Romanticism And The Industrial Revolution 5r2k3y

ROMANTIC PERIOD What is Romanticism? Romanticism was an artistic and intellectual movement which took place in Europe between the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries. Understood broadly as a break from the guiding principles of the Enlightenment – which established reason as the foundation of all knowledge – the Romantic Movement emphasised the importance of emotional sensitivity and individual subjectivity. For the Romantics, imagination, rather than reason, was the most important creative faculty. Romanticism in literature Romanticism in English literature started in the late eighteenth century, with the poets William Blake, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. It continued into the nineteenth century with the second generation of Romantic poets, most notably Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats and Lord Byron. In contrast to the reasoned detachment of the Enlightenment, the poetic works of Blake, Wordsworth and Coleridge were characterised by their emotional sensitivity and reverence for nature. Though the second generation of Romantic poets, especially Shelley and Byron, became notorious for their subversive and salacious works, later Romantic poetry also retained many characteristics established by Blake and Wordsworth. Keats’ odes, much like the poetry of Wordsworth, took inspiration from nature, and Bryon’s poetry had a strong introspective character. Shelley, Byron and Keats also acquired a posthumous reputation as ‘Romantic’ because many aspects of their lives – including their travels around Europe and the fact they died young – conformed to the emerging nineteenth-century ideal-type of a Romantic hero. Romanticism in art Nature was also a source of inspiration in the visual arts of the Romantic Movement. Breaking with the longer tradition of historical and allegorical paintings, which took scenes from history or the Bible as their principle subject matter, Romantic artists like J. M. W. Turner and John Constable – chose instead to depict the natural world, most notably landscapes and maritime scenes. Romantic artists depicted nature to be not only beautiful, but powerful, unpredictable and destructive. This constituted a radical departure from Enlightenment representations of the natural world as orderly and benign. Romanticism in music The Romantic Movement in music originated in Beethoven, whose later works drew upon and developed the classical styles of Mozart and Haydn. Beethoven’s later symphonies and piano sonatas were made distinctive by their expressiveness and strong emotive quality. These characteristics set the tone for successive generations of Romantic composers in Europe, including Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn. Romanticism as a mind-set Romanticism may be best understood not as a movement, but as a mind-set. The artists, poets and musicians of the Romantic period were united by their determination to use their art to convey emotion or provoke an emotional response from audiences. There was also something pioneering – almost revolutionary – about Romanticism. It involved breaking with the past, and consciously moving away from the ideas and traditions of the Enlightenment. In so doing, Romanticism fundamentally changed the prevailing attitudes toward nature, emotion, reason and even the individual.

: a literary, artistic, and philosophical movement originating in the 18th century, characterized chiefly by a reaction against neoclassicism and an emphasis on the imagination and emotions, and marked especially in English literature by sensibility and the use of autobiographical material, an exaltation of the primitive and the common man, an appreciation of external nature, an interest in the remote, a predilection for melancholy, and the use in poetry of older verse forms In a general sense, Romanticism refers to several distinct groups of artists, poets, writers, musicians, political, philosophical and social thinkers and trends of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in Europe. This movement is typically characterized by its reaction against the Enlightenment; while the Enlightenment emphasized the primacy of reason, Romanticism emphasized imagination and strong emotion. Rather than an epistemology of deduction, the Romantics demonstrated elements of knowledge through intuition. A precise characterization and a specific description of Romanticism were objects of intellectual history and literary history for all of the twentieth century without the emergence of any great measure of consensus.