, perhaps a little later than some other critics. Others have proposed 1780–1830. In other fields and other countries the period denominated as Romantic can be considerably different;
musical Romanticism, for example, is generally regarded as only having ceased as a major artistic force as late as 1910, but in an extreme extension the ''
Four Last Songs
The ''Four Last Songs'' (german: Vier letzte Lieder, link=no), Op. posth., for soprano and orchestra are – with the exception of the song "Malven" (Mallows), composed later the same year – the final completed works of Richard Strauss. They ...
'' of
Richard Strauss are described stylistically as "Late Romantic" and were composed in 1946–48. However, in most fields the Romantic period is said to be over by about 1850, or earlier.
The early period of the Romantic era was a time of war, with the French Revolution (1789–1799) followed by the
Napoleonic Wars
The Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815) were a series of major global conflicts pitting the French Empire and its allies, led by Napoleon I, against a fluctuating array of European states formed into various coalitions. It produced a period of Fren ...
until 1815. These wars, along with the political and social turmoil that went along with them, served as the background for Romanticism.
[Greenblatt et al., ''Norton Anthology of English Literature'', eighth edition, "The Romantic Period – Volume D" (New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 2006): ] The key generation of French Romantics born between 1795 and 1805 had, in the words of one of their number,
Alfred de Vigny
Alfred Victor, Comte de Vigny (27 March 1797 – 17 September 1863) was a French poet and early French Romanticist. He also produced novels, plays, and translations of Shakespeare.
Biography
Vigny was born in Loches (a town to which he never r ...
, been "conceived between battles, attended school to the rolling of drums". According to
Jacques Barzun
Jacques Martin Barzun (; November 30, 1907 – October 25, 2012) was a French-American historian known for his studies of the history of ideas and cultural history. He wrote about a wide range of subjects, including baseball, mystery novels, and ...
, there were three generations of Romantic artists. The first emerged in the 1790s and 1800s, the second in the 1820s, and the third later in the century.
Context and place in history
The more precise characterization and specific definition of Romanticism has been the subject of debate in the fields of
intellectual history and
literary history
The history of literature is the historical development of writings in prose or poetry that attempt to provide entertainment, enlightenment, or instruction to the reader/listener/observer, as well as the development of the literary techniques ...
throughout the 20th century, without any great measure of consensus emerging. That it was part of the
Counter-Enlightenment
The Counter-Enlightenment refers to a loose collection of intellectual stances that arose during the European Enlightenment in opposition to its mainstream attitudes and ideals. The Counter-Enlightenment is generally seen to have continued from t ...
, a reaction against the
Age of Enlightenment
The Age of Enlightenment or the Enlightenment; german: Aufklärung, "Enlightenment"; it, L'Illuminismo, "Enlightenment"; pl, Oświecenie, "Enlightenment"; pt, Iluminismo, "Enlightenment"; es, La Ilustración, "Enlightenment" was an intel ...
, is generally accepted in current scholarship. Its relationship to the
French Revolution
The French Revolution ( ) was a period of radical political and societal change in France that began with the Estates General of 1789 and ended with the formation of the French Consulate in coup of 18 Brumaire, November 1799. Many of its ...
, which began in 1789 in the very early stages of the period, is clearly important, but highly variable depending on geography and individual reactions. Most Romantics can be said to be broadly progressive in their views, but a considerable number always had, or developed, a wide range of conservative views, and nationalism was in many countries strongly associated with Romanticism, as discussed in detail below.
In philosophy and the history of ideas, Romanticism was seen by Isaiah Berlin as disrupting for over a century the classic Western traditions of rationality and the idea of moral absolutes and agreed values, leading "to something like the melting away of the very notion of objective truth", and hence not only to nationalism, but also
fascism
Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, ultra-nationalist political ideology and movement,: "extreme militaristic nationalism, contempt for electoral democracy and political and cultural liberalism, a belief in natural social hierarchy an ...
and
totalitarianism
Totalitarianism is a form of government and a political system that prohibits all opposition parties, outlaws individual and group opposition to the state and its claims, and exercises an extremely high if not complete degree of control and regu ...
, with a gradual recovery coming only after World War II. For the Romantics, Berlin says,
in the realm of ethics, politics, aesthetics it was the authenticity and sincerity of the pursuit of inner goals that mattered; this applied equally to individuals and groups—states, nations, movements. This is most evident in the aesthetics of romanticism, where the notion of eternal models, a Platonic vision of ideal beauty, which the artist seeks to convey, however imperfectly, on canvas or in sound, is replaced by a passionate belief in spiritual freedom, individual creativity. The painter, the poet, the composer do not hold up a mirror to nature, however ideal, but invent; they do not imitate (the doctrine of mimesis), but create not merely the means but the goals that they pursue; these goals represent the self-expression of the artist's own unique, inner vision, to set aside which in response to the demands of some "external" voice—church, state, public opinion, family friends, arbiters of taste—is an act of betrayal of what alone justifies their existence for those who are in any sense creative.
Arthur Lovejoy
Arthur Oncken Lovejoy (October 10, 1873 – December 30, 1962) was an American philosopher and intellectual historian, who founded the discipline known as the history of ideas with his book ''The Great Chain of Being'' (1936), on the topic o ...
attempted to demonstrate the difficulty of defining Romanticism in his seminal article "On The Discrimination of Romanticisms" in his ''Essays in the
History of Ideas
Intellectual history (also the history of ideas) is the study of the history of human thought and of intellectuals, people who conceptualize, discuss, write about, and concern themselves with ideas. The investigative premise of intellectual his ...
'' (1948); some scholars see Romanticism as essentially continuous with the present, some like
Robert Hughes see in it the inaugural moment of
modernity
Modernity, a topic in the humanities and social sciences, is both a historical period (the modern era) and the ensemble of particular socio-cultural norms, attitudes and practices that arose in the wake of the Renaissancein the "Age of Reas ...
, and some like
Chateaubriand,
Novalis
Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg (2 May 1772 – 25 March 1801), pen name Novalis (), was a German polymath who was a writer, philosopher, poet, aristocrat and mystic. He is regarded as an idiosyncratic and influential figure of ...
and Samuel Taylor Coleridge see it as the beginning of a tradition of resistance to
Enlightenment rationalism—a "Counter-Enlightenment"— to be associated most closely with
German Romanticism. An earlier definition comes from
Charles Baudelaire
Charles Pierre Baudelaire (, ; ; 9 April 1821 – 31 August 1867) was a French poet who also produced notable work as an essayist and art critic. His poems exhibit mastery in the handling of rhyme and rhythm, contain an exoticism inherited ...
: "Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling."
The end of the Romantic era is marked in some areas by a new style of
Realism
Realism, Realistic, or Realists may refer to:
In the arts
*Realism (arts), the general attempt to depict subjects truthfully in different forms of the arts
Arts movements related to realism include:
*Classical Realism
*Literary realism, a move ...
, which affected literature, especially the novel and drama, painting, and even music, through
Verismo
In opera, ''verismo'' (, from , meaning "true") was a post-Romantic operatic tradition associated with Italian composers such as Pietro Mascagni, Ruggero Leoncavallo, Umberto Giordano, Francesco Cilea and Giacomo Puccini.
''Verismo'' as an ...
opera. This movement was led by France, with
Balzac and
Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert ( , , ; 12 December 1821 – 8 May 1880) was a French novelist. Highly influential, he has been considered the leading exponent of literary realism in his country. According to the literary theorist Kornelije Kvas, "in Flauber ...
in literature and
Courbet
Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet ( , , ; 10 June 1819 – 31 December 1877) was a French painter who led the Realism movement in 19th-century French painting. Committed to painting only what he could see, he rejected academic convention and t ...
in painting;
Stendhal and
Goya
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (; ; 30 March 174616 April 1828) was a Spanish romantic painter and printmaker. He is considered the most important Spanish artist of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. His paintings, drawings, and e ...
were important precursors of Realism in their respective media. However, Romantic styles, now often representing the established and safe style against which Realists rebelled, continued to flourish in many fields for the rest of the century and beyond. In music such works from after about 1850 are referred to by some writers as "Late Romantic" and by others as "Neoromantic" or "Postromantic", but other fields do not usually use these terms; in English literature and painting the convenient term "Victorian" avoids having to characterise the period further.
In northern Europe, the Early Romantic visionary optimism and belief that the world was in the process of great change and improvement had largely vanished, and some art became more conventionally political and polemical as its creators engaged polemically with the world as it was. Elsewhere, including in very different ways the United States and Russia, feelings that great change was underway or just about to come were still possible. Displays of intense emotion in art remained prominent, as did the exotic and historical settings pioneered by the Romantics, but experimentation with form and technique was generally reduced, often replaced with meticulous technique, as in the poems of Tennyson or many paintings. If not realist, late 19th-century art was often extremely detailed, and pride was taken in adding authentic details in a way that earlier Romantics did not trouble with. Many Romantic ideas about the nature and purpose of art, above all the pre-eminent importance of originality, remained important for later generations, and often underlie modern views, despite opposition from theorists.
Literature
![Chatterton](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/54/Chatterton.jpg)
In literature, Romanticism found recurrent themes in the evocation or criticism of the past, the cult of "
sensibility
Sensibility refers to an acute perception of or responsiveness toward something, such as the emotions of another. This concept emerged in eighteenth-century Britain, and was closely associated with studies of sense perception as the means thro ...
" with its emphasis on women and children, the isolation of the artist or narrator, and respect for nature. Furthermore, several romantic authors, such as
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (; Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is wid ...
and
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864) was an American novelist and short story writer. His works often focus on history, morality, and religion.
He was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, from a family long associated with that t ...
, based their writings on the
supernatural/
occult and human
psychology
Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between ...
. Romanticism tended to regard
satire
Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of shaming ...
as something unworthy of serious attention, a prejudice still influential today. The Romantic movement in literature was preceded by the
Enlightenment and succeeded by
Realism
Realism, Realistic, or Realists may refer to:
In the arts
*Realism (arts), the general attempt to depict subjects truthfully in different forms of the arts
Arts movements related to realism include:
*Classical Realism
*Literary realism, a move ...
.
Some authors cite 16th-century poet
Isabella di Morra
Isabella di Morra (c. 1520 – 1545/1546) was an Italian poet of the Renaissance. An unknown figure in her lifetime, she was forced by her brothers to live in isolation, which estranged her from courts and literary salons. While living in so ...
as an early precursor of Romantic literature. Her lyrics covering themes of isolation and loneliness, which reflected the tragic events of her life, are considered "an impressive prefigurement of Romanticism", differing from the
Petrarch
Francesco Petrarca (; 20 July 1304 – 18/19 July 1374), commonly anglicized as Petrarch (), was a scholar and poet of early Renaissance Italy, and one of the earliest humanists.
Petrarch's rediscovery of Cicero's letters is often credited ...
ist fashion of the time based on the
philosophy of love.
The precursors of Romanticism in English poetry go back to the middle of the 18th century, including figures such as
Joseph Warton
Joseph Warton (April 1722 – 23 February 1800) was an English academic and literary critic.
He was born in Dunsfold, Surrey, England, but his family soon moved to Hampshire, where his father, the Reverend Thomas Warton, became vicar of B ...
(headmaster at
Winchester College
Winchester College is a public school (fee-charging independent day and boarding school) in Winchester, Hampshire, England. It was founded by William of Wykeham in 1382 and has existed in its present location ever since. It is the oldest of ...
) and his brother
Thomas Warton
Thomas Warton (9 January 172821 May 1790) was an English literary historian, critic, and poet. He was appointed Poet Laureate in 1785, following the death of William Whitehead.
He is sometimes called ''Thomas Warton the younger'' to disti ...
,
Professor of Poetry
The Professor of Poetry is an academic appointment at the University of Oxford. The chair was created in 1708 by an endowment from the estate of Henry Birkhead. The professorship carries an obligation to lecture, but is in effect a part-time po ...
at
Oxford University
Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to th ...
.
[John Keats. By Sidney Colvin, p. 106. Elibron Classics] Joseph maintained that invention and imagination were the chief qualities of a poet. The Scottish poet
James Macpherson
James Macpherson (Gaelic: ''Seumas MacMhuirich'' or ''Seumas Mac a' Phearsain''; 27 October 1736 – 17 February 1796) was a Scottish writer, poet, literary collector and politician, known as the "translator" of the Ossian cycle of epic poem ...
influenced the early development of Romanticism with the international success of his
Ossian cycle of poems published in 1762, inspiring both
Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, and critic. His works include plays, poetry, literature, and aesthetic criticism, as well as tr ...
and the young
Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832), was a Scottish novelist, poet, playwright and historian. Many of his works remain classics of European and Scottish literature, notably the novels '' Ivanhoe'', '' Rob Roy ...
.
Thomas Chatterton
Thomas Chatterton (20 November 1752 – 24 August 1770) was an English poet whose precocious talents ended in suicide at age 17. He was an influence on Romantic artists of the period such as Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth and Coleridge.
Altho ...
is generally considered the first Romantic poet in English.
[Thomas Chatterton, Grevel Lindop, 1972, Fyffield Books, p. 11] Both Chatterton and Macpherson's work involved elements of fraud, as what they claimed was earlier literature that they had discovered or compiled was, in fact, entirely their own work. The
Gothic novel, beginning with
Horace Walpole's ''
The Castle of Otranto
''The Castle of Otranto'' is a novel by Horace Walpole. First published in 1764, it is generally regarded as the first gothic novel. In the second edition, Walpole applied the word 'Gothic' to the novel in the subtitle – ''A Gothic Story''. Se ...
'' (1764), was an important precursor of one strain of Romanticism, with a delight in horror and threat, and exotic picturesque settings, matched in Walpole's case by his role in the early
revival of Gothic architecture. ''
Tristram Shandy Tristram may refer to:
Literature
* the title character of ''The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman'', a novel by Laurence Sterne
* the title character of '' Tristram of Lyonesse'', an epic poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne
*"Tristr ...
'', a novel by
Laurence Sterne
Laurence Sterne (24 November 1713 – 18 March 1768), was an Anglo-Irish novelist and Anglican cleric who wrote the novels ''The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman'' and '' A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy'', publishe ...
(1759–67), introduced a whimsical version of the anti-rational
sentimental novel
The sentimental novel or the novel of sensibility is an 18th-century literary genre which celebrates the emotional and intellectual concepts of sentiment, sentimentalism, and sensibility. Sentimentalism, which is to be distinguished from sens ...
to the English literary public.
Germany
![Des Knaben Wunderhorn III (1808)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b5/Des_Knaben_Wunderhorn_III_%281808%29.jpg)
An early German influence came from
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, and critic. His works include plays, poetry, literature, and aesthetic criticism, as well as t ...
, whose 1774 novel ''
The Sorrows of Young Werther
''The Sorrows of Young Werther'' (; german: Die Leiden des jungen Werthers) is a 1774 epistolary novel by Johann Wolfgang Goethe, which appeared as a revised edition in 1787. It was one of the main novels in the '' Sturm und Drang'' period in Ge ...
'' had young men throughout Europe emulating its protagonist, a young artist with a very sensitive and passionate temperament. At that time Germany was a multitude of small separate states, and Goethe's works would have a seminal influence in developing a unifying sense of
nationalism
Nationalism is an idea and movement that holds that the nation should be congruent with the state. As a movement, nationalism tends to promote the interests of a particular nation (as in a group of people), Smith, Anthony. ''Nationalism: The ...
. Another philosophic influence came from the German idealism of
Johann Gottlieb Fichte and
Friedrich Schelling
Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (; 27 January 1775 – 20 August 1854), later (after 1812) von Schelling, was a German philosopher. Standard histories of philosophy make him the midpoint in the development of German idealism, situating him be ...
, making
Jena
Jena () is a German city and the second largest city in Thuringia. Together with the nearby cities of Erfurt and Weimar, it forms the central metropolitan area of Thuringia with approximately 500,000 inhabitants, while the city itself has a po ...
(where Fichte lived, as well as Schelling,
Hegel,
Schiller and the
brothers
A brother is a man or boy who shares one or more parents with another; a male sibling. The female counterpart is a sister. Although the term typically refers to a familial relationship, it is sometimes used endearingly to refer to non-familia ...
Schlegel
Schlegel is a German occupational surname. Notable people with the surname include:
* Anthony Schlegel (born 1981), former American football linebacker
* August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845), German poet, older brother of Friedrich
* Brad Schlege ...
) a centre for early
German Romanticism (see
Jena Romanticism
Jena Romanticism (german: Jenaer Romantik; also the Jena Romantics or Early Romanticism (''Frühromantik'')) is the first phase of Romanticism in German literature represented by the work of a group centred in Jena from about 1798 to 1804. The move ...
). Important writers were
Ludwig Tieck
Johann Ludwig Tieck (; ; 31 May 177328 April 1853) was a German poet, fiction writer, translator, and critic. He was one of the founding fathers of the Romantic movement in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Early life
Tieck was born in B ...
,
Novalis
Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg (2 May 1772 – 25 March 1801), pen name Novalis (), was a German polymath who was a writer, philosopher, poet, aristocrat and mystic. He is regarded as an idiosyncratic and influential figure of ...
,
Heinrich von Kleist
Bernd Heinrich Wilhelm von Kleist (18 October 177721 November 1811) was a German poet, dramatist, novelist, short story writer and journalist. His best known works are the theatre plays '' Das Käthchen von Heilbronn'', ''The Broken Jug'', ''Amph ...
and
Friedrich Hölderlin
Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin (, ; ; 20 March 1770 – 7 June 1843) was a German poet and philosopher. Described by Norbert von Hellingrath as "the most German of Germans", Hölderlin was a key figure of German Romanticism. Part ...
.
Heidelberg
Heidelberg (; Palatine German language, Palatine German: ''Heidlberg'') is a city in the States of Germany, German state of Baden-Württemberg, situated on the river Neckar in south-west Germany. As of the 2016 census, its population was 159,914 ...
later became a centre of German Romanticism, where writers and poets such as
Clemens Brentano
Clemens Wenzeslaus Brentano (also Klemens; pseudonym: Clemens Maria Brentano ; ; 9 September 1778 – 28 July 1842) was a German poet and novelist, and a major figure of German Romanticism. He was the uncle, via his brother Christian, of Franz ...
,
Achim von Arnim
Carl Joachim Friedrich Ludwig von Arnim (26 January 1781 – 21 January 1831), better known as Achim von Arnim, was a German poet, novelist, and together with Clemens Brentano and Joseph von Eichendorff, a leading figure of German Romanticism.
...
, and
Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff
Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff (10 March 178826 November 1857) was a German poet, novelist, playwright, literary critic, translator, and anthologist. Eichendorff was one of the major writers and critics of Romanticism.Cf. J. A. Cuddon: ' ...
(''
Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts
''Memoirs of a Good-for-Nothing'' (german: Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts, ) is a novella by Joseph von Eichendorff. Completed in 1823, it was first printed in 1826. The work is regarded as a pinnacle of musical prose. Eichendorff created an open ...
'') met regularly in literary circles.
Important motifs in German Romanticism are travelling, nature, for example the
German Forest
The German Forest (german: Deutscher Wald) was a phrase used both as a metaphor as well as to describe in exaggerated terms an idyllic landscape in German poems, fairy tales and legends of the early 19th-century Romantic period. Historical and ...
, and
Germanic myths. The later German Romanticism of, for example
E. T. A. Hoffmann's ''
Der Sandmann
"The Sandman" ( German: ''Der Sandmann'') is a short story by . It was the first in an 1817 book of stories titled ''Die Nachtstücke'' (''The Night Pieces'').
Plot summary
The story is told by a narrator who claims to have known Lothar. It beg ...
'' (''The Sandman''), 1817, and
Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff
Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff (10 March 178826 November 1857) was a German poet, novelist, playwright, literary critic, translator, and anthologist. Eichendorff was one of the major writers and critics of Romanticism.Cf. J. A. Cuddon: ' ...
's ''
Das Marmorbild'' (''The Marble Statue''), 1819, was darker in its motifs and has
gothic
Gothic or Gothics may refer to:
People and languages
*Goths or Gothic people, the ethnonym of a group of East Germanic tribes
**Gothic language, an extinct East Germanic language spoken by the Goths
**Crimean Gothic, the Gothic language spoken b ...
elements. The significance to Romanticism of childhood innocence, the importance of imagination, and racial theories all combined to give an unprecedented importance to
folk literature
Oral literature, orature or folk literature is a genre of literature that is spoken or sung as opposed to that which is written, though much oral literature has been transcribed. There is no standard definition, as anthropologists have used vary ...
, non-classical
mythology
Myth is a folklore genre consisting of narratives that play a fundamental role in a society, such as foundational tales or origin myths. Since "myth" is widely used to imply that a story is not objectively true, the identification of a narra ...
and
children's literature
Children's literature or juvenile literature includes stories, books, magazines, and poems that are created for children. Modern children's literature is classified in two different ways: genre or the intended age of the reader.
Children's ...
, above all in Germany. Brentano and von Arnim were significant literary figures who together published ''
Des Knaben Wunderhorn
''Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Alte deutsche Lieder'' (German; "The boy's magic horn: old German songs") is a collection of German folk poems and songs edited by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, and published in Heidelberg, Baden. The book was p ...
'' ("The Boy's Magic Horn" or
cornucopia
In classical antiquity, the cornucopia (), from Latin ''cornu'' (horn) and ''copia'' (abundance), also called the horn of plenty, was a symbol of abundance and nourishment, commonly a large horn-shaped container overflowing with produce, flowers ...
), a collection of versified folk tales, in 1806–08. The first collection of ''
Grimms' Fairy Tales
''Grimms' Fairy Tales'', originally known as the ''Children's and Household Tales'' (german: Kinder- und Hausmärchen, lead=yes, ), is a German collection of fairy tales by the Grimm brothers or "Brothers Grimm", Jacob and Wilhelm, first publi ...
'' by the
Brothers Grimm
The Brothers Grimm ( or ), Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm (1786–1859), were a brother duo of German academics, philologists, cultural researchers, lexicographers, and authors who together collected and published folklore. They are among the ...
was published in 1812. Unlike the much later work of
Hans Christian Andersen, who was publishing his invented tales in Danish from 1835, these German works were at least mainly based on collected
folk tales, and the Grimms remained true to the style of the telling in their early editions, though later rewriting some parts. One of the brothers,
Jacob
Jacob (; ; ar, يَعْقُوب, Yaʿqūb; gr, Ἰακώβ, Iakṓb), later given the name Israel, is regarded as a patriarch of the Israelites and is an important figure in Abrahamic religions, such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. J ...
, published in 1835 ''
Deutsche Mythologie
''Deutsche Mythologie'' (, ''Teutonic Mythology'') is a treatise on Germanic mythology by Jacob Grimm. First published in Germany in 1835, the work is an exhaustive treatment of the subject, tracing the mythology and beliefs of the ancient Germani ...
'', a long academic work on Germanic mythology. Another strain is exemplified by Schiller's highly emotional language and the depiction of physical violence in his play ''
The Robbers
''The Robbers'' (', ) is the first drama by German playwright Friedrich Schiller. The play was published in 1781 and premiered on 13 January 1782 in Mannheim, Germany, and was inspired by Leisewitz' earlier play '' Julius of Taranto''. It ...
'' of 1781.
Great Britain
![Wordsworth on Helvellyn by Benjamin Robert Haydon](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8c/Wordsworth_on_Helvellyn_by_Benjamin_Robert_Haydon.jpg)
In
English literature, the key figures of the Romantic movement are considered to be the group of poets including
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth (7 April 177023 April 1850) was an English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication '' Lyrical Ballads'' (1798).
Wordsworth's ' ...
,
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (; 21 October 177225 July 1834) was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher, and theologian who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake ...
,
John Keats,
Lord Byron
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), known simply as Lord Byron, was an English romantic poet and peer. He was one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement, and has been regarded as among the ...
,
Percy Bysshe Shelley and the much older
William Blake
William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his life, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. ...
, followed later by the isolated figure of
John Clare
John Clare (13 July 1793 – 20 May 1864) was an English poet. The son of a farm labourer, he became known for his celebrations of the English countryside and sorrows at its disruption. His work underwent major re-evaluation in the late 20th ce ...
; also such novelists as
Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832), was a Scottish novelist, poet, playwright and historian. Many of his works remain classics of European and Scottish literature, notably the novels '' Ivanhoe'', '' Rob Roy ...
from Scotland and
Mary Shelley
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (; ; 30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel '' Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus'' (1818), which is considered an early example of science fiction. She also ...
, and the essayists
William Hazlitt
William Hazlitt (10 April 177818 September 1830) was an English essayist, drama and literary critic, painter, social commentator, and philosopher. He is now considered one of the greatest critics and essayists in the history of the English lan ...
and
Charles Lamb
Charles Lamb (10 February 1775 – 27 December 1834) was an English essayist, poet, and antiquarian, best known for his '' Essays of Elia'' and for the children's book '' Tales from Shakespeare'', co-authored with his sister, Mary Lamb (1764 ...
. The publication in 1798 of ''
Lyrical Ballads
''Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems'' is a collection of poems by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798 and generally considered to have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literatu ...
'', with many of the finest poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge, is often held to mark the start of the movement. The majority of the poems were by Wordsworth, and many dealt with the lives of the poor in his native
Lake District, or his feelings about nature—which he more fully developed in his long poem ''
The Prelude
''The Prelude or, Growth of a Poet's Mind; An Autobiographical Poem '' is an autobiographical poem in blank verse by the English poet William Wordsworth. Intended as the introduction to the more philosophical poem ''The Recluse,'' which Wordsw ...
'', never published in his lifetime. The longest poem in the volume was Coleridge's ''
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
''The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'' (originally ''The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere'') is the longest major poem by the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, written in 1797–1798 and published in 1798 in the first edition of ''Lyrical Ballad ...
'', which showed the Gothic side of English Romanticism, and the exotic settings that many works featured. In the period when they were writing, the
Lake Poets
The Lake Poets were a group of English poets who all lived in the Lake District of England, United Kingdom, in the first half of the nineteenth century. As a group, they followed no single "school" of thought or literary practice then known. They ...
were widely regarded as a marginal group of radicals, though they were supported by the critic and writer
William Hazlitt
William Hazlitt (10 April 177818 September 1830) was an English essayist, drama and literary critic, painter, social commentator, and philosopher. He is now considered one of the greatest critics and essayists in the history of the English lan ...
and others.
![Byron 1813 by Phillips](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3c/Byron_1813_by_Phillips.jpg)
In contrast,
Lord Byron
George Gordon Byron, 6th Baron Byron (22 January 1788 – 19 April 1824), known simply as Lord Byron, was an English romantic poet and peer. He was one of the leading figures of the Romantic movement, and has been regarded as among the ...
and
Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832), was a Scottish novelist, poet, playwright and historian. Many of his works remain classics of European and Scottish literature, notably the novels '' Ivanhoe'', '' Rob Roy ...
achieved enormous fame and influence throughout Europe with works exploiting the violence and drama of their exotic and historical settings; Goethe called Byron "undoubtedly the greatest genius of our century". Scott achieved immediate success with his long narrative poem ''
The Lay of the Last Minstrel
''The Lay of the Last Minstrel'' (1805) is a narrative poem in six cantos with copious antiquarian notes by Walter Scott. Set in the Scottish Borders in the mid-16th century, it is represented within the work as being sung by a minstrel late i ...
'' in 1805, followed by the full
epic poem
An epic poem, or simply an epic, is a lengthy narrative poem typically about the extraordinary deeds of extraordinary characters who, in dealings with gods or other superhuman forces, gave shape to the mortal universe for their descendants.
...
''
Marmion'' in 1808. Both were set in the distant Scottish past, already evoked in ''Ossian'';
Romanticism and Scotland were to have a long and fruitful partnership. Byron had equal success with the first part of ''
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage'' in 1812, followed by four "Turkish tales", all in the form of long poems, starting with ''
The Giaour
''The Giaour'' is a poem by Lord Byron first published in 1813 by John Murray and printed by Thomas Davison. It was the first in the series of Byron's Oriental romances. ''The Giaour'' proved to be a great success when published, consolidati ...
'' in 1813, drawing from his
Grand Tour
The Grand Tour was the principally 17th- to early 19th-century custom of a traditional trip through Europe, with Italy as a key destination, undertaken by upper-class young European men of sufficient means and rank (typically accompanied by a tut ...
, which had reached Ottoman Europe, and
orientalizing the themes of the Gothic novel in verse. These featured different variations of the "
Byronic hero
The Byronic hero is a variant of the Romantic hero as a type of character, named after the English Romantic poet Lord Byron. Both Byron's own persona as well as characters from his writings are considered to provide defining features to the char ...
", and his own life contributed a further version. Scott meanwhile was effectively inventing the
historical novel, beginning in 1814 with ''
Waverley Waverley may refer to:
Arts and entertainment
* ''Waverley'' (novel), by Sir Walter Scott
** ''Waverley'' Overture, a work by Hector Berlioz inspired by Scott's novel
* Waverley Harrison, a character in the New Zealand soap opera ''Shortland Stree ...
'', set in the
1745 Jacobite rising, which was a highly profitable success, followed by over 20 further
Waverley Novels
The Waverley Novels are a long series of novels by Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832). For nearly a century, they were among the most popular and widely read novels in Europe.
Because Scott did not publicly acknowledge authorship until 1827, the se ...
over the next 17 years, with settings going back to the
Crusades
The Crusades were a series of religious wars initiated, supported, and sometimes directed by the Latin Church in the medieval period. The best known of these Crusades are those to the Holy Land in the period between 1095 and 1291 that were ...
that he had researched to a degree that was new in literature.
In contrast to Germany, Romanticism in English literature had little connection with nationalism, and the Romantics were often regarded with suspicion for the sympathy many felt for the ideals of the
French Revolution
The French Revolution ( ) was a period of radical political and societal change in France that began with the Estates General of 1789 and ended with the formation of the French Consulate in coup of 18 Brumaire, November 1799. Many of its ...
, whose collapse and replacement with the dictatorship of Napoleon was, as elsewhere in Europe, a shock to the movement. Though his novels celebrated Scottish identity and history, Scott was politically a firm Unionist, but admitted to Jacobite sympathies. Several Romantics spent much time abroad, and a famous stay on
Lake Geneva
, image = Lake Geneva by Sentinel-2.jpg
, caption = Satellite image
, image_bathymetry =
, caption_bathymetry =
, location = Switzerland, France
, coords =
, lake_type = Glacial la ...
with Byron and Shelley in 1816 produced the hugely influential novel ''
Frankenstein
''Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus'' is an 1818 novel written by English author Mary Shelley. ''Frankenstein'' tells the story of Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who creates a sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific ...
'' by Shelley's wife-to-be
Mary Shelley
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (; ; 30 August 1797 – 1 February 1851) was an English novelist who wrote the Gothic novel '' Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus'' (1818), which is considered an early example of science fiction. She also ...
and the
novella ''
The Vampyre
"The Vampyre" is a short work of prose fiction written in 1819 by John William Polidori taken from the story Lord Byron told as part of a contest among Polidori, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley. The same contest produced the novel '' ...
'' by Byron's doctor
John William Polidori. The lyrics of
Robert Burns
Robert Burns (25 January 175921 July 1796), also known familiarly as Rabbie Burns, was a Scottish poet and lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland and is celebrated worldwide. He is the best known of the poets who hav ...
in Scotland, and
Thomas Moore
Thomas Moore (28 May 1779 – 25 February 1852) was an Irish writer, poet, and lyricist celebrated for his ''Irish Melodies''. Their setting of English-language verse to old Irish tunes marked the transition in popular Irish culture from Irish ...
from Ireland, reflected in different ways their countries and the Romantic interest in folk literature, but neither had a fully Romantic approach to life or their work.
Though they have modern critical champions such as
György Lukács
György Lukács (born György Bernát Löwinger; hu, szegedi Lukács György Bernát; german: Georg Bernard Baron Lukács von Szegedin; 13 April 1885 – 4 June 1971) was a Hungarian Marxist philosopher, literary historian, critic, and aesth ...
, Scott's novels are today more likely to be experienced in the form of the many operas that composers continued to base on them over the following decades, such as
Donizetti
Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti (29 November 1797 – 8 April 1848) was an Italian composer, best known for his almost 70 operas. Along with Gioachino Rossini and Vincenzo Bellini, he was a leading composer of the ''bel canto'' opera style duri ...
's ''
Lucia di Lammermoor
''Lucia di Lammermoor'' () is a (tragic opera) in three acts by Italian composer Gaetano Donizetti. Salvadore Cammarano wrote the Italian-language libretto loosely based upon Sir Walter Scott's 1819 historical novel '' The Bride of Lammermoo ...
'' and
Vincenzo Bellini
Vincenzo Salvatore Carmelo Francesco Bellini (; 3 November 1801 – 23 September 1835) was a Sicilian opera composer, who was known for his long-flowing melodic lines for which he was named "the Swan of Catania".
Many years later, in 1898, Gius ...
's ''
I puritani
' (''The Puritans'') is an 1835 opera by Vincenzo Bellini. It was originally written in two acts and later changed to three acts on the advice of Gioachino Rossini, with whom the young composer had become friends. The music was set to a libretto ...
'' (both 1835). Byron is now most highly regarded for his short lyrics and his generally unromantic prose writings, especially his letters, and his unfinished
satire
Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of shaming ...
''
Don Juan
Don Juan (), also known as Don Giovanni ( Italian), is a legendary, fictional Spanish libertine who devotes his life to seducing women. Famous versions of the story include a 17th-century play, ''El burlador de Sevilla y convidado de piedra'' ...
''. Unlike many Romantics, Byron's widely publicised personal life appeared to match his work, and his death at 36 in 1824 from disease when helping the
Greek War of Independence appeared from a distance to be a suitably Romantic end, entrenching his legend. Keats in 1821 and Shelley in 1822 both died in Italy, Blake (at almost 70) in 1827, and Coleridge largely ceased to write in the 1820s. Wordsworth was by 1820 respectable and highly regarded, holding a government
sinecure, but wrote relatively little. In the discussion of English literature, the Romantic period is often regarded as finishing around the 1820s, or sometimes even earlier, although many authors of the succeeding decades were no less committed to Romantic values.
The most significant novelist in English during the peak Romantic period, other than Walter Scott, was
Jane Austen, whose essentially conservative world-view had little in common with her Romantic contemporaries, retaining a strong belief in decorum and social rules, though critics such as
Claudia L. Johnson have detected tremors under the surface of many works, such as ''
Northanger Abbey
''Northanger Abbey'' () is a coming-of-age novel and a satire of Gothic novels written by Jane Austen. Austen was also influenced by Charlotte Lennox's '' The Female Quixote'' (1752). ''Northanger Abbey'' was completed in 1803, the first of ...
'' (1817), ''
Mansfield Park
''Mansfield Park'' is the third published novel by Jane Austen, first published in 1814 by Thomas Egerton. A second edition was published in 1816 by John Murray, still within Austen's lifetime. The novel did not receive any public reviews unt ...
'' (1814) and ''
Persuasion'' (1817). But around the mid-century the undoubtedly Romantic novels of the
Yorkshire
Yorkshire ( ; abbreviated Yorks), formally known as the County of York, is a historic county in northern England and by far the largest in the United Kingdom. Because of its large area in comparison with other English counties, functions have ...
-based
Brontë family
The Brontës () were a nineteenth-century literary family, born in the village of Thornton and later associated with the village of Haworth in the West Riding of Yorkshire, England. The sisters, Charlotte (1816–1855), Emily (1818–184 ...
appeared. Most notably
Charlotte
Charlotte ( ) is the most populous city in the U.S. state of North Carolina. Located in the Piedmont region, it is the county seat of Mecklenburg County. The population was 874,579 at the 2020 census, making Charlotte the 16th-most populo ...
's ''
Jane Eyre
''Jane Eyre'' ( ; originally published as ''Jane Eyre: An Autobiography'') is a novel by the English writer Charlotte Brontë. It was published under her pen name "Currer Bell" on 19 October 1847 by Smith, Elder & Co. of London. The first ...
'' and
Emily's ''
Wuthering Heights
''Wuthering Heights'' is an 1847 novel by Emily Brontë, initially published under her pen name Ellis Bell. It concerns two families of the landed gentry living on the West Yorkshire moors, the Earnshaws and the Lintons, and their turbulent re ...
'', both published in 1847, which also introduced more Gothic themes. While these two novels were written and published after the Romantic period is said to have ended, their novels were heavily influenced by Romantic literature they had read as children.
Byron, Keats and Shelley all wrote for the stage, but with little success in England, with Shelley's ''
The Cenci
''The Cenci, A Tragedy, in Five Acts'' (1819) is a verse drama in five acts by Percy Bysshe Shelley written in the summer of 1819, and inspired by a real Italian family, the House of Cenci (in particular, Beatrice Cenci, pronounced CHEN-chee). ...
'' perhaps the best work produced, though that was not played in a public theatre in England until a century after his death. Byron's plays, along with dramatizations of his poems and Scott's novels, were much more popular on the Continent, and especially in France, and through these versions several were turned into operas, many still performed today. If contemporary poets had little success on the stage, the period was a legendary one for performances of
Shakespeare
William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's natio ...
, and went some way to restoring his original texts and removing the Augustan "improvements" to them. The greatest actor of the period,
Edmund Kean
Edmund Kean (4 November 178715 May 1833) was a celebrated British Shakespearean stage actor born in England, who performed, among other places, in London, Belfast, New York, Quebec, and Paris. He was known for his short stature, tumultuo ...
, restored the tragic ending to ''
King Lear
''King Lear'' is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare.
It is based on the mythological Leir of Britain. King Lear, in preparation for his old age, divides his power and land between two of his daughters. He becomes destitute and insane ...
''; Coleridge said that, "Seeing him act was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning."
Scotland
![PG 1063Burns Naysmith](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/aa/PG_1063Burns_Naysmith.jpg)
Although after
union with England in 1707 Scotland increasingly adopted English language and wider cultural norms, its literature developed a distinct national identity and began to enjoy an international reputation.
Allan Ramsay (1686–1758) laid the foundations of a reawakening of interest in older Scottish literature, as well as leading the trend for pastoral poetry, helping to develop the
Habbie stanza The Burns stanza is a verse form named after the Scottish poet Robert Burns, who used it in some fifty poems. It was not, however, invented by Burns, and prior to his use of it was known as the standard Habbie, after the piper Habbie Simpson (1550 ...
as a
poetic form
Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in a ...
.
James Macpherson
James Macpherson (Gaelic: ''Seumas MacMhuirich'' or ''Seumas Mac a' Phearsain''; 27 October 1736 – 17 February 1796) was a Scottish writer, poet, literary collector and politician, known as the "translator" of the Ossian cycle of epic poem ...
(1736–96) was the first Scottish poet to gain an international reputation. Claiming to have found poetry written by the ancient bard
Ossian, he published translations that acquired international popularity, being proclaimed as a Celtic equivalent of the
Classical epics
The Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) is a set of software tools and applications used to develop and implement distributed control systems to operate devices such as particle accelerators, telescopes and other large sci ...
. ''Fingal'', written in 1762, was speedily translated into many European languages, and its appreciation of natural beauty and treatment of the ancient legend has been credited more than any single work with bringing about the Romantic movement in European, and especially in German literature, through its influence on
Johann Gottfried von Herder
Johann Gottfried von Herder ( , ; 25 August 174418 December 1803) was a German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic. He is associated with the Enlightenment, '' Sturm und Drang'', and Weimar Classicism.
Biography
Born in Mohrun ...
and
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German poet, playwright, novelist, scientist, statesman, theatre director, and critic. His works include plays, poetry, literature, and aesthetic criticism, as well as t ...
. It was also popularised in France by figures that included
Napoleon
Napoleon Bonaparte ; it, Napoleone Bonaparte, ; co, Napulione Buonaparte. (born Napoleone Buonaparte; 15 August 1769 – 5 May 1821), later known by his regnal name Napoleon I, was a French military commander and political leader who ...
. Eventually it became clear that the poems were not direct translations from
Scottish Gaelic
Scottish Gaelic ( gd, Gàidhlig ), also known as Scots Gaelic and Gaelic, is a Goidelic language (in the Celtic branch of the Indo-European language family) native to the Gaels of Scotland. As a Goidelic language, Scottish Gaelic, as well ...
, but flowery adaptations made to suit the aesthetic expectations of his audience.
Robert Burns
Robert Burns (25 January 175921 July 1796), also known familiarly as Rabbie Burns, was a Scottish poet and lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland and is celebrated worldwide. He is the best known of the poets who hav ...
(1759–96) and
Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832), was a Scottish novelist, poet, playwright and historian. Many of his works remain classics of European and Scottish literature, notably the novels '' Ivanhoe'', '' Rob Roy ...
(1771–1832) were highly influenced by the Ossian cycle. Burns, an Ayrshire poet and lyricist, is widely regarded as the
national poet
A national poet or national bard is a poet held by tradition and popular acclaim to represent the identity, beliefs and principles of a particular national culture. The national poet as culture hero is a long-standing symbo ...
of Scotland and a major influence on the Romantic movement. His poem (and song) "
Auld Lang Syne" is often sung at
Hogmanay (the last day of the year), and "
Scots Wha Hae
"Scots Wha Hae" (English: ''Scots Who Have''; gd, Brosnachadh Bhruis) is a patriotic song of Scotland written using both words of the Scots language and English, which served for centuries as an unofficial national anthem of the country, but h ...
" served for a long time as an unofficial
national anthem
A national anthem is a patriotic musical composition symbolizing and evoking eulogies of the history and traditions of a country or nation. The majority of national anthems are marches or hymns in style. American, Central Asian, and Europea ...
of the country. Scott began as a poet and also collected and published Scottish ballads. His first prose work, ''
Waverley Waverley may refer to:
Arts and entertainment
* ''Waverley'' (novel), by Sir Walter Scott
** ''Waverley'' Overture, a work by Hector Berlioz inspired by Scott's novel
* Waverley Harrison, a character in the New Zealand soap opera ''Shortland Stree ...
'' in 1814, is often called the first historical novel. It launched a highly successful career, with other historical novels such as ''
Rob Roy'' (1817), ''
The Heart of Midlothian
''The Heart of Mid-Lothian'' is the seventh of Sir Walter Scott's Waverley Novels. It was originally published in four volumes on 25 July 1818, under the title of '' Tales of My Landlord, 2nd series'', and the author was given as "Jedediah Cle ...
'' (1818) and ''
Ivanhoe'' (1820). Scott probably did more than any other figure to define and popularise Scottish cultural identity in the nineteenth century. Other major literary figures connected with Romanticism include the poets and novelists
James Hogg
James Hogg (1770 – 21 November 1835) was a Scottish poet, novelist and essayist who wrote in both Scots and English. As a young man he worked as a shepherd and farmhand, and was largely self-educated through reading. He was a friend of many ...
(1770–1835),
Allan Cunningham (1784–1842) and
John Galt
John Galt () is a character in Ayn Rand's novel ''Atlas Shrugged'' (1957). Although he is not identified by name until the last third of the novel, he is the object of its often-repeated question "Who is John Galt?" and of the quest to discover ...
(1779–1839).
![Sir Henry Raeburn - Portrait of Sir Walter Scott](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/Sir_Henry_Raeburn_-_Portrait_of_Sir_Walter_Scott.jpg)
Scotland was also the location of two of the most important literary magazines of the era, ''
The Edinburgh Review
The ''Edinburgh Review'' is the title of four distinct intellectual and cultural magazines. The best known, longest-lasting, and most influential of the four was the third, which was published regularly from 1802 to 1929.
''Edinburgh Review'' ...
'' (founded in 1802) and ''
Blackwood's Magazine
''Blackwood's Magazine'' was a British magazine and miscellany printed between 1817 and 1980. It was founded by the publisher William Blackwood and was originally called the ''Edinburgh Monthly Magazine''. The first number appeared in April 1817 ...
'' (founded in 1817), which had a major impact on the development of British literature and drama in the era of Romanticism. Ian Duncan and Alex Benchimol suggest that publications like the novels of Scott and these magazines were part of a highly dynamic Scottish Romanticism that by the early nineteenth century, caused Edinburgh to emerge as the cultural capital of Britain and become central to a wider formation of a "British Isles nationalism".
Scottish "national drama" emerged in the early 1800s, as plays with specifically Scottish themes began to dominate the Scottish stage. Theatres had been discouraged by the
Church of Scotland
The Church of Scotland ( sco, The Kirk o Scotland; gd, Eaglais na h-Alba) is the national church in Scotland.
The Church of Scotland was principally shaped by John Knox, in the Reformation of 1560, when it split from the Catholic Church ...
and fears of Jacobite assemblies. In the later eighteenth century, many plays were written for and performed by small amateur companies and were not published and so most have been lost. Towards the end of the century there were "
closet drama
A closet drama is a play that is not intended to be performed onstage, but read by a solitary reader or sometimes out loud in a large group. The contrast between closet drama and classic "stage" dramas dates back to the late eighteenth century. Al ...
s", primarily designed to be read, rather than performed, including work by Scott, Hogg, Galt and
Joanna Baillie
Joanna Baillie (11 September 1762 – 23 February 1851) was a Scottish poet and dramatist, known for such works as ''Plays on the Passions'' (three volumes, 1798–1812) and ''Fugitive Verses'' (1840). Her work shows an interest in moral philoso ...
(1762–1851), often influenced by the ballad tradition and
Gothic
Gothic or Gothics may refer to:
People and languages
*Goths or Gothic people, the ethnonym of a group of East Germanic tribes
**Gothic language, an extinct East Germanic language spoken by the Goths
**Crimean Gothic, the Gothic language spoken b ...
Romanticism.
[I. Brown, ''The Edinburgh History of Scottish Literature: Enlightenment, Britain and Empire (1707–1918)'' (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), , pp. 229–30.]
France
Romanticism was relatively late in developing
in French literature, more so than in the visual arts. The 18th-century precursor to Romanticism, the cult of sensibility, had become associated with the ''
Ancien Régime
''Ancien'' may refer to
* the French word for "ancient, old"
** Société des anciens textes français
* the French for "former, senior"
** Virelai ancien
** Ancien Régime
** Ancien Régime in France
''Ancien'' may refer to
* the French word for ...
'', and the French Revolution had been more of an inspiration to foreign writers than those experiencing it at first-hand. The first major figure was
François-René de Chateaubriand
François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand (4 September 1768 – 4 July 1848) was a French writer, politician, diplomat and historian who had a notable influence on French literature of the nineteenth century. Descended from an old aristocrati ...
, an aristocrat who had remained a royalist throughout the Revolution, and returned to France from exile in England and America under Napoleon, with whose regime he had an uneasy relationship. His writings, all in prose, included some fiction, such as his influential
novella of exile ''
René
René ('' born again'' or ''reborn'' in French) is a common first name in French-speaking, Spanish-speaking, and German-speaking countries. It derives from the Latin name Renatus.
René is the masculine form of the name ( Renée being the femin ...
'' (1802), which anticipated Byron in its alienated hero, but mostly contemporary history and politics, his travels, a defence of religion and the medieval spirit (''
Génie du christianisme
''The Genius of Christianity, or Beauties of the Christian Religion'' (french: Le Génie du christianisme, ou Beautés de la religion chrétienne, link=no) is a work by the French author François-René de Chateaubriand, written during his exile ...
'', 1802), and finally in the 1830s and 1840s his enormous
autobiography ''
Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe
''Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe'' () is the memoir of François-René de Chateaubriand (1768–1848), collected and published posthumously in two volumes in 1849 and 1850, respectively. Chateaubriand, a writer, politician, diplomat and historian, rema ...
'' ("Memoirs from beyond the grave").
![Jean-Jacques Grandville - Frenzied Romans at the First Performance of Hernani - WGA10359](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f4/Jean-Jacques_Grandville_-_Frenzied_Romans_at_the_First_Performance_of_Hernani_-_WGA10359.jpg)
After the
Bourbon Restoration, French Romanticism developed in the lively world of
Parisian theatre, with productions of
Shakespeare
William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's natio ...
, Schiller (in France a key Romantic author), and adaptations of Scott and Byron alongside French authors, several of whom began to write in the late 1820s. Cliques of pro- and anti-Romantics developed, and productions were often accompanied by raucous vocalizing by the two sides, including the shouted assertion by one theatregoer in 1822 that "Shakespeare, c'est l'aide-de-camp de Wellington" ("Shakespeare is
Wellington
Wellington ( mi, Te Whanganui-a-Tara or ) is the capital city of New Zealand. It is located at the south-western tip of the North Island, between Cook Strait and the Remutaka Range. Wellington is the second-largest city in New Zealand by metr ...
's
aide-de-camp").
Alexandre Dumas began as a dramatist, with a series of successes beginning with ''
Henri III et sa cour'' (1829) before turning to novels that were mostly historical adventures somewhat in the manner of Scott, most famously ''
The Three Musketeers
''The Three Musketeers'' (french: Les Trois Mousquetaires, links=no, ) is a French historical adventure novel written in 1844 by French author Alexandre Dumas. It is in the swashbuckler genre, which has heroic, chivalrous swordsmen who fight ...
'' and ''
The Count of Monte Cristo'', both of 1844.
Victor Hugo
Victor-Marie Hugo (; 26 February 1802 – 22 May 1885) was a French Romantic writer and politician. During a literary career that spanned more than sixty years, he wrote in a variety of genres and forms. He is considered to be one of the great ...
published as a poet in the 1820s before achieving success on the stage with ''
Hernani''—a historical drama in a quasi-Shakespearian style that had famously riotous performances on its first run in 1830. Like Dumas, Hugo is best known for his novels, and was already writing ''
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
''The Hunchback of Notre-Dame'' (french: Notre-Dame de Paris, translation=''Our Lady of Paris'', originally titled ''Notre-Dame de Paris. 1482'') is a French Gothic novel by Victor Hugo, published in 1831. It focuses on the unfortunate story of ...
'' (1831), one of the best known works, which became a paradigm of the French Romantic movement. The preface to his unperformed play ''Cromwell'' gives an important manifesto of French Romanticism, stating that "there are no rules, or models". The career of Prosper Mérimée followed a similar pattern; he is now best known as the originator of the story of ''Carmen (novella), Carmen'', with his novella published 1845. Alfred de Vigny remains best known as a dramatist, with his play on the life of the English poet ''Chatterton'' (1835) perhaps his best work. George Sand was a central figure of the Parisian literary scene, famous both for her novels and criticism and her affairs with Frédéric Chopin, Chopin and several others; she too was inspired by the theatre, and wrote works to be staged at her House of George Sand, private estate.
French Romantic poets of the 1830s to 1850s include Alfred de Musset, Gérard de Nerval, Alphonse de Lamartine and the flamboyant Théophile Gautier, whose prolific output in various forms continued until his death in 1872.
Stendhal is today probably the most highly regarded French novelist of the period, but he stands in a complex relation with Romanticism, and is notable for his penetrating psychological insight into his characters and his realism, qualities rarely prominent in Romantic fiction. As a survivor of the French French invasion of Russia#Retreat, retreat from Moscow in 1812, fantasies of heroism and adventure had little appeal for him, and like Goya he is often seen as a forerunner of Realism. His most important works are ''Le Rouge et le Noir'' (''The Red and the Black'', 1830) and ''La Chartreuse de Parme'' (''The Charterhouse of Parma'', 1839).
Poland
![Adam Mickiewicz](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/33/Adam_Mickiewicz.PNG)
Romanticism in Poland is often taken to begin with the publication of Adam Mickiewicz's first poems in 1822, and end with the crushing of the January Uprising of 1863 against the Russians. It was strongly marked by interest in Polish history. Polish Romanticism revived the old "Sarmatism" traditions of the ''szlachta'' or Polish nobility. Old traditions and customs were revived and portrayed in a positive light in the Polish messianic movement and in works of great Polish poets such as Adam Mickiewicz (''Pan Tadeusz''), Juliusz Słowacki and Zygmunt Krasiński. This close connection between Polish Romanticism and Polish history became one of the defining qualities of the literature of Romanticism in Poland, Polish Romanticism period, differentiating it from that of other countries. They had not suffered the loss of national statehood as was the case with Poland. Influenced by the general spirit and main ideas of European Romanticism, the literature of Polish Romanticism is unique, as many scholars have pointed out, in having developed largely outside of Poland and in its emphatic focus upon the issue of Polish
nationalism
Nationalism is an idea and movement that holds that the nation should be congruent with the state. As a movement, nationalism tends to promote the interests of a particular nation (as in a group of people), Smith, Anthony. ''Nationalism: The ...
. The Polish intelligentsia, along with leading members of its government, left Poland in the early 1830s, during what is referred to as the "Great Emigration", resettling in France, Germany, Great Britain, Turkey, and the United States.
![Juliusz Słowacki 1](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/Juliusz_S%C5%82owacki_1.PNG)
Their art featured wikt:emotionalism, emotionalism and Irrationalism and Aestheticism, irrationality, fantasy and imagination, personality cults, folklore and country life, and the propagation of ideals of freedom. In the second period, many of the Polish Romantics worked abroad, often banished from Poland by the occupying powers due to their politically subversive ideas. Their work became increasingly dominated by the ideals of political struggle for freedom and their country's sovereignty. Elements of mysticism became more prominent. There developed the idea of the ''Three Bards, poeta wieszcz'' (the prophet). The ''wieszcz'' (bard) functioned as spiritual leader to the nation fighting for its independence. The most notable poet so recognized was Adam Mickiewicz.
Zygmunt Krasiński also wrote to inspire political and religious hope in his countrymen. Unlike his predecessors, who called for victory at whatever price in Poland's struggle against Russia, Krasinski emphasized Poland's Spirituality, spiritual role in its fight for independence, advocating an intellectual rather than a military superiority. His works best exemplify the Messianism, Messianic movement in Poland: in two early dramas, ''Nie-boska komedia'' (1835; ''The Undivine Comedy'') and ''Irydion'' (1836; ''Iridion''), as well as in the later ''Psalmy przyszłości'' (1845), he asserted that Poland was the Christ of Europe: specifically chosen by God to carry the world's burdens, to suffer, and eventually be resurrected.
Russia
Early Russian Romanticism is associated with the writers Konstantin Batyushkov (''A Vision on the Shores of the Lethe'', 1809), Vasily Zhukovsky (''The Bard'', 1811; ''Svetlana'', 1813) and Nikolay Karamzin (''Poor Liza'', 1792; ''Julia'', 1796; ''Martha the Mayoress'', 1802; ''The Sensitive and the Cold'', 1803). However the principal exponent of Romanticism in Russia is Alexander Pushkin (''The Prisoner of the Caucasus (poem), The Prisoner of the Caucasus'', 1820–1821; ''The Robber Brothers'', 1822; ''Ruslan and Ludmila'', 1820; ''Eugene Onegin'', 1825–1832). Pushkin's work influenced many writers in the 19th century and led to his eventual recognition as Russia's greatest poet. Other Russian Romantic poets include Mikhail Lermontov (''A Hero of Our Time'', 1839), Fyodor Tyutchev (''Silentium!'', 1830), Yevgeny Baratynsky (''Eda'', 1826), Anton Delvig, and Wilhelm Küchelbecker.
Influenced heavily by Lord Byron, Lermontov sought to explore the Romantic emphasis on metaphysical discontent with society and self, while Tyutchev's poems often described scenes of nature or passions of love. Tyutchev commonly operated with such categories as night and day, north and south, dream and reality, cosmos and chaos, and the still world of winter and spring teeming with life. Baratynsky's style was fairly classical in nature, dwelling on the models of the previous century.
Spain
![José de Espronceda (detalle)](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/96/Jos%C3%A9_de_Espronceda_%28detalle%29.jpg)
Romanticism in Spanish literature developed a well-known literature with a huge variety of poets and playwrights. The most important Spanish poet during this movement was José de Espronceda. After him there were other poets like Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Mariano José de Larra and the dramatists Ángel de Saavedra and José Zorrilla, author of ''Don Juan Tenorio''. Before them may be mentioned the pre-romantics José Cadalso and Manuel José Quintana. The plays of Antonio García Gutiérrez were adapted to produce Giuseppe Verdi's operas ''Il trovatore'' and ''Simon Boccanegra''. Spanish Romanticism also influenced regional literatures. For example, in Catalonia and in Galicia (Spain), Galicia there was a national boom of writers in the local languages, like the Catalan Jacint Verdaguer and the Galician Rosalía de Castro, the main figures of the Romantic nationalism, national revivalist movements Renaixença and Rexurdimento, respectively.
There are scholars who consider Spanish Romanticism to be Proto-Existentialism because it is more anguished than the movement in other European countries. Foster et al., for example, say that the work of Spain's writers such as Espronceda, Larra, and other writers in the 19th century demonstrated a "metaphysical crisis". These observers put more weight on the link between the 19th-century Spanish writers with the existentialist movement that emerged immediately after. According to Richard Caldwell, the writers that we now identify with Spain's romanticism were actually precursors to those who galvanized the literary movement that emerged in the 1920s. This notion is the subject of debate for there are authors who stress that Spain's romanticism is one of the earliest in Europe, while some assert that Spain really had no period of literary romanticism. This controversy underscores a certain uniqueness to Spanish Romanticism in comparison to its European counterparts.
Portugal
![Almeida Garrett - litografia sobre papel](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Almeida_Garrett_-_litografia_sobre_papel.png)
Romanticism began in Portugal with the publication of the poem ''Camões'' (1825), by Almeida Garrett, who was raised by his uncle D. Alexandre, bishop of Angra do Heroísmo, Angra, in the precepts of Neoclassicism, which can be observed in his early work. The author himself confesses (in ''Camões'' preface) that he voluntarily refused to follow the principles of epic poetry enunciated by Aristotle in his Poetics (Aristotle), ''Poetics'', as he did the same to Horace's Ars Poetica (Horace), ''Ars Poetica''. Almeida Garrett had participated in the Liberal Revolution of 1820, 1820 Liberal Revolution, which caused him to exile himself in England in 1823 and then in France, after the Vilafrancada, Vila-Francada. While living in Great Britain, he had contacts with the Romantic movement and read authors such as
Shakespeare
William Shakespeare ( 26 April 1564 – 23 April 1616) was an English playwright, poet and actor. He is widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's natio ...
, Scott, Ossian, Byron, Hugo, Lamartine and de Staël, at the same time visiting feudal castles and ruins of Gothic architecture, Gothic churches and abbeys, which would be reflected in his writings. In 1838, he presented ''Um Auto de Gil Vicente'' ("A Play by Gil Vicente"), in an attempt to create a new national theatre, free of Greco-Roman and foreign influence. But his masterpiece would be ''Frei Luís de Sousa'' (1843), named by himself as a "Romantic drama" and it was acclaimed as an exceptional work, dealing with themes as national independence, faith, justice and love. He was also deeply interested in Portuguese folkloric verse, which resulted in the publication of ''Romanceiro'' ("Traditional Portuguese Ballads") (1843), that recollect a great number of ancient popular ballads, known as "romances" or "rimances", in ''redondilha maior'' verse form, that contained stories of chivalry, life of saints, crusades, courtly love, etc. He wrote the novels ''Viagens na Minha Terra'', ''O Arco de Sant'Ana'' and ''Helena.''
Alexandre Herculano is, alongside Almeida Garrett, one of the founders of Portuguese Romanticism. He too was forced to exile to Great Britain and France because of his Liberalism, liberal ideals. All of his poetry and prose are (unlike Almeida Garrett's) entirely Romantic, rejecting Classical mythology, Greco-Roman myth and history. He sought inspiration in medieval Portuguese poems and chronicles as in the Bible. His output is vast and covers many different genres, such as historical essays, poetry, novels, opuscules and theatre, where he brings back a whole world of Portuguese legends, tradition and history, especially in ''Eurico, o Presbítero'' ("Eurico, the Priest") and ''Lendas e Narrativas'' ("Legends and Narratives"). His work was influenced by Chateaubriand, Schiller, Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock, Klopstock, Walter Scott and the Old Testament Psalms.
António Feliciano de Castilho made the case for Ultra-Romanticism, publishing the poems ''A Noite no Castelo'' ("Night in the Castle") and ''Os Ciúmes do Bardo'' ("The Jealousy of the Bard"), both in 1836, and the drama ''Camões''. He became an unquestionable master for successive Ultra-Romantic generations, whose influence would not be challenged until the famous Coimbra Question. He also created polemics by translating Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Goethe's ''Goethe's Faust, Faust'' without knowing German, but using French versions of the play. Other notable figures of Portuguese Romanticism are the famous novelists Camilo Castelo Branco and Júlio Dinis, and António Augusto Soares de Passos, Soares de Passos, Bulhão Pato and Pinheiro Chagas.
Romantic style would be revived in the beginning of the 20th century, notably through the works of poets linked to the Portuguese Renaissance, such as Teixeira de Pascoaes, Teixeira de Pascoais, Jaime Cortesão, Mário Beirão, among others, who can be considered Neo-Romantics. An early Portuguese expression of Romanticism is found already in poets such as Manuel Maria Barbosa du Bocage (especially in his sonnets dated at the end of the 18th century) and Leonor de Almeida Portugal, 4th Marquise of Alorna, Leonor de Almeida Portugal, Marquise of Alorna.
Italy
![Isabella di Morra](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3e/Isabella_di_Morra.jpg)
Romanticism in Italian literature was a minor movement although some important works were produced; it began officially in 1816 when
Germaine de Staël
Anne Louise Germaine de Staël-Holstein (; ; 22 April 176614 July 1817), commonly known as Madame de Staël (), was a French woman of letters and political theorist, the daughter of banker and French finance minister Jacques Necker and Suzan ...
wrote an article in the journal ''Biblioteca italiana'' called "Sulla maniera e l'utilità delle traduzioni", inviting Italian people to reject Neoclassicism and to study new authors from other countries. Before that date, Ugo Foscolo had already published poems anticipating Romantic themes. The most important Romantic writers were Ludovico di Breme, Pietro Borsieri and Giovanni Berchet. Better known authors such as Alessandro Manzoni and Giacomo Leopardi were influenced by
Enlightenment as well as by Romanticism and Classicism. An Italian romanticist writer who produced works in various genres, including short stories and novels (such as ''Ricciarda o i Nurra e i Cabras''), was the Piedmontese Giuseppe Botero (1815-1885), devoting much of his career to Sardinian literature.
South America
![Grecian-Gothic neoclassical-romantic style-contrast 1816-Repton](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/62/Grecian-Gothic_neoclassical-romantic_style-contrast_1816-Repton.jpg)
Spanish-speaking South American Romanticism was influenced heavily by Esteban Echeverría, who wrote in the 1830s and 1840s. His writings were influenced by his hatred for the Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, and filled with themes of blood and terror, using the metaphor of a slaughterhouse to portray the violence of Rosas' dictatorship.
Brazilian Romanticism is characterized and divided in three different periods. The first one is basically focused on the creation of a sense of national identity, using the ideal of the heroic Indian. Some examples include José de Alencar, who wrote ''Iracema'' and ''The Guarani, O Guarani'', and Gonçalves Dias, renowned by the poem "Canção do exílio" (Song of the Exile). The second period, sometimes called Ultra-Romanticism, is marked by a profound influence of European themes and traditions, involving the melancholy, sadness and despair related to unobtainable love. Goethe and Lord Byron are commonly quoted in these works. Some of the most notable authors of this phase are Álvares de Azevedo, Casimiro de Abreu, Fagundes Varela and Junqueira Freire. The third cycle is marked by social poetry, especially the abolitionist movement, and it includes Castro Alves, Tobias Barreto and Pedro Luís Pereira de Sousa.
United States
In the United States, at least by 1818 with William Cullen Bryant's "To a Waterfowl", Romantic poetry was being published. American Romantic Gothic literature made an early appearance with Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (1820) and "Rip Van Winkle" (1819), followed from 1823 onwards by the ''Leatherstocking Tales'' of James Fenimore Cooper, with their emphasis on heroic simplicity and their fervent landscape descriptions of an already-exotic mythicized frontier peopled by "noble savages", similar to the philosophical theory of Rousseau, exemplified by Uncas, from ''The Last of the Mohicans''. There are picturesque "local colour" elements in Washington Irving's essays and especially his travel books.
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (; Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is wid ...
's tales of the macabre and his balladic poetry were more influential in France than at home, but the romantic American novel developed fully with the atmosphere and drama of
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nathaniel Hawthorne (July 4, 1804 – May 19, 1864) was an American novelist and short story writer. His works often focus on history, morality, and religion.
He was born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts, from a family long associated with that t ...
's ''The Scarlet Letter'' (1850). Later Transcendentalism, Transcendentalist writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson still show elements of its influence and imagination, as does the romantic realism of Walt Whitman. The poetry of Emily Dickinson—nearly unread in her own time—and Herman Melville's novel ''Moby-Dick'' can be taken as epitomes of American Romantic literature. By the 1880s, however, psychological and social realism were competing with Romanticism in the novel.
Influence of European Romanticism on American writers
The European Romantic movement reached America in the early 19th century. American Romanticism was just as multifaceted and individualistic as it was in Europe. Like the Europeans, the American Romantics demonstrated a high level of moral enthusiasm, commitment to individualism and the unfolding of the self, an emphasis on intuitive perception, and the assumption that the natural world was inherently good, while human society was filled with corruption.
[George L. McMichael and Frederick C. Crews, eds. ''Anthology of American Literature: Colonial through romantic'' (6th ed. 1997) p. 613]
Romanticism became popular in American politics, philosophy and art. The movement appealed to the revolutionary spirit of America as well as to those longing to break free of the strict religious traditions of early settlement. The Romantics rejected rationalism and religious intellect. It appealed to those in opposition of Calvinism, which includes the belief that the destiny of each individual is preordained. The Romantic movement gave rise to New England Transcendentalism, which portrayed a less restrictive relationship between God and Universe. The new philosophy presented the individual with a more personal relationship with God. Transcendentalism and Romanticism appealed to Americans in a similar fashion, for both privileged feeling over reason, individual freedom of expression over the restraints of tradition and custom. It often involved a rapturous response to nature. It encouraged the rejection of harsh, rigid Calvinism, and promised a new blossoming of American culture.
American Romanticism embraced the individual and rebelled against the confinement of neoclassicism and religious tradition. The Romantic movement in America created a new literary genre that continues to influence American writers. Novels, short stories, and poems replaced the sermons and manifestos of yore. Romantic literature was personal, intense, and portrayed more emotion than ever seen in neoclassical literature. America's preoccupation with freedom became a great source of motivation for Romantic writers as many were delighted in free expression and emotion without so much fear of ridicule and controversy. They also put more effort into the psychological development of their characters, and the main characters typically displayed extremes of sensitivity and excitement.
The works of the Romantic Era also differed from preceding works in that they spoke to a wider audience, partly reflecting the greater distribution of books as costs came down during the period.
Architecture
Romantic architecture appeared in the late 18th century in a reaction against the rigid forms of neoclassical architecture. Romantic architecture reached its peak in the mid-19th century, and continued to appear until the end of the 19th century. It was designed to evoke an emotional reaction, either respect for tradition or nostalgia for a bucolic past. It was frequently inspired by the architecture of the Middle Ages, especially Gothic architecture, It was strongly influenced by romanticism in literature, particularly the historical novels of
Victor Hugo
Victor-Marie Hugo (; 26 February 1802 – 22 May 1885) was a French Romantic writer and politician. During a literary career that spanned more than sixty years, he wrote in a variety of genres and forms. He is considered to be one of the great ...
and
Walter Scott
Sir Walter Scott, 1st Baronet (15 August 1771 – 21 September 1832), was a Scottish novelist, poet, playwright and historian. Many of his works remain classics of European and Scottish literature, notably the novels '' Ivanhoe'', '' Rob Roy ...
. It sometimes moved into the domain of eclecticism, with features assembled from different historic periods and regions of the world.
Gothic Revival architecture was a popular variant of the romantic style, particularly in the construction of churches, Cathedrals, and university buildings. Notable examples include the completion of Cologne Cathedral in Germany, by Karl Friedrich Schinkel. The cathedral had been begun in 1248, but work was halted in 1473. The original plans for the façade were discovered in 1840, and it was decided to recommence. Schinkel followed the original design as much as possible, but used modern construction technology, including an iron frame for the roof. The building was finished in 1880.
[Weber, Patrick, ''Histoire de l'Architecture'' (2008), pp. 64]
In Britain, notable examples include the Royal Pavilion in Brighton, a romantic version of traditional Indian architecture by John Nash (architect), John Nash (1815–1823), and the Houses of Parliament in London, built in a Gothic revival style by Charles Barry between 1840 and 1876.
[Weber, Patrick, ''Histoire de l'Architecture'' (2008), pp. 64–65]
In France, one of the earliest examples of romantic architecture is the Hameau de la Reine, the small rustic hamlet created at the Palace of Versailles for Queen Marie Antoinette between 1783 and 1785 by the royal architect Richard Mique with the help of the romantic painter Hubert Robert. It consisted of twelve structures, ten of which still exist, in the style of villages in Normandy. It was designed for the Queen and her friends to amuse themselves by playing at being peasants, and included a farmhouse with a dairy, a mill, a boudoir, a pigeon loft, a tower in the form of a lighthouse from which one could fish in the pond, a belvedere, a cascade and grotto, and a luxuriously furnished cottage with a billiard room for the Queen.
French romantic architecture in the 19th century was strongly influenced by two writers;
Victor Hugo
Victor-Marie Hugo (; 26 February 1802 – 22 May 1885) was a French Romantic writer and politician. During a literary career that spanned more than sixty years, he wrote in a variety of genres and forms. He is considered to be one of the great ...
, whose novel ''The Hunchback of Notre Dame'' inspired a resurgence in interest in the Middle Ages; and Prosper Mérimée, who wrote celebrated romantic novels and short stories and was also the first head of the commission of Historic Monuments in France, responsible for publicizing and restoring (and sometimes romanticizing) many French cathedrals and monuments desecrated and ruined after the
French Revolution
The French Revolution ( ) was a period of radical political and societal change in France that began with the Estates General of 1789 and ended with the formation of the French Consulate in coup of 18 Brumaire, November 1799. Many of its ...
. His projects were carried out by the architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc. These included the restoration (sometimes creative) of the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris, the fortified city of Carcassonne, and the unfinished medieval Château de Pierrefonds.
The romantic style continued in the second half of the 19th century. The Palais Garnier, the Paris opera house designed by Charles Garnier (architect), Charles Garnier was a highly romantic and eclectic combination of artistic styles. Another notable example of late 19th century romanticism is the Sacré-Cœur, Paris, Basilica of Sacré-Cœur by Paul Abadie, who drew upon the model of Byzantine architecture for his elongated domes (1875–1914).
File:Marie Antoinette amusement at Versailles.JPG, Hameau de la Reine, Palace of Versailles (1783–1785)
File:Brighton royal pavilion Qmin.jpg, Royal Pavilion in Brighton by John Nash (architect), John Nash (1815–1823)
File:Cologne cathedrale vue sud.jpg, Cologne Cathedral (1840–80)
File:Monumental stairway of the palais Garnier opera in Paris.jpg, Grand Staircase of the Paris Opera by Charles Garnier (architect), Charles Garnier (1861–75)
File:Le sacre coeur.jpg, Sacré-Cœur, Paris, Basilica of Sacré-Cœur by Paul Abadie (1875–1914)
Visual arts
![Thomas_Jones_The_Bard_1774](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d1/Thomas_Jones_The_Bard_1774.jpg)
In the visual arts, Romanticism first showed itself in landscape painting, where from as early as the 1760s British artists began to turn to wilder landscapes and storms, and Gothic architecture, even if they had to make do with Welsh art, Wales as a setting.
Caspar David Friedrich and J. M. W. Turner were born less than a year apart in 1774 and 1775 respectively and were to take German and English landscape painting to their extremes of Romanticism, but both their artistic sensibilities were formed when forms of Romanticism was already strongly present in art. John Constable, born in 1776, stayed closer to the English landscape tradition, but in his largest "six-footers" insisted on the heroic status of a patch of the working countryside where he had grown up—challenging the traditional hierarchy of genres, which relegated landscape painting to a low status. Turner also painted very large landscapes, and above all, seascapes. Some of these large paintings had contemporary settings and staffage, but others had small figures that turned the work into history painting in the manner of Claude Lorrain, like Salvator Rosa, a Rococo, late Baroque artist whose landscapes had elements that Romantic painters repeatedly turned to. Friedrich often used single figures, or features like crosses, set alone amidst a huge landscape, "making them images of the transitoriness of human life and the premonition of death".
![Anne-Louis Girodet-Trioson 001](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fb/Anne-Louis_Girodet-Trioson_001.jpg)
Other groups of artists expressed feelings that verged on the mystical, many largely abandoning classical drawing and proportions. These included
William Blake
William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his life, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. ...
and Samuel Palmer and the other members of Ancients (art group), the Ancients in England, and in Germany Philipp Otto Runge. Like Friedrich, none of these artists had significant influence after their deaths for the rest of the 19th century, and were 20th-century rediscoveries from obscurity, though Blake was always known as a poet, and Norway's leading painter Johan Christian Dahl was heavily influenced by Friedrich. The Rome-based Nazarene movement of German artists, active from 1810, took a very different path, concentrating on medievalizing history paintings with religious and nationalist themes.
The arrival of Romanticism in French art was delayed by the strong hold of Neoclassicism on the academies, but from the Napoleonic period it became increasingly popular, initially in the form of history paintings propagandising for the new regime, of which Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson, Girodet's ''
Ossian receiving the Ghosts of the French Heroes'', for Napoleon's Château de Malmaison, was one of the earliest. Girodet's old teacher Jacques-Louis David, David was puzzled and disappointed by his pupil's direction, saying: "Either Girodet is mad or I no longer know anything of the art of painting". A new generation of the French school, developed personal Romantic styles, though still concentrating on history painting with a political message. Théodore Géricault (1791–1824) had his first success with ''The Charging Chasseur'', a heroic military figure derived from Rubens, at the Paris Salon of 1812 in the years of the Empire, but his next major completed work, ''The Raft of the Medusa'' of 1818-19, remains the greatest achievement of the Romantic history painting, which in its day had a powerful anti-government message.
Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) made his first Salon hits with ''The Barque of Dante'' (1822), ''The Massacre at Chios'' (1824) and ''Death of Sardanapalus'' (1827). The second was a scene from the Greek War of Independence, completed the year Byron died there, and the last was a scene from one of Byron's plays. With Shakespeare, Byron was to provide the subject matter for many other works of Delacroix, who also spent long periods in North Africa, painting colourful scenes of mounted Arab warriors. His ''Liberty Leading the People'' (1830) remains, with the ''Medusa'', one of the best-known works of French Romantic painting. Both reflected current events, and increasingly "history painting", literally "story painting", a phrase dating back to the Italian Renaissance meaning the painting of subjects with groups of figures, long considered the highest and most difficult form of art, did indeed become the painting of historical scenes, rather than those from religion or mythology.
Francisco Goya was called "the last great painter in whose art thought and observation were balanced and combined to form a faultless unity". But the extent to which he was a Romantic is a complex question. In Spain, there was still a struggle to introduce the values of the
Enlightenment, in which Goya saw himself as a participant. The demonic and anti-rational monsters thrown up by his imagination are only superficially similar to those of the Gothic fantasies of northern Europe, and in many ways he remained wedded to the classicism and realism of his training, as well as looking forward to the Realism of the later 19th century. But he, more than any other artist of the period, exemplified the Romantic values of the expression of the artist's feelings and his personal imaginative world. He also shared with many of the Romantic painters a more free handling of paint, emphasized in the new prominence of the brushstroke and impasto, which tended to be repressed in neoclassicism under a self-effacing finish.
![Cavalier gaulois pont d'iena RG am face](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b3/Cavalier_gaulois_pont_d%27iena_RG_am_face.jpg)
Sculpture remained largely impervious to Romanticism, probably partly for technical reasons, as the most prestigious material of the day, marble, does not lend itself to expansive gestures. The leading sculptors in Europe, Antonio Canova and Bertel Thorvaldsen, were both based in Rome and firm Neoclassicists, not at all tempted to allow influence from medieval sculpture, which would have been one possible approach to Romantic sculpture. When it did develop, true Romantic sculpture—with the exception of a few artists such as Rudolf Maison— rather oddly was missing in Germany, and mainly found in France, with François Rude, best known from his group of the 1830s from the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, David d'Angers, and Auguste Préault. Préault's plaster relief entitled ''Slaughter'', which represented the horrors of wars with exacerbated passion, caused so much scandal at the 1834 Salon (Paris), Salon that Préault was banned from this official annual exhibition for nearly twenty years. In Italy, the most important Romantic sculptor was Lorenzo Bartolini.
File:George Stubbs - A Lion Attacking a Horse - 1955.27.1 - Yale University Art Gallery.jpg, George Stubbs, ''A Lion Attacking a Horse'' (1770), oil on canvas, 38 in. x 49 1/2in., Yale Center for British Art
File:John Henry Fuseli - The NightmareFXD.jpg, John Henry Fuseli, ''The Nightmare'' (1781), oil on canvas, 101.6 cm × 127 cm., Detroit Institute of Arts
File:El Tres de Mayo, by Francisco de Goya, from Prado thin black margin.jpg, Francisco Goya, ''The Third of May 1808'', 1814
File:JEAN LOUIS THÉODORE GÉRICAULT - La Balsa de la Medusa (Museo del Louvre, 1818-19).jpg, Théodore Géricault, ''The Raft of the Medusa'', 1819
File:Eugène Delacroix - La liberté guidant le peuple.jpg, Eugène Delacroix, ''Liberty Leading the People'', 1830
File:The Fighting Temeraire, JMW Turner, National Gallery.jpg, J. M. W. Turner, ''The Fighting Temeraire, The Fighting Téméraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up'', 1839
In France, historical painting on idealized medieval and Renaissance themes is known as the Troubadour style, ''style Troubadour'', a term with no equivalent for other countries, though the same trends occurred there. Delacroix, Ingres and Richard Parkes Bonington all worked in this style, as did lesser specialists such as Pierre-Henri Révoil (1776–1842) and Fleury-François Richard (1777–1852). Their pictures are often small, and feature intimate private and anecdotal moments, as well as those of high drama. The lives of great artists such as Raphael were commemorated on equal terms with those of rulers, and fictional characters were also depicted. Fleury-Richard's ''Valentine of Milan weeping for the death of her husband'', shown in the Paris Salon of 1802, marked the arrival of the style, which lasted until the mid-century, before being subsumed into the increasingly academic history painting of artists like Paul Delaroche.
![Hayez, Fracesco - Crusaders Thirsting near Jerusalem - 1836-50](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c1/Hayez%2C_Fracesco_-_Crusaders_Thirsting_near_Jerusalem_-_1836-50.jpg)
Another trend was for very large apocalyptic history paintings, often combining extreme natural events, or divine wrath, with human disaster, attempting to outdo ''The Raft of the Medusa'', and now often drawing comparisons with effects from Hollywood. The leading English artist in the style was John Martin (painter), John Martin, whose tiny figures were dwarfed by enormous earthquakes and storms, and worked his way through the biblical disasters, and those to come in the Christian eschatology, final days. Other works such as Delacroix's ''Death of Sardanapalus'' included larger figures, and these often drew heavily on earlier artists, especially Nicolas Poussin, Poussin and Peter Paul Rubens, Rubens, with extra emotionalism and special effects.
Elsewhere in Europe, leading artists adopted Romantic styles: in Russia there were the portraitists Orest Kiprensky and Vasily Tropinin, with Ivan Aivazovsky specializing in marine painting, and in Norway Hans Gude painted scenes of fjords. In Italy Francesco Hayez (1791–1882) was the leading artist of Romanticism in mid-19th-century Milan. His long, prolific and extremely successful career saw him begin as a Neoclassical painter, pass right through the Romantic period, and emerge at the other end as a sentimental painter of young women. His Romantic period included many historical pieces of "Troubadour" tendencies, but on a very large scale, that are heavily influenced by Gian Battista Tiepolo and other Rococo, late Baroque Italian masters.
Literary Romanticism had its counterpart in the American visual arts, most especially in the exaltation of an untamed American Landscape art, landscape found in the paintings of the Hudson River School. Painters like Thomas Cole, Albert Bierstadt and Frederic Edwin Church and others often expressed Romantic themes in their paintings. They sometimes depicted ancient ruins of the old world, such as in Fredric Edwin Church's piece ''Sunrise in Syria''. These works reflected the Gothic feelings of death and decay. They also show the Romantic ideal that Nature is powerful and will eventually overcome the transient creations of men. More often, they worked to distinguish themselves from their European counterparts by depicting uniquely American scenes and landscapes. This idea of an American identity in the art world is reflected in William Cullen Bryant, W. C. Bryant's poem ''To Cole, the Painter, Departing for Europe'', where Bryant encourages Cole to remember the powerful scenes that can only be found in America.
Some American paintings (such as Albert Bierstadt's ''The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak'') promote the literary idea of the "noble savage" by portraying idealized Native Americans living in harmony with the natural world. Thomas Cole's paintings tend towards allegory, explicit in ''The Voyage of Life'' series painted in the early 1840s, showing the stages of life set amidst an awesome and immense nature.
File:Thomas Cole - The Voyage of Life Childhood, 1842 (National Gallery of Art).jpg, Thomas Cole, ''The Voyage of Life#Childhood, Childhood'' (1842), one of the four scenes in ''The Voyage of Life''
File:Thomas Cole - The Voyage of Life Old Age, 1842 (National Gallery of Art).jpg, Thomas Cole, ''The Voyage of Life
The Voyage of Life#Old Age, Old Age'' (1842)
File:William Blake - Albion Rose - from A Large Book of Designs 1793-6.jpg, William Blake
William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his life, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. ...
, ''Albion (Blake), Albion Rose'', 1794–95
File:Le poeme de lAme-14-Louis Janmot-MBA Lyon-IMG 0497.jpg, Louis Janmot, from his series ''The Poem of the Soul'', before 1854
Music
![Beethoven](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6f/Beethoven.jpg)
Musical Romanticism is predominantly a German phenomenon—so much so that one respected French reference work defines it entirely in terms of "The role of music in the aesthetics of German romanticism". Another French encyclopedia holds that the German temperament generally "can be described as the deep and diverse action of romanticism on German musicians", and that there is only one true representative of Romanticism in French music, Hector Berlioz, while in Italy, the sole great name of musical Romanticism is Giuseppe Verdi, "a sort of Victor Hugo, [Victor] Hugo of opera, gifted with a real genius for dramatic effect". Similarly, in his analysis of Romanticism and its pursuit of harmony, Henri Lefebvre posits that, "But of course, German romanticism was more closely linked to music than French romanticism was, so it is there we should look for the direct expression of harmony as the central romantic idea." Nevertheless, the huge popularity of German Romantic music led, "whether by imitation or by reaction", to an often nationalistically inspired vogue amongst Polish, Hungarian, Russian, Czech, and Scandinavian musicians, successful "perhaps more because of its extra-musical traits than for the actual value of musical works by its masters".
![Eugène Ferdinand Victor Delacroix 043](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/Eug%C3%A8ne_Ferdinand_Victor_Delacroix_043.jpg)
Although the term "Romanticism" when applied to music has come to imply the period roughly from 1800 until 1850, or else until around 1900, the contemporary application of "romantic" to music did not coincide with this modern interpretation. Indeed, one of the earliest sustained applications of the term to music occurs in 1789, in the ''Mémoires'' of André Grétry. This is of particular interest because it is a French source on a subject mainly dominated by Germans, but also because it explicitly acknowledges its debt to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (himself a composer, amongst other things) and, by so doing, establishes a link to one of the major influences on the Romantic movement generally.
[Samson 2001.] In 1810
E. T. A. Hoffmann named Joseph Haydn, Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven, Beethoven as "the three masters of instrumental compositions" who "breathe one and the same romantic spirit". He justified his view on the basis of these composers' depth of evocative expression and their marked individuality. In Haydn's music, according to Hoffmann, "a child-like, serene disposition prevails", while Mozart (in the late Symphony No. 39 (Mozart), E-flat major Symphony, for example) "leads us into the depths of the spiritual world", with elements of fear, love, and sorrow, "a presentiment of the infinite ... in the eternal dance of the spheres". Beethoven's music, on the other hand, conveys a sense of "the monstrous and immeasurable", with the pain of an endless longing that "will burst our breasts in a fully coherent concord of all the passions". This elevation in the valuation of pure emotion resulted in the promotion of music from the subordinate position it had held in relation to the verbal and plastic arts during the Enlightenment. Because music was considered to be free of the constraints of reason, imagery, or any other precise concept, it came to be regarded, first in the writings of Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, Wackenroder and Ludwig Tieck, Tieck and later by writers such as Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Schelling and Richard Wagner, Wagner, as preeminent among the arts, the one best able to express the secrets of the universe, to evoke the spirit world, infinity, and the absolute.
This chronologic agreement of musical and literary Romanticism continued as far as the middle of the 19th century, when Richard Wagner denigrated the music of Giacomo Meyerbeer, Meyerbeer and Hector Berlioz, Berlioz as "Neoromanticism (music), neoromantic": "The Opera, to which we shall now return, has swallowed down the Neoromanticism of Berlioz, too, as a plump, fine-flavoured oyster, whose digestion has conferred on it anew a brisk and well-to-do appearance."
It was only toward the end of the 19th century that the newly emergent discipline of ''Musikwissenschaft'' (musicology)—itself a product of the historicizing proclivity of the age—attempted a more scientific periodization of music history, and a distinction between Classical period (music), Viennese Classical and Romantic periods was proposed. The key figure in this trend was Guido Adler, who viewed Beethoven and Franz Schubert as transitional but essentially Classical composers, with Romanticism achieving full maturity only in the post-Beethoven generation of Frédéric Chopin, Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann, Hector Berlioz and Franz Liszt. From Adler's viewpoint, found in books like ''Der Stil in der Musik'' (1911), composers of the New German School and various late-19th-century Musical nationalism, nationalist composers were not Romantics but "moderns" or "realists" (by analogy with the fields of painting and literature), and this schema remained prevalent through the first decades of the 20th century.
By the second quarter of the 20th century, an awareness that radical changes in musical syntax had occurred during the early 1900s caused another shift in historical viewpoint, and the change of century came to be seen as marking a decisive break with the musical past. This in turn led historians such as Alfred Einstein to extend the musical "Romantic music, Romantic era" throughout the 19th century and into the first decade of the 20th. It has continued to be referred to as such in some of the standard music references such as ''The Oxford Companion to Music'' and Donald Jay Grout, Grout's ''History of Western Music'' but was not unchallenged. For example, the prominent German musicologist Friedrich Blume, the chief editor of the first edition of ''Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart'' (1949–86), accepted the earlier position that Classicism and Romanticism together constitute a single period beginning in the middle of the 18th century, but at the same time held that it continued into the 20th century, including such pre-World War II developments as Expressionist music, expressionism and Neoclassicism (music), neoclassicism. This is reflected in some notable recent reference works such as the ''New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians''
and the new edition of ''Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart''.
File:Mendelssohn Bartholdy.jpg, Felix Mendelssohn, 1839
File:Robert Schumann 1839.jpg, Robert Schumann, 1839
File:Barabas-liszt.jpg, Franz Liszt, 1847
File:Postcard-1910 Daniel Fransois Auber.jpg, Daniel Auber, c. 1868
File:Hector Berlioz.jpg, Hector Berlioz by Gustave Courbet, 1850
File:Giuseppe Verdi by Giovanni Boldini.jpg, Giovanni Boldini, ''Portrait of Giuseppe Verdi'', 1886
File:Richardwagner1.jpg, Richard Wagner, c. 1870s
File:Giacomo Meyerbeer nuorempana.jpg, Giacomo Meyerbeer, 1847
File:Gustav Mahler 1896.jpg, Gustav Mahler, 1896
In the contemporary music culture, the romantic musician followed a public career depending on sensitive middle-class audiences rather than on a courtly patron, as had been the case with earlier musicians and composers. Public persona characterized a new generation of virtuosi who made their way as soloists, epitomized in the concert tours of Paganini and Liszt, and the conductor began to emerge as an important figure, on whose skill the interpretation of the increasingly complex music depended.
Outside the arts
Sciences
The Romantic movement affected most aspects of intellectual life, and Romanticism in science, Romanticism and science had a powerful connection, especially in the period 1800–1840. Many scientists were influenced by versions of the ''Naturphilosophie'' of
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and others, and without abandoning empiricism, sought in their work to uncover what they tended to believe was a unified and organic Nature. The English scientist Sir Humphry Davy, a prominent Romantic thinker, said that understanding nature required "an attitude of admiration, love and worship, [...] a personal response". He believed that knowledge was only attainable by those who truly appreciated and respected nature. Self-understanding was an important aspect of Romanticism. It had less to do with proving that man was capable of understanding nature (through his budding intellect) and therefore controlling it, and more to do with the emotional appeal of connecting himself with nature and understanding it through a harmonious co-existence.
Historiography
Historiography, History writing was very strongly, and many would say harmfully, influenced by Romanticism. In England, Thomas Carlyle was a highly influential essayist who turned historian; he both invented and exemplified the phrase "hero-worship", lavishing largely uncritical praise on strong leaders such as Oliver Cromwell, Frederick the Great and
Napoleon
Napoleon Bonaparte ; it, Napoleone Bonaparte, ; co, Napulione Buonaparte. (born Napoleone Buonaparte; 15 August 1769 – 5 May 1821), later known by his regnal name Napoleon I, was a French military commander and political leader who ...
. Romantic nationalism had a largely negative effect on the writing of history in the 19th century, as each nation tended to Historiography and nationalism, produce its own version of history, and the critical attitude, even cynicism, of earlier historians was often replaced by a tendency to create romantic stories with clearly distinguished heroes and villains. Nationalist ideology of the period placed great emphasis on racial coherence, and the antiquity of peoples, and tended to vastly overemphasize the continuity between past periods and the present, leading to national mysticism. Much historical effort in the 20th century was devoted to combating the romantic historical myths created in the 19th century.
Theology
To insulate theology from scientism or reductionism in science, 19th-century post-Enlightenment German theologians developed a modernist or so-called Liberal Christianity, liberal conception of Christianity, led by Friedrich Schleiermacher and Albrecht Ritschl. They took the Romantic approach of rooting religion in the inner world of the human spirit, so that it is a person's feeling or sensibility about spiritual matters that comprises religion.
Chess
Romantic chess was the style of chess which emphasized quick, tactical maneuvers characterized by aesthetic beauty rather than long-term strategic planning, which was considered to be of secondary importance.
The Romantic era in chess is generally considered to have begun around the 18th century (although a primarily tactical style of chess was predominant even earlier), and to have reached its peak with Joseph MacDonnell and Pierre LaBourdonnais, the two dominant chess players in the 1830s. The 1840s were dominated by Howard Staunton, and other leading players of the era included Adolf Anderssen, Daniel Harrwitz, Henry Bird (chess player), Henry Bird, Louis Paulsen, and Paul Morphy. The "Immortal Game", played by Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky on 21 June 1851 in London—where Anderssen made bold sacrifice (chess), sacrifices to secure victory, giving up both rook (chess), rooks and a bishop, then his queen (chess), queen, and then checkmate, checkmating his opponent with his three remaining minor pieces—is considered a supreme example of Romantic chess. The end of the Romantic era in chess is considered to be the Vienna 1873 chess tournament, 1873 Vienna Tournament where Wilhelm Steinitz popularized positional play and the closed game.
Romantic nationalism
One of Romanticism's key ideas and most enduring legacies is the assertion of nationalism, which became a central theme of Romantic art and political philosophy. From the earliest parts of the movement, with their focus on development of national languages and folklore, and the importance of local customs and traditions, to the movements that would redraw the map of Europe and lead to calls for self-determination of nationalities, nationalism was one of the key vehicles of Romanticism, its role, expression and meaning. One of the most important functions of medieval references in the 19th century was nationalist. Popular and epic poetry were its workhorses. This is visible in Germany and Ireland, where underlying Germanic or Celtic Stratum (linguistics), linguistic substrates dating from before the Romanization-Latinization were sought out.
Early Romantic nationalism was strongly inspired by Rousseau, and by the ideas of
Johann Gottfried von Herder
Johann Gottfried von Herder ( , ; 25 August 174418 December 1803) was a German philosopher, theologian, poet, and literary critic. He is associated with the Enlightenment, '' Sturm und Drang'', and Weimar Classicism.
Biography
Born in Mohrun ...
, who in 1784 argued that the geography formed the natural economy of a people, and shaped their customs and society.
The nature of nationalism changed dramatically, however, after the
French Revolution
The French Revolution ( ) was a period of radical political and societal change in France that began with the Estates General of 1789 and ended with the formation of the French Consulate in coup of 18 Brumaire, November 1799. Many of its ...
with the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon, and the reactions in other nations. Napoleonic nationalism and republicanism were, at first, inspirational to movements in other nations: self-determination and a consciousness of national unity were held to be two of the reasons why France was able to defeat other countries in battle. But as the French First Republic, French Republic became First French Empire, Napoleon's Empire, Napoleon became not the inspiration for nationalism, but the object of its struggle. In Prussia, the development of spiritual renewal as a means to engage in Napoleonic Wars, the struggle against Napoleon was argued by, among others,
Johann Gottlieb Fichte, a disciple of Immanuel Kant, Kant. The word ''Volkstum'', or nationality, was coined in German as part of this resistance to the now conquering emperor. Fichte expressed the unity of language and nation in his address "To the German Nation" in 1806:
Those who speak the same language are joined to each other by a multitude of invisible bonds by nature herself, long before any human art begins; they understand each other and have the power of continuing to make themselves understood more and more clearly; they belong together and are by nature one and an inseparable whole. ...Only when each people, left to itself, develops and forms itself in accordance with its own peculiar quality, and only when in every people each individual develops himself in accordance with that common quality, as well as in accordance with his own peculiar quality—then, and then only, does the manifestation of divinity appear in its true mirror as it ought to be.
This view of nationalism inspired the collection of folklore by such people as the
Brothers Grimm
The Brothers Grimm ( or ), Jacob (1785–1863) and Wilhelm (1786–1859), were a brother duo of German academics, philologists, cultural researchers, lexicographers, and authors who together collected and published folklore. They are among the ...
, the revival of old epics as national, and the construction of new epics as if they were old, as in the ''Kalevala'', compiled from Finnish tales and folklore, or ''
Ossian'', where the claimed ancient roots were invented. The view that fairy tales, unless contaminated from outside literary sources, were preserved in the same form over thousands of years, was not exclusive to Romantic Nationalists, but fit in well with their views that such tales expressed the primordial nature of a people. For instance, the Brothers Grimm rejected many tales they collected because of their similarity to tales by Charles Perrault, which they thought proved they were not truly German tales; ''Sleeping Beauty'' survived in their collection because the tale of Brunhild, Brynhildr convinced them that the figure of the sleeping princess was authentically German. Vuk Karadžić contributed to Serbian language, Serbian folk literature, using peasant culture as the foundation. He regarded the oral literature of the peasants as an integral part of Serbian culture, compiling it to use in his collections of folk songs, tales and proverbs, as well as the first dictionary of vernacular Serbian. Similar projects were undertaken by the Russian Alexander Afanasyev, the Norwegians Peter Christen Asbjørnsen and Jørgen Moe, and the Englishman Joseph Jacobs.
[Jack Zipes, ''The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm'', p. 846, ]
Polish nationalism and messianism
![Night november](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/85/Night_november.jpg)
Romanticism played an essential role in the national awakening of many Central European peoples lacking their own national states, not least in Poland, which had recently failed to restore its independence when Imperial Russian Army, Russia's army crushed the November Uprising, Polish Uprising under Nicholas I of Russia, Nicholas I. Revival and reinterpretation of ancient myths, customs and traditions by Romantic poets and painters helped to distinguish their indigenous cultures from those of the dominant nations and crystallise the mythography of Romantic nationalism. Patriotism, nationalism, revolution and armed struggle for independence also became popular themes in the arts of this period. Arguably, the most distinguished Romantic poet of this part of Europe was Adam Mickiewicz, who developed an idea that Christ of Europe, Poland was the Messiah of Nations, predestined to suffer just as Jesus had suffered to save all the people. The Polish self-image as a "Christ of Europe, Christ among nations" or the martyr of Europe can be traced back to its history of Christendom and suffering under invasions. During the periods of foreign occupation, the Catholic Church served as bastion of Poland's national identity and language, and the major promoter of Culture of Poland, Polish culture. The Partitions of Poland, partitions came to be seen in Poland as a Polish sacrifice for the security for Western culture, Western civilization. Adam Mickiewicz wrote the patriotic drama ''Dziady (poem), Dziady'' (directed against the Russians), where he depicts Poland as the Christ of Nations. He also wrote "Verily I say unto you, it is not for you to learn civilization from foreigners, but it is you who are to teach them civilization ... You are among the foreigners like the Apostles among the idolaters". In ''Books of the Polish Nation and Polish Pilgrimage'' Mickiewicz detailed his vision of Poland as a Messias and a Christ of Nations, that would save mankind. Dziady is known for various interpretation. The most known ones are the moral aspect of part II, individualist and romantic message of part IV, as well as deeply patriotic, messianistic and Christian vision in part III of the poem. Zdzisław Kępiński, however, focuses his interpretation on Slavic mythology, Slavic pagan and
occult elements found in the drama. In his book ''Mickiewicz hermetyczny'' he writes about Hermeticism, hermetic, Theosophy (Blavatskian), theosophic and Alchemy, alchemical philosophy on the book as well as Freemasonry, Masonic symbols.
Gallery
;Emerging Romanticism in the 18th century
File:Shipwrec-vernet.jpg, Joseph Vernet, 1759, ''Shipwreck''; the 18th-century "sublime"
File:Joseph Wright 004.jpg, Joseph Wright of Derby, Joseph Wright, 1774, ''Cave at evening'', Smith College, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts
File:John Henry Fuseli - The NightmareFXD.jpg, Henry Fuseli, 1781, ''The Nightmare'', a classical artist whose themes often anticipate the Romantic
File:Philipp Jakob Loutherbourg d. J. 002.jpg, Philip James de Loutherbourg, ''Coalbrookdale by Night'', 1801, a key location of the English Industrial Revolution
The Industrial Revolution was the transition to new manufacturing processes in Great Britain, continental Europe, and the United States, that occurred during the period from around 1760 to about 1820–1840. This transition included going f ...
;French Romantic painting
File:GericaultHorseman.jpg, Théodore Géricault, ''The Charging Chasseur'', c. 1812
File:IngresDeathOfDaVinci.jpg, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Ingres, ''The Death of Leonardo da Vinci'', 1818, one of his Troubadour style works
File:Eugène Delacroix - Collision of Moorish Horsemen - Walters 376.jpg, Eugène Delacroix, ''Collision of Moorish Horsemen'', 1843–44
File:Eugène Delacroix - The Bride of Abydos - WGA06224.jpg, Eugène Delacroix, ''The Bride of Abydos'', 1857, after the poem by Byron
;Other
File:Waterfalls at Subiaco Joseph Anton Koch.jpeg, Joseph Anton Koch, ''Waterfalls at Subiaco'', 1812–1813, a "classical" landscape to art historians
File:James Ward - Gordale Scar (A View of Gordale, in the Manor of East Malham in Craven, Yorkshire, the Property of Lord Ribblesdale) - Google Art Project.jpg, James Ward (artist), James Ward, 1814–1815, ''Gordale Scar''
File:John Constable The Hay Wain.jpg, John Constable, 1821, ''The Hay Wain'', one of Constable's large "six footers"
File:J.C. Dahl - Eruption of the Volcano Vesuvius - Google Art Project.jpg, J. C. Dahl, 1826, ''Eruption of Vesuvius'', by Friedrich's closest follower
File:The Wood of the Self-Murderers.jpg, William Blake
William Blake (28 November 1757 – 12 August 1827) was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his life, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual art of the Romantic Age. ...
, c. 1824–27, ''The Wood of the Self-Murderers: The Harpies and the Suicides'', Tate
File:Karl Brullov - The Last Day of Pompeii - Google Art Project.jpg, Karl Bryullov, ''The Last Day of Pompeii'', 1833, The State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
File:Isaak Ilitsch Lewitan 003.jpg, Isaac Levitan, ''Pacific'', 1898, State Russian Museum, St.Petersburg
File:Turner-The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons.jpg, J. M. W. Turner, ''The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons'' (1835), Philadelphia Museum of Art
File:Hans Gude--Vinterettermiddag--1847.jpg, Hans Gude, ''Winter Afternoon'', 1847, National Gallery of Norway, Oslo
File:Hovhannes Aivazovsky - The Ninth Wave - Google Art Project.jpg, Ivan Aivazovsky, 1850, ''The Ninth Wave'', Russian Museum, St. Petersburg
File:John Martin - Sodom and Gomorrah.jpg, John Martin (painter), John Martin, 1852, ''The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah'', Laing Art Gallery
File:Twilight in the Wilderness by Frederic Edwin Church (3).jpg, Frederic Edwin Church, 1860, ''Twilight in the Wilderness'', Cleveland Museum of Art
File:Albert Bierstadt - The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak.jpg, Albert Bierstadt, 1863, ''The Rocky Mountains, Lander's Peak''
Romantic authors
Scholars of Romanticism
See also
Related terms
* Clandestine literature
* Goethean science
* Humboldtian science
* Sentimentalism (literature)
Opposing terms
* Academy, The Academy
* Positivism
* Utilitarianism
Related subjects
* Coleridge's theory of life
* Dark Romanticism
* List of romantics
* ''Mal du siècle''
* Middle Ages in history
* Neo-romanticism
** Post-romanticism
* Opium and Romanticism
* ''Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period''
* Romantic ballet
* Romantic epistemology
* Romantic hero
* Romantic medicine
* Romantic poetry
** List of Romantic poets
Related movements
* Arts and Crafts movement
* Decadent movement
* Düsseldorf School
* Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood
* Vegetarianism and Romanticism
* Marxist-Leninist views on Romanticism
* Underground culture
References
Citations
Sources
* Guido Adler, Adler, Guido. 1911. ''Der Stil in der Musik''. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel.
* Adler, Guido. 1919. ''Methode der Musikgeschichte''. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel.
* Adler, Guido. 1930. ''Handbuch der Musikgeschichte'', second, thoroughly revised and greatly expanded edition. 2 vols. Berlin-Wilmersdorf: H. Keller. Reprinted, Tutzing: Schneider, 1961.
* Jacques Barzun, Barzun, Jacques. 2000. ''From Dawn to Decadence: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life, 1500 to the Present''. .
* Isaiah Berlin, Berlin, Isaiah. 1990. ''The Crooked Timber of Humanity: Chapters in the History of Ideas'', ed. Henry Hardy. London: John Murray. .
* Harold Bloom, Bloom, Harold (ed.). 1986. ''George Gordon, Lord Byron''. New York: Chelsea House Publishers.
* Friedrich Blume, Blume, Friedrich. 1970. ''Classic and Romantic Music'', translated by M. D. Herter Norton from two essays first published in ''Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart''. New York: W.W. Norton.
* Black, Joseph, Leonard Conolly, Kate Flint, Isobel Grundy, Don LePan, Roy Liuzza, Jerome J. McGann, Anne Lake Prescott, Barry V. Qualls, and Claire Waters. 2010
The Broadview Anthology of British Literature Volume 4: The Age of Romanticism Second Edition Peterborough: Broadview Press. .
* Bowra, C. Maurice. 1949. ''The Romantic Imagination'' (in series, "Galaxy Book[s]"). New York: Oxford University Press.
* Boyer, Jean-Paul. 1961. "Romantisme". ''Encyclopédie de la musique'', edited by François Michel, with François Lesure and Vladimir Fédorov, 3:585–87. Paris: Fasquelle.
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another excerpt-and-text-search source.
* Day, Aidan. ''Romanticism'', 1996, Routledge, .
* Umberto Eco, Eco, Umberto. 1994. "Interpreting Serials", in his
The Limits of Interpretation'', pp. 83–100. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
excerpt
* Alfred Einstein, Einstein, Alfred. 1947. ''Music in the Romantic Era''. New York: W.W. Norton.
* Ferber, Michael. 2010. ''Romanticism: A Very Short Introduction''. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. .
* Walter Friedländer, Friedlaender, Walter, ''David to Delacroix'', (Originally published in German; reprinted 1980) 1952.
* Greenblatt, Stephen, M. H. Abrams, Alfred David, James Simpson, George Logan, Lawrence Lipking, James Noggle, Jon Stallworthy, Jahan Ramazani, Jack Stillinger, and Deidre Shauna Lynch. 2006. ''Norton Anthology of English Literature'', eighth edition, ''The Romantic Period – Volume D''. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. .
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* Grout, Donald Jay. 1960. ''A History of Western Music''. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.
* E. T. A. Hoffmann, Hoffmann, Ernst Theodor Amadeus. 1810. "Recension: Sinfonie pour 2 Violons, 2 Violes, Violoncelle e Contre-Violon, 2 Flûtes, petite Flûte, 2 Hautbois, 2 Clarinettes, 2 Bassons, Contrabasson, 2 Cors, 2 Trompettes, Timbales et 3 Trompes, composée et dediée etc. par Louis van Beethoven. à Leipsic, chez Breitkopf et Härtel, Oeuvre 67. No. 5. des Sinfonies. (Pr. 4 Rthlr. 12 Gr.)". ''Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung'' 12, no. 40 (4 July), cols. 630–42 [Der Beschluss folgt.]; 12, no. 41 (11 July), cols. 652–59.
* Hugh Honour, Honour, Hugh, ''Neo-classicism'', 1968, Pelican.
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* Joachimides, Christos M. and Rosenthal, Norman and Anfam, David and Adams, Brooks (1993
''American Art in the 20th Century: Painting and Sculpture 1913–1993''.
* Macfarlane, Robert. 2007.
'Romantic' Originality'', i
''Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature'', March 2007, pp. 18–50(33)
* Noon, Patrick (ed), ''Crossing the Channel, British and French Painting in the Age of Romanticism'', 2003, Tate Publishing/Metropolitan Museum of Art.
* Fritz Novotny, Novotny, Fritz, ''Painting and Sculpture in Europe, 1780–1880'' (Pelican History of Art), Yale University Press, 2nd edn. 1971 .
* Ruthven, Kenneth Knowles. 2001. ''Faking Literature''. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. .
*
* Samson, Jim. 2001. "Romanticism". ''The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians'', second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (professor of music), John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers.
*
* Logan Pearsall Smith, Smith, Logan Pearsall (1924) ''Four Words: Romantic, Originality, Creative, Genius''. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
* A. C. Spearing, Spearing, A. C. 1987. ''Introduction'' section to Chaucer's ''The Franklin's Prologue and Tale''
* George Steiner, Steiner, George. 1998. "Topologies of Culture", chapter 6 of ''After Babel, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation'', third revised edition. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. .
* Wagner, Richard. ''Opera and Drama'', translated by William Ashton Ellis. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Originally published as volume 2 of ''Richard Wagner's Prose Works'' (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1900), a translation from ''Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen'' (Leipzig, 1871–73, 1883).
* Warrack, John. 2002. "Romanticism". ''The Oxford Companion to Music'', edited by Alison Latham. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. .
* Waterhouse, Francis A. 1926.
Romantic 'Originality''' in ''The Sewanee Review'', Vol. 34, No. 1 (January 1926), pp. 40–49.
* Weber, Patrick, ''Histoire de l'Architecture de l'Antiquité à Nos Jours'', Librio, Paris, (2008) .
* Wehnert, Martin. 1998. "Romantik und romantisch". ''Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart: allgemeine Enzyklopädie der Musik, begründet von Friedrich Blume'', second revised edition. Sachteil 8: Quer–Swi, cols. 464–507. Basel, Kassel, London, Munich, and Prague: Bärenreiter; Stuttgart and Weimar: Metzler.
Further reading
* Abrams, Meyer H. 1971. ''The Mirror and the Lamp''. London: Oxford University Press. .
* Abrams, Meyer H. 1973. ''Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature''. New York: W.W. Norton.
* Jacques Barzun, Barzun, Jacques. 1943. ''Romanticism and the Modern Ego''. Boston: Little, Brown and Company.
* Barzun, Jacques. 1961. ''Classic, Romantic, and Modern''. University of Chicago Press. .
* Berlin, Isaiah. 1999. ''The Roots of Romanticism''. London: Chatto and Windus. .
*Blanning, Tim. ''The Romantic Revolution: A History'' (2011) 272pp
* Breckman, Warren, ''European Romanticism: A Brief History with Documents''. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2007.
* Cavalletti, Carlo. 2000. ''Chopin and Romantic Music'', translated by Anna Maria Salmeri Pherson. Hauppauge, New York: Barron's Educational Series. (Hardcover) .
* Chaudon, Francis. 1980. ''The Concise Encyclopedia of Romanticism''. Secaucus, N.J.: Chartwell Books. .
* Ciofalo, John J. 2001. "The Ascent of Genius in the Court and Academy." ''The Self-Portraits of Francisco Goya.'' Cambridge University Press.
* Clewis, Robert R., ed. ''The Sublime Reader''. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019.
* Cox, Jeffrey N. 2004. ''Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and Their Circle''. Cambridge University Press. .
* Dahlhaus, Carl. 1979. "Neo-Romanticism". ''19th-Century Music'' 3, no. 2 (November): 97–105.
* Carl Dahlhaus, Dahlhaus, Carl. 1980. ''Between Romanticism and Modernism: Four Studies in the Music of the Later Nineteenth Century'', translated by Mary Whittall in collaboration with Arnold Whittall; also with Friedrich Nietzsche, "On Music and Words", translated by Walter Arnold Kaufmann. California Studies in 19th Century Music 1. Berkeley: University of California Press. . Original German edition, as ''Zwischen Romantik und Moderne: vier Studien zur Musikgeschichte des späteren 19. Jahrhunderts''. Munich: Musikverlag Katzber, 1974.
* Dahlhaus, Carl. 1985. ''Realism in Nineteenth-Century Music'', translated by Mary Whittall. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. . Original German edition, as ''Musikalischer Realismus: zur Musikgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts''. Munich: R. Piper, 1982. .
* Fabre, Côme, and Felix Krämer (eds.). 2013. ''L'ange du bizarre: Le romantisme noire de Goya a Max Ernst'', à l'occasion de l'Exposition, Stadel Museum, Francfort, 26 septembre 2012 – 20 janvier 2013, Musée d'Orsay, Paris, 5 mars – 9 juin 2013. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz. .
* Fay, Elizabeth. 2002. ''Romantic Medievalism. History and the Romantic Literary Ideal.'' Houndsmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave.
* Gaull, Marilyn. 1988. ''English Romanticism: The Human Context.'' New York and London: W.W. Norton. .
*Garofalo, Piero. 2005. "Italian Romanticisms." ''Companion to European Romanticism'', ed. Michael Ferber. London: Blackwell Press, 238–255.
* Geck, Martin. 1998. "Realismus". ''Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Allgemeine Enzyklopädie der Musik begründe von Friedrich Blume'', second, revised edition, edited by Ludwig Finscher. Sachteil 8: Quer–Swi, cols. 91–99. Kassel, Basel, London, New York, Prague: Bärenreiter; Suttgart and Weimar: Metzler. (Bärenreiter); (Metzler).
* Grewe, Cordula. 2009. ''Painting the Sacred in the Age of German Romanticism''. Burlington: Ashgate.
* Hamilton, Paul, ed. ''The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism'' (2016).
* Hesmyr, Atle. 2018. ''From Enlightenment to Romanticism in 18th Century Europe''
* Holmes, Richard. 2009. ''The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science''. London: HarperPress. . New York: Pantheon Books. . Paperback reprint, New York: Vintage Books.
* Honour, Hugh. 1979. ''Romanticism''. New York: Harper and Row. .
* Kravitt, Edward F. 1992. "Romanticism Today". ''The Musical Quarterly'' 76, no. 1 (Spring): 93–109.
* Lang, Paul Henry. 1941. ''Music in Western Civilization''. New York: W.W. Norton
* McCalman, Iain (ed.). 2009. ''An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age''. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Online a
Oxford Reference Online
* Mason, Daniel Gregory. 1936. ''The Romantic Composers''. New York: Macmillan.
* Masson, Scott. 2007. "Romanticism", Chapt. 7 in ''The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology'', (Oxford University Press).
* Murray, Christopher, ed. ''Encyclopedia of the romantic era, 1760–1850'' (2 vol 2004); 850 articles by experts; 1600pp
* Mazzeo, Tilar J. 2006. ''Plagiarism and Literary Property in the Romantic Period''. University of Pennsylvania Press.
*
* Leon Plantinga, Plantinga, Leon. 1984. ''Romantic Music: A History of Musical Style in Nineteenth-Century Europe''. A Norton Introduction to Music History. New York: W.W. Norton.
* Reynolds, Nicole. 2010. ''Building Romanticism: Literature and Architecture in Nineteenth-century Britain''. University of Michigan Press. .
* Nicholas V. Riasanovsky, Riasanovsky, Nicholas V. 1992. ''The Emergence of Romanticism''. New York: Oxford University Press.
* Charles Rosen, Rosen, Charles. 1995. ''The Romantic Generation''. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. .
* Rosenblum, Robert, ''Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition: Friedrich to Rothko'', (Harper & Row) 1975.
* Rummenhöller, Peter. 1989. ''Romantik in der Musik: Analysen, Portraits, Reflexionen''. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag; Kassel and New York: Bärenreiter.
* Ruston, Sharon. 2013. ''Creating Romanticism: Case Studies in the Literature, Science and Medicine of the 1790s''. Palgrave Macmillan. .
* Schenk, H. G. 1966. ''The Mind of the European Romantics: An Essay in Cultural History''. : Constable.
* Spencer, Stewart. 2008. "The 'Romantic Operas' and the Turn to Myth". In ''Cambridge Companions to Music, The Cambridge Companion to Wagner'', edited by Thomas S. Grey, 67–73. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. .
* Tekiner, Deniz. 2000. ''Modern Art and the Romantic Vision''. Lanham, Maryland. University Press of America. .
* Tong, Q. S. 1997. ''Reconstructing Romanticism: Organic Theory Revisited''. Poetry Salzburg.
* Workman, Leslie J. 1994. "Medievalism and Romanticism". ''Poetica'' 39–40: 1–34.
Black Letter Press 2019. "Oh, Death!" Anthology of English Romantic Poetry, selected by Claudio Rocchetti
External links
Romantics & Victoriansexplored on the British Library Discovering Literature website
The Romantic Poets"Romanticism" ''Dictionary of the History of Ideas''
"Romanticism in Political Thought" ''Dictionary of the History of Ideas''
''Romantic Circles''Electronic editions, histories, and scholarly articles related to the Romantic era
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