Romanticism
Romanticism was an innovative artistic, musical and literary movement in the 1800s which emphasized expressed thoughts, feelings, and nature. The Romantic period of art was also a period of rebirth for religion. Romanticism was a conservative backlash against atheistic elements of the Enlightenment and its biased view of intelligence at the expense of fundamental human emotion and imagination.
American literature typifying this era include Herman Melville's Moby Dick, Edgar Allan Poe's writings, and the additional American writers Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman; writer Victor Hugo led this movement in Europe with his works readable by the common man. English poets in this movement included William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
The term "Romanticism" was coined because it originated in European regions of the "Romance Languages," namely French, Spanish and Italian. German and British Romanticism followed soon after. Other countries such as America and Canada also had Romantic art movements. Romanticism was a rebellion against Neo-Classicism, a movement that preceded it in the late 1600s and 1700s, and which obsessed with intellect while ignoring freedom and imagination.
In writing, Romanticism elevated the common man, nationalism, and the supernatural, while also glorifying nature.
Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) was perhaps the most important of the French Romantic painters; in English literature, the Romantic movement was started by Lyrical Ballads (1798), poems co-authored by William Wordsworth (a ballad is a narrative poem).
Chassériau, Othello and Desdemona in Venice.
Key Artists
- William Blake
- Henry Fuseli
- Francisco de Goya
- Eugene Delacroix
- Theodore Chasseriau
- William Turner
- John Constable
- Philippe Jacques De Loutherbourg
Key Authors
- Walt Whitman (poetry)
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
- E.T.A. Hoffmann
- Mary Shelley
- Sir Walter Scott
- Edgar Allan Poe
- Henry David Thoreau
- Herman Melville
- Nathaniel Hawthorne
In Literature
Literary romanticism was characterized by a series of details. It evoked the past heavily and put a great emphasis on women and children, mostly because of their purity. It wasn't associated to carnal love, as in lust, but a romantic love that was more idealistic than anything. Romanticism also had a strong nationalist sense, as can be found in Goethe's works.
