Dictionary:

romanticism

  (rō-măn'tĭ-sĭz'əm)

1. often Romanticism An artistic and intellectual movement originating in Europe in the late 18th century and characterized by a heightened interest in nature, emphasis on the individual's expression of emotion and imagination, departure from the attitudes and forms of classicism, and rebellion against established social rules and conventions.
2. Romantic quality or spirit in thought, expression, or action.

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Dominant cultural tendency in the Western world in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It caused a re-evaluation of the nature of art and the role of the artist in society. Significantly, from the 1790s it was a self-proclaimed movement, the first such, and so initiated a tradition that has remained in Western culture since. Romanticism was rejected or ignored by most of the major artists later seen as associated with it, but it nevertheless identified several key tendencies of the period. Though hard to define precisely, it essentially involves: 1) placing emotion and intuition before (or at least on an equal footing with) reason; 2) a belief that there are crucial areas of experience neglected by the rational mind; and 3) a belief in the general importance of the individual, the personal and the subjective. In fact it embodies a critique of that faith in progress and rationality that had characterized the main trend of Western thought and action since the Renaissance. This resulted in an opposition to the dominant contemporary values and social structures. Romanticism started as a literary movement but soon came to include the visual arts, particularly painting, the most notable exponents being Blake, Delacroix, Friedrich, G?ricault, Goya, Philipp Otto Runge and Turner. To a lesser extent it also affected the graphic arts, sculpture and architecture. By the 1840s it was being superseded by Realism, though many of its ideas persisted throughout the 19th century and into the 20th.

See the Abbreviations for further details.

Associated with free and idealistic expression of and attitudes towards the passions and individuality, Romanticism is nevertheless an extremely vague term, more familiar in analysis of the arts than of politics. In literature, the adjective ‘romantic’ first appeared in French towards the end of the seventeenth century, and referred to a form of narrative fiction, involving passions rather than reason, which eventually became known in English as the novel. Romanticism as an explicit system of ideas appeared at the end of the eighteenth century, in Germany, as a critique of neoclassical aesthetics, an aspect of Enlightenment thought. It came to include history, philosophy, music, the plastic arts, and politics, as well as literature. The meaning in politics often seems to be a reflection of literary classifications, and Romanticism cannot be associated with any specific political system or ideology. Some Romantics supported the French Revolution, some opposed it, and some changed their minds about it.

Romanticism is often seen as an antithesis of the Enlightenment, but that is too simple. For the Enlightenment thinker, human nature is universal, or at least what is important about it is universal, and it can be analysed in terms of general laws on the model of physics. For the Romantic, this is impossible. What is important is the specificity and creativity of each individual, which cannot be reduced to any set of general laws. One aspect of this is the Romantic rejection of natural science, at least when applied to humanity but sometimes in any guise. Part of this denial of universalism involved the Romantic adoption of nationalism, but originally this was more cultural than political, and did not include the idea that one nation was ‘better’ than another.

Politically, Romanticism has been associated with every view from liberalism to extreme authoritarianism. One of its essential manifestations in the nineteenth century involved the rejection of individualism and industrial society in favour of sympathy for the factory worker, as in the case of Coleridge.

— Carl Slevin

Romanticism, a sweeping but indispensable modern term applied to the profound shift in Western attitudes to art and human creativity that dominated much of European culture in the first half of the 19th century, and that has shaped most subsequent developments in literature—even those reacting against it. In its most coherent early form, as it emerged in the 1790s in Germany and Britain, and in the 1820s in France and elsewhere, it is known as the Romantic Movement or Romantic Revival. Its chief emphasis was upon freedom of individual self‐expression: sincerity, spontaneity, and originality became the new standards in literature, replacing the decorous imitation of classical models favoured by 18th‐century neoclassicism. Rejecting the ordered rationality of the Enlightenment as mechanical, impersonal, and artificial, the Romantics turned to the emotional directness of personal experience and to the boundlessness of individual imagination and aspiration. Increasingly independent of the declining system of aristocratic patronage, they saw themselves as free spirits expressing their own imaginative truths; several found admirers ready to hero‐worship the artist as a genius or prophet. The restrained balance valued in 18th‐century culture was abandoned in favour of emotional intensity, often taken to extremes of rapture, nostalgia (for childhood or the past), horror, melancholy, or sentimentality. Some—but not all—Romantic writers cultivated the appeal of the exotic, the bizarre, or the macabre; almost all showed a new interest in the irrational realms of dream and delirium or of folk superstition and legend. The creative imagination occupied the centre of Romantic views of art, which replaced the ‘mechanical’ rules of conventional form with an ‘organic’ principle of natural growth and free development.

The emergence of Romanticism has been attributed to several developments in late 18th‐century culture (see preromanticism), including a strong antiquarian interest in ballads and medieval romances (from which Romanticism takes its name). The immediateinspiration for the first self‐declared Romantics—the German group including the Schlegel brothers and Novalis—was the transcendental philosophy of Kant and Fichte, which stressed the creative power of themind and allowed nature to be seen as a responsivemirror of the soul. This new German thinking spread via S. T. Coleridge to Britain and via Mme de Staël to France, eventually shaping American Transcendentalism. English Romanticism had emerged independently with William Blake's then little‐known anti‐Enlightenment writings of the 1790s and with the landmark of William Wordsworth's 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads. In a second wave after the Napoleonic wars, Romanticism established itself in France and across Europe; by the 1830s the movement extended from Pushkin in Russia to Poe in the USA. Romanticism drew some of its energies from the associated revolutionary movements of democracy and nationalism, although the ‘classical’ culture of the French Revolution actually delayed the arrival of French Romanticism, and a strong element of conservative nostalgia is also evident in many Romantic writers.

The literary rebellion of Wordsworth in England and Victor Hugo in France declared an end to the artificiality of older conventions, breaking up the 18th‐century system of distinct genres and of poetic diction. Lyric poetry underwent a major revival led by Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Pushkin, Leopardi, Heine, and others; narrative verse took on a new subjective dimension in the work of Wordsworth and Byron, but the theatre tended towards the sensationalism of melodrama. In fiction, Hoffmann and Poe pioneered the tale of terror in the wake of the Gothic novel, while the historical novels of Walter Scott, Alessandro Manzoni, Victor Hugo, and James Fenimore Cooper combined bold action with nostalgic sentiment. A new wave of women novelists led by Mary Shelley, George Sand, and the Brontë sisters broke the imposed restraints of modesty in works of powerful imaginative force. The astonishing personality of Byron provided Alfred de Musset, Mikhail Lermontov, and other admirers throughout Europe with a model of the Romantic poet as tormented outcast. The growing international cult of Shakespeare also reflected the Romantic hero‐worship which, in the writings of Thomas Carlyle and R. W. Emerson, became a ‘heroic’ view of history as the product of forceful personalities like Napoleon.

Although challenged in the second half of the 19th century by the rise of realism and naturalism, Romanticism has in some ways maintained a constant presence in Western literature, providing the basis for several schools and movements from the Pre‐Raphaelites and Symbolists to expressionism and Surrealism. In a broader sense, the term ‘romantic’ may be applied to works and authors of other periods, by explicit or implicit comparison with a ‘classical’ standard: thus Shakespeare is more romantic than Molière or Ben Jonson, both because he disregards the structural models of Greek drama and because he exploits freely the supernatural elements of folk legend; and in a different way, W. B. Yeats and D. H. Lawrence are more romantic than W. H. Auden and E. M. Forster, because they assert the absolute primacy of their personal visions, rejecting common norms of objectivity. For a fuller account, consult Aidan Day, Romanticism (1996).

For more information on Romanticism, visit Britannica.com.

Late-C18 and early C19 artistic forward, including the beak-head, billet, movement, its many variations and strands cable, chevron, double cone, nebule, and defying any neat definition. The one character-reversed zig-zag. istic found throughout its sundry manifestations was the insistence on individual experience, intuition, instinct, and emotion. Commonly perceived as a reaction against the rationalism of the Enlightenment, Classicism, and Neo-Classicism, it nevertheless shared with Classicism reverence for the ideal, transcending reality, hence the term Romantic Classicism applied to works displaying a Romantic response to the Antique. A perfect Ancient Greek temple in its pristine state would be Classical, but a ruined Greek temple, though Classical in one sense, cannot be Classical in another because it is broken, incomplete, partial, and in ruins. Such a ruin might, however, be perceived as beautiful, and so a Classical building constructed as a ‘ruin’ in an C18 garden could be described as an example of Romantic Classicism. Asymmetrical compositions set in the context of the Picturesque often are purely Classical in detail, such as Schinkel's exquisite buildings at Potsdam (Charlottenhof and the Roman Baths complex), and so can be classed as examples of Romantic Classicism.

Form, in Romantic art, was determined by the inner idea within the subject represented, and the yearning for spirituality and inner meaning allied Romanticism with medievalism, Historicism, the Picturesque, the Gothic Revival, and the Sublime. A new tenderness towards the dead, a love of melancholy, and the cultivation of feelings were characteristics of Romanticism, creating elegiac gardens, the first cemeteries, and fuelling the religious revival that was such an important part of C19 European and American culture.

Bibliography

• Chilvers, Osborne, & Farr (eds.) (1988)
• Clay (1981)
• J. Curl (2002a)
• Honour (1979)
• H.O. (1970)
• Jane Turner (1996)

The full bibliography for this book is available to download as a pdf file.
Download the bibliography for A Dictionary of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (PDF: 1.2MB)

Romanticism (Le Romantisme)

1. General characteristics

Romanticism marked a profound shift in European culture, a crisis in belief and a change in sensibility. It was a complex phenomenon which contained diverse and sometimes contradictory elements, developing along different lines within individual national cultures. In France it affected politics, philosophy, literature, music, and the fine arts.

Romanticism was long presented first and foremost as a reaction against the rules imposed by a tired classical aesthetic. It was held to be characterized by a vibrant assertion of the value of selfhood, individuality, and personal revolt. Although this view contains much that is true, it neglects the extent to which Romanticism was a much broader cultural phenomenon involving new evaluations of the relationship between self and society, new attitudes to nature and to history, and a new sense of the sacred. Moreover, one must bear in mind that in France, more than elsewhere, the development of Romanticism was intimately related to the experience of the Revolution and its aftermath. Indeed, Romanticism was in large part a response to the general mood of post-Revolutionary instability.

In recent times entrenched and often highly polemical definitions of French Romanticism—which tended to focus on a narrow period such as 1820-43—have given way to a willingness to consider most literary work produced from the 1770s to at least 1850 as corresponding to the Romantic age (indeed, some critics go as far as to include Symbolism and Surrealism within an extended definition of Romanticism). Furthermore, the notion that there was a distinct early phase of Romanticism, called Pre-Romanticism, which had earlier become a critical orthodoxy, has also now fallen from favour. The difficulty with considering almost a century of French culture as Romantic is obvious: can any term retain its usefulness if it is applied to such a diversity of cultural production? On the other hand, one advantage of adopting the extended time-scale and moving away from restricted definitions is that authors such as Balzac and Stendhal, who tended to be situated outside mainstream Romanticism, can now legitimately be placed at its centre.

2. Origins to 1830

The term ‘Romantic’ was popularized by Germaine de Staël in De l'Allemagne (1810), where she advocated an openness towards foreign literatures and cultures, to values and qualities which had been excluded by classical taste. Romanticism marked a move away from 18th-c. sensationalist philosophy, which held that all knowledge came through the senses, in a new direction, one which valued inwardness and the truths of feeling. The scientific world-view was held to have sundered the individual from society, separated man from nature. Romanticism questioned the capacity of reason to arrive at the truth, valorizing instead mystery and fantasy, dream and reverie. Moreover, as the power of traditional Catholicism waned, the Romantics attributed to literature itself a revelatory function, casting themselves in the role of priests of the religion of art. In turning inwards and relying on the voice of conscience, Romanticism followed J.-J. Rousseau; it also incorporated his identification of the natural as the locus of truth and authenticity. However, in the 19th c. political and social conditions had been transformed by the experience of the Revolution. At one level Romanticism's Prometheanism, its call for self-expression and emancipation, can be seen as an avatar of the revolutionary will to freedom. But at another level it represents a quest for new forms of knowledge and grounds of meaning, and also, paradoxically, for the restoration of a lost or imagined harmony. Indeed, Romanticism can be said to be characterized by a passionate desire for unity, a wish to transcend the contraries of mind and nature, subject and object, intellect and emotion.

In the early 1800s the quintessentially Romantic themes of spiritual longing, the inner void, solitude, restlessness, uncertainty, melancholia, the vanity of all things, and the obsession with love and death were embodied in Chateaubriand's highly influential René. The tale's protagonist became the archetypal victim of the mal du siècle. Was it only the intensity of suffering which gave purchase on life? René was included within Le Génie du christianisme (1802), Chateaubriand's apologia for the Christian religion, where the story functioned—somewhat ambiguously—as a cautionary tale. Le Génie du christianisme blended Rousseauism with Catholicism, and marked a sharp reaction against the liberalism and individualism of the Enlightenment, which were held responsible for the social dislocation wrought by the Revolution. What mattered was the rebuilding of social cohesion, the reconstruction of the social bond.

Romanticism repudiated contractual theories and often ascribed primacy to society over the individual. This desire to re-forge the social bond often involved viewing society as an organism—this was the hallmark of anti-democratic conservative thought (e.g. J. de Maistre, Lamennais). Conservative Romantics revered the past as the repository of truth and value, rehabilitated the Gothic Middle Ages, and respected the ordering power of medieval Christianity. In the early years of the century their arguments were resisted by the Idéologues, who defended the cause of moderate republicanism and individualism.

In the 1820s the Romantic school of poets came to prominence. Vigny, Hugo, and Lamartine were young authors whose writing, with its personal, introspective, confessional tone, struck an immediate chord with readers [see also Desbordesvalmore]. In political and religious terms the allegiance of these new writers lay with legitimist royalism and Catholicism. They met as a group, or cénacle, in the salon of Charles Nodier, and their views on literature were expressed in the pages of periodicals such as La Muse française (1823-4). However, the Romantic idea underwent significant modifications during the Restoration. In Racine et Shakespeare (1823 and 1825) Stendhal related Romanticism to an artistic commitment to engage with contemporary reality, particularly in the theatre. In the mid-1820s a different, liberal Romanticism was formulated in the pages of Le Globe, the organ of a rising generation of critics, historians, and poets who were dissatisfied with the sceptical liberalism of the Idéologues. The later 1820s witnessed the coming together of Romanticism and liberalism.

In the Préface de Cromwell Hugo formulated what amounted to a manifesto and a new aesthetic. He saw the task of art as grasping the complexity of reality in a totalizing vision, grounded his project in a philosophy of history, and formulated an aesthetic based upon oppositions and tensions which challenged the prescriptions and formal requirements of classicism. Romantic writers followed Hugo's example, holding that the old conventions were no longer adequate to express the conflicts of modernity. Artistic freedom involved technical innovation and questioning of the traditional genres. The battle of Hernani (1830) is usually taken as a key date in the struggle to renew French drama by calling into question the rules of classical doctrine [for the drame romantique see Drama in France since 1789].

3. After 1830

The July Revolution of 1830 marked a watershed in the development of French Romanticism. After this date we find a growing concern for broader social themes and a sympathy for the plight of the masses suffering under the impact of industrialism [see July Monarchy]. The artist was held to have social responsibilities. The poet, in particular, was cast in the role of interpreter of God's ways to man in what to many seemed to be a post-Christian world. In the wake of 1830 there was an explosion of new social religions in France [see Saint-Simon, Marquis de; Fourier]. There were also attempts to renew traditional religious forms: Lamennais published his Paroles d'un croyant in 1834. Some authors, however, found the self-importance of the new believers difficult to accept. Musset could not take seriously the new religions which proclaimed the goodness of the masses and relied upon a progressivist theory of history. Gautier rejected the notion that art should serve political ends and advocated a different programme altogether, that of ‘l' art pour l'art’. Others, the Frénétiques, developed a literature which focused on the violence, despair, and nihilism inherent in the critical dimension of Romanticism [see also Bousingots; Jeunes-France].

After 1830 the mal du siècle persisted, but its cause was no longer the loss of the ancien régime so much as the failure of France to regain her position in the vanguard of history, to extend the gains of the Revolutionary years. In the 1830s and 1840s Quinet, Pierre Leroux, and Michelet proclaimed their faith in nationalism. Socialists, on the other hand, prized humanitarianism over nationalism; in their view social reorganization in the name of increased equality was of greater significance than political reform. In these years Romantic writing was drawn to the apocalyptic, to myths of rebirth and transformation. It created the intellectual climate which accompanied the Revolution of 1848 [see Republics, 2], with its exaggerated hopes of renewal and the inception of a new harmonious order. The disillusionment which followed the Second Republic's inability to incarnate the idealism of Romanticism in the world of fact produced an anti-Romantic backlash. Writers who none the less remained deeply Romantic in temperament (Baudelaire, Flaubert) questioned the metaphysical status of nature and history. Others reaffirmed, against the odds, the totalizing ambitions of Romanticism. After 1851 Michelet wrote expansive works of history and natural history and Hugo elaborated cosmic themes in his prophetic poetry.

4. Nature and History

French Romanticism's main centres of interest can be summed up by looking briefly at attitudes to nature and history. Romantic literature did more than use reference to nature as a way of evoking human feelings. Many authors believed that external nature was the embodiment of the divine and that the universe could be understood analogically as a network of secret relationships or correspondences. The artist obtained access to an invisible spiritual world (Sand, Les Sept Cordes de la lyre, 1840); the imagination was viewed as a spiritual faculty, creative not imitative. Moreover, artistic knowledge of the sacred patterning of nature was linked to theories of the regeneration of society.

Equally central to Romanticism was a new relation to time. The God who was present in nature was also active in history, which became a ground of meaning, personal and collective. Romantic thinkers envisaged politics against the backdrop of world history. Poets and writers who were preoccupied with the fragmentation of the personality (e.g. Nerval) turned to a poetics of memory as a way of beginning the reconstruction of selfhood. Romanticism believed that ideas moved history and that these ideas were embodied in peoples, collective subjects. Reviving the national past was a central part of creating a sense of belonging to community, and the recreation of the past was a central aspect of the novels of Hugo, Vigny, and Dumas.

Romantic writing surprises by its capacity to challenge our expectations. Personal lyricism combines with political commitment; the literature of exhaustion exudes energy and desire; the evocation of disintegration becomes a hymn to metamorphosis and transformation; the imagination which sets out to discover the divine presence uncovers unsettling truths about the unconscious and its workings; confidence in the goodness of of nature and the purpose of history is undercut by parody or qualified by irony. The overarching Romantic desire to achieve synthesis and unity remained tempered by the critical inheritance of the 18th c.

[Ceri Crossley]

Bibliography

• H. Peyre, Qu'est-ce que le romantisme? (1971)
• M. Milner and C. Pichois, Le Romantisme (1973)
• P. Bénichou, Le Temps des prophètes (1977)
• D. G. Charlton, The French Romantics, 2 vols. (1984)
• F. P. Bowman, French Romanticism: Intertextual and Interdisciplinary Readings (1990)
• C. Crossley, French Historians and Romanticism (1993)

The movement that swept European and thence American culture between about 1775 and 1830, although heralded by preceding elements in the 18th century (antiquarianism, novels of sensibility, the taste for the sublime and the picturesque, and above all Rousseau's elevation of nature and sentiment above civilization and intellect). Romanticism was partly a reaction against the stiff rationality of the Enlightenment and its official, static, neo-classical art, in favour of the spontaneous, the unfettered, the subjective, the imaginative and emotional, and the inspirational and heroic. In philosophy, the Romantics took from Kant both the emphasis on free will and the doctrine that reality is ultimately spiritual, with nature itself a mirror of the human soul. In Schelling, nature becomes a creative spirit whose aspiration is ever fuller and more complete self-realization. Knowledge of the nature of this spirit (the Absolute) cannot be acquired by rational and analytic means, but only by emotional and intuitive absorption within the process. The spontaneous innocence of the child (and of humanity in its childhood) is corrupted with the onset of intellectual separation from nature, but the individual, and equally human history, can overcome this separation by a spiral process of regaining the lost unity, albeit cleansed and improved by the journey. Romantic art is thus essentially one of movement, figured in quests, journeys, and pilgrimages whose aim is to return to a lost home or haven. Coleridge and de Staël were the main vehicle for the transmission of German philosophical Romanticism to England. Although a movement of more general cultural importance, Romanticism drew on the same intellectual and emotional resources as German idealism, as it culminates in the philosophy of Hegel and of absolute idealism. In the twentieth century it survived in nostalgic nationalism and intemperate criticisms of modernity, found most notably in Heidegger. The problem is that once human beings believe they have suffered a Fall, or a separation from the true grounds of life, they quickly start looking for victims within or without the society, to blame for it.

Ever since A. O. Lovejoy explained the importance of "discriminating among" the strands, scholars have resisted treating "Romanticism" as a single unified historical movement. Without minimizing this variety, however, it is still possible to identify some emphases common to western Romanticisms, whether in the United States, England, or on the continent, especially in France and Germany. All celebrate the importance of the individual. Most represent human potential in terms of an organic link with the natural world. Many depict this capacity for human growth as the triumph of the intuitive over the methodical and rational. Some suppose that individual self-culture will lead to social progress, even political revolution.

The Beginnings of American Romanticism

In the United States, anticipations of Romanticism appear as early as the late eighteenth century—most notably in discussions of the sublime and the picturesque in landscape, and in the influence of the "moral sense" philosophy of such post-Lockeans as Francis Hutcheson, Dugald Stewart, and Thomas Reid. Although such proto-Romanticism can be found even in the works of Jonathan Edwards and Thomas Jefferson, it is most evident in the gothic and sentimental fictions that flourished in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is customary, however, to date the official beginning of American Romanticism from the rise of Bostonian "transcendentalism" in the 1830s. An outgrowth of liberal Christianity, transcendentalism began as occasional meetings among recent graduates of the Harvard Divinity School. The so-called Transcendental Club soon expanded into more inclusive discussions among men and (a few) women of general interests—primarily in philosophy, literature, and moral theology. From 1840 to 1844, the group published its own journal, The Dial. But its most important statement was one of its earliest: published in 1836, a few days before the club's first meeting, the little book Nature became the unofficial "credo" of transcendentalism, from its most influential spokesperson, Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Emerson's Nature was less concerned with the natural landscape than with the role that individual thought played in perceiving the world of substance. In his argument for the creative power of consciousness, Emerson drew not only on the Scottish moral sense philosophers, but also on European epistemology in general, with special emphasis on René Descartes, John Locke, and Immanuel Kant. He learned from Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, perhaps through intermediaries like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Victor Cousin, to value the intuitions of Reason over the mechanical demonstrations of the Understanding. Most of the book outlined the value of idealism, with a complementary lack of interest in the material world. However radical Emerson's embrace of Kantian idealism, readers found more compelling the uplifting poetry of the prophetic final chapter "Prospects." When one's life conformed, Emerson claimed, to the "true idea" in one's mind, the influx of spirit would work a "corresponding revolution" in things. Not only did the disagreeable vanish; man, understood as a "god in ruins," once again established dominion over his kingdom.

Emerson was transcendentalism's most philosophical writer and its greatest advocate for unification with the Universal Spirit or the One. He was less interested in the practical consequences of that union. When invited to join a local reform group, he refused to lift "the siege of [my] hencoop" to "march baffled away to a pretended siege of Babylon." Most transcendentalists, however, saw spiritual purification as only the first step in political reform. Bronson Alcott and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody actively engaged in humanizing secondary education; while George Ripley put into practice the theories of French utopian Charles Fourier in his communal experiment at Brook Farm. Most influential in their politics were the two students most closely influenced by Emerson—Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau. Emerson's coeditor at The Dial, Fuller was famous for her travel writing, reviews, and translations, and as part of the Italian unification movement. But her most celebrated work was "The Great Lawsuit: MAN versus MEN. WOMAN versus WOMEN," published first in The Dial in 1845 and expanded soon thereafter into the book-length Woman in the Nineteenth Century. The most influential feminist tract between those of Mary Wollstonecraft and Virginia Woolf, Woman explored gendered aspects of Emerson's sexless Universal. Just as Emerson foretold the advent of godlike American scholars and poets, so Fuller ended her work rhapsodically awaiting the second coming of woman as a daughter of God: "Would [woman] but assume her inheritance, Mary would not be the only Virgin Mother. … The soul is ever young, ever virgin."

Like Fuller, Thoreau introduced social realities into Emerson's abstract philosophy. In A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854), and numerous essays, he examined with microscopic attention the natural world that for Emerson remained merely ideal and phenomenal. More important, perhaps, was his early and unflinching opposition to slavery. Notorious in his age for his 1860 defense of John Brown, Thoreau has in later generations been more celebrated for his earlier piece, "Resistance to Civil Government" (1849), which under the posthumous title of "Civil Disobedience" helped shape Gandhi's and Martin Luther King Jr.'s policies of passive resistance. Taking to its logical conclusion the Emersonian proposition that society conspires against the "manhood" of its members, Thoreau announced that "that government is best which governs not at all."

Beyond Transcendentalism

Romanticism among American writers was not, however, restricted to the New England transcendentalists. Some Romantic novelists responded directly to transcendental theories—whether negatively as in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance (1852) or more ambivalently as in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851). Romantic historians like George Bancroft, Francis Parkman, and William Prescott tempered fact with a gripping narrative style to celebrate a "democratic" vision of America. Most puzzling, especially in its regional allegiances with both the North and the South, was the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Continuing older literary traditions, Poe's use of the gothic superimposed on a popular commercial genre a metaphysical density that was at times indistinguishable from Emerson's—by Poe's own account a Gothicism "not of Germany, but of the Mind."

The place of Romanticism outside of literature is harder to assess. Unitarianism shared many characteristics with the transcendentalist movement it spawned, particularly its distaste for the stern Calvinist image of God, and its support for liberal political reform. It was less comfortable, however, with Emersonian notions of the divinity in man, and openly opposed the transcendentalists' rejection of both the Holy Trinity and Christ's miracles. More generally, the religious intensity of the mid-century can be seen as broadly Romantic, and in fact transcendentalism has frequently been read as a more secular form of the revivalism that swept the Midwest and the "burned-over" district of upstate New York. Here the shifting allegiances of the Beecher family may be taken as representative. Firmly grounded in a Calvinist tradition of fire-and-brimstone preaching, Lyman Beecher openly rejected the "icy" rhetoric of Boston Unitarianism. Although his gradualist approach to both salvation and abolition seemed too cautious for the more fiery imagination of the frontier preacher Charles Grandison Finney, Beecher eventually became reconciled to Finney's evangelicalism to avoid the greater dangers of Bostonian secularism. By the next generation, Lyman's son Henry Ward Beecher was able to combine traditional Presbyterianism with a philosophical outlook not far from Emerson's own.

The point of convergence between religious and more secular Romanticisms was a shared sense of the perfectibility of man. Perfectibility had been a common theme of progressive Enlightenment philosophy. In mid-nineteenth-century America, however, the religious dimensions of programs for the betterment of individuals may have also reinforced conservative politics. The attempts of such benevolence societies as the American Bible Association and the American Tract Society to enlighten the lower classes also had the effect of bringing those previously ignored groups under more careful social surveillance. A similarly uncomfortable compromise between personal advancement and social control can be seen in the period's preoccupation with institutionalization, especially the prison reform movement.

The ambiguities by which Romantic reform of the individual also bound down the underprivileged are perhaps most evident in the women's movement. The most transcendental feminists like Fuller and Peabody eschewed any group activity to focus exclusively on self-cultivation. But more mainstream proponents like Catherine Beecher located female excellence in the special characteristics of women. This argument afforded the movement great power only at the expense of reinforcing domestic stereotypes. The limitations of this position informed much of mid-century women's fiction. The heroine's triumph over adversity in best-sellers like Susan Warner's The Wide, Wide World (1851) and Maria Cummins's The Lamplighter (1854) was accomplished by obedience to authority, spiritual and patriarchal. Even in Harriet Beecher Stowe's fierce Uncle Tom's Cabin (1851– 1852), the conclusion—that slavery can be ended only through the reform of individuals into a state of "right feeling"—betrayed both its origins in Emerson's self-reliance and the insufficiency of transcendentalism as a political tool.

Eventually absorbed into the political ferment of antebellum culture, Romanticism as a movement was eclipsed by more pressing realities of secession and reconstruction. Yet the precepts of Romanticism continue to shape culture today. Modern Romanticism is most apparent in the poetic tradition, where the experiments of the late Romantic experimental poets Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson stand as models for most subsequent poetry, not only of Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens, but later of Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, and John Ashbery. Even intellectual traditions like pragmatism and naturalism that define themselves in opposition to Romanticism still maintain clear links to the earlier tradition; there is as much of Emersonian individualism in William James, Theodore Dreiser, and Ernest Hemingway as in any of his Boston contemporaries. On the darker side, cynical readings of individualism and perfectibility are regularly used to justify contemporary laissez-faire economics and corporate greed. As a literary and philosophical movement, American Romanticism ended in 1865; as a cultural mentality, it is still very much with us.

Bibliography

Davis, David Brion, ed. Antebellum Reform. New York: Harper and Row, 1967. Particularly fine essay by John L. Thomas on Romantic reform.

Hutchison, William R. The Transcendentalist Ministers: Church Reform in the New England Renaissance. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1959.

Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. New York: Oxford University Press, 1941.

Packer, Barbara L. "The Transcendentalists." In The Cambridge History of American Literature, Volume II; 1820–1865. Edited by Sacvan Bercovitch. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Rose, Ann C. Transcendentalism As a Social Movement, 1830– 1850. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981.

Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Fine feminist account of sentimental fiction.

Unlike the Enlightenment, a cultural movement that was imported into Russia from the West and thus, in the words of the poet Alexander Pushkin, "moored on the banks of the conquered Neva" (referring to the river that flows through St. Petersburg), Romanticism had a more indigenous quality, building on the earlier cultural tradition of sentimentalism. The awakening of the heart experienced by Russian society in the second half of the eighteenth century resulted in an oversensitive, reflective personality - a type that persisted in the next generation and evolved into the superfluous man epitomized by Pushkin in the character of Eugene Onegin in the poem of the same name, and by Mikhail Lermontov in Pechorin, the protagonist of A Hero of Our Time. The full-fledged Romantic type was born in Russia during the reign of Alexander I (1801 - 1825), which witnessed Napoleon's invasion and subsequent fall and the Russian army's triumphant entry into Paris. These cataclysmic events powerfully enhanced, in the conscience of a sensitive generation, a fatalistic conception of change to which both kingdoms and persons are subject - a conception shared by Alexander. At the same time, an idea of freedom and happiness "within ourselves" - notwithstanding the doom of external reality - was put forward with unprecedented strength. The Alexandrine age saw an extraordinary burst of creativity, especially in literature.

Western Influences

Russian Romanticism was strongly influenced by cultural developments in the West. Vasily Zhukovsky's masterly translations and adaptations from German poetry are representative of the transitional 1800s and early 1810s. Later, British literary influence became dominant. "It seems that, in the present age, a poet cannot but echo Byron, as well as a novelist cannot but echo W. Scott, notwithstanding the magnitude and even originality of talent," wrote the poet and critic Peter Vyazemsky in 1827. More philosophical authors such as Vladimir F. Odoyevsky persistently looked to German thought for inspiration; Schelling was particularly important. The evolution of French literature was also keenly followed: Victor Hugo (but hardly the dreamy Lamartine) aroused much sympathy in the Russian Romantics. A seminal event was the sojourn in St. Petersburg and Moscow of the exiled Polish poet Adam Mickiewicz. However, the study of European models only convinced Russian authors and critics that Romanticism necessarily implied originality. "Conditioned by the desire to realize the creative originality of the human soul," Romanticism owes its formation "not just to every individual nation, but, what is more, to every individual author," wrote Nikolai Polevoy, a leading figure in the Russian Romantic movement. Characteristically, Pushkin struggled to dispel the image of Russian Byron, while Lermontov explicitly declared his non-Byronism.

Controversies

The Russian Romantic movement consolidated. In the late 1810s, the Classic - Romantic controversy broke out, continuing throughout the 1820s and 1830s. Russian literary journals took sides. Academic circles, too, were engaged in the controversy: Nikolai Nadezhdin's Latin dissertation on Romantic poetry is a case in point. The Classicists claimed that Romanticism sought anarchy in literature and in the fine arts, whereas "Art, generally, is obedience to rules." Indeed, the Romantics, especially in their poetic declarations, blissfully proclaimed the lawlessness of artistic creation. In theoretical discussions, however, they did not simply reject the classical rigidities, but undertook to formulate alternative laws, loosely, those of nature, beauty, and truth. A more specific agreement was difficult to reach, not just on specific issues such as the principles of Romantic drama, but also on the very meaning of Romanticism. Vladimir Nabokov has identified at least eleven various interpretations of "Romantic" current in Pushkin's time. As might be expected, the internal controversy emerged in the Romantic camp. The polemics, piercing other than purely theoretical issues, often involved angry exchanges. Literary alliances were vulnerable, as in the case of Pushkin and Nikolai Polevoy. Yet, the early nineteenth century witnessed a remarkable tendency, on the part of the authors, artists, and musicians, to form circles, attend salons, and group around enlightened patrons.

Crossing Borders

In this kind of atmosphere, crossing of borders between different arts was common. Vasily Zhukovsky produced brilliant drawings; Lermontov nearly abandoned writing for the sake of painting; Vladimir Odoyevsky was a musicologist as well as a poet and novelist; the playwright Alexander Griboyedov, a talented composer. As art historian Valery Turchin points out, it was the musician rather than the poet who was eventually promoted, in the view of the Romantics, to the role of the supreme type of artistic genius. This precisely reflected the Romantics' quest for the spiritual, for music, of all the arts, was considered the least bound by materiality. Arguably, Romanticism was a later phenomenon in Russian music than in literature and art. Anyway, a contemporary of Pushkin, the composer Mikhail Glinka, renowned for his use of Russian folk tradition, was a major contributor to the Romantic movement. The painter Orestes Kiprensky commenced his series of Romantic portraits during the very dawn of literary Romanticism. Somewhat later emerged the Romantic schools of landscape and historical painting. Even in architecture, the art most strongly bound by matter, new trends showed up against the neoclassical background: neogothicism, exotic orientalism, and, finally, the national current exemplified in Konstantin Ton's churches. During the reign of Nicholas I (1825 - 1855) Romanticism began to be diffused in the more general quest for history and nationality.

Slavophilism

The important offshoot of this development was Slavophilism. Nicholas I typified the new epoch in the same way as Alexander I had typified the previous age. In his youth, Nicholas had received a largely Romantic education. He was an admirer of Walter Scott and was inclined to imitate the kings of Scott's novels. Characteristically, Pushkin, during the reign of Nicholas, persistently returns to the twin themes of nobility and ancestry, lamenting (in a manner closely resembling Edmund Burke) the passing of the age of chivalry. The dominant mood of the period, however, was nationalistic and messianic, and here again the Romantics largely shared the inclinations of the tsar. Notably, it was Peter Vyazemsky who coined the word narodnost (the Russian equivalent of "nationality"), which became part of the official ideological formula ("Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality"). Odoevsky argued that because of their "poetic organization," the Russian people would attain superiority over the West even in scientific matters. Pushkin welcomed the suppression of the Polish uprising of 1831, interpreting it in Panslavic terms. Nonetheless, there was an unbridgeable psychological rift between the tsar and the Romantic camp, which had its origin in the catastrophe of December 1825. Several of the Decembrists (most importantly, Kondraty Ryleyev, one of the five executed) were men of letters and members of the Romantic movement. Throughout the reign, a creative personality faced fierce censorship and remained under the threat of persecution. Many could say with Polevoy (whose ambitious Romantic enterprise embraced, beside literature, history and even economics, but whose Moscow Telegraph, Russia's most successful literary journal, was closed by the government): "My dreams remained unfulfilled, my ideals, unexpressed." The split between ideal and reality was the central problem for Romanticism universally, but in Russia this problem acquired a specifically bleak character.

Bibliography

McLaughlin, Sigrid (1972). "Russia: RomanicČeskij-RomanticČeskij-Romantizm." In "Romantic" and Its Cognates: The European History of a Word, ed. Hans Eichner. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Peer, Larry H. (1998). "Pushkin and Romantizm," In Comparative Romanticisms: Power, Gender, Subjectivity, ed. Larry H. Peer and Diane Long Hoeveler. Columbia, SC: Camden House.

Riasanovsky, Nicholas V. (1992). The Emergence of Romanticism. New York: Oxford University Press.

Rydel, Christine, ed. (1984). The Ardis Anthology of Russian Romanticism. Ann Arbor, MI: Ardis.

—YURI TULUPENKO

According to most definitions, Romanticism begins sometime around or after 1789, the terminal date of this encyclopedia and the moment of the French Revolution. 1789 has been the key date in a good many historical narratives, the point at which everything is thought to have changed forever. But much of what we recognize as Romantic was in place before the Revolution. Confusion arises from the way in which scholars and critics have understood Romanticism as both a period (somewhere between 1760 and 1850) and an attitude or disposition whose priorities include (but are not limited to) emotionalism, excessive self-consciousness, respect for the dignity of childhood, a critique of neoclassicism, an interest in folk culture and primitive origins, a preference for rural life, and a high valuation of private reading over public performance. Artists or writers who foreshadow these concerns before 1789 are likely to be called "Preromantics" (Brown, 1991) or to be assigned to the "age of sensibility" (Hilles and Bloom). The poet George Crabbe (1754–1832) is squarely within the Romantic period but is anti-Romantic because he opposes the spirit of the age. Some writers, like Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), go through Romantic and anti-Romantic phases; others, like Lord Byron (1788–1824), appear throughout as excessively Romantic in some ways (the melodramatic hero) and doggedly antagonistic in others (the decision to use neoclassical rhyming couplets).

Romanticism can be politically radical and democratic (as it was held to be in Britain among the poetic avant-garde in the 1790s) or reactionary and traditional (as it mostly was in France). Often it can be somewhere in between, leading to a lively controversy about, for example, the politics of William Wordsworth's (1770–1850) poetry. National chronologies also vary significantly. British and German Romanticisms are held to be well under way in the 1790s; French and other European Romanticisms come later, in the 1800s and after; and American Romanticism comes later still. Romanticism also varies according to the forms and genres we examine. Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) and Franz Schubert (1797–1828) are Romantics; there are Romantic painters (Francisco Goya [1746–1828], James Mallord William Turner [1775–1852], and Eugène Delacroix [1798–1863]); but there is no familiar concept of Romantic architecture (Gothic revival comes closest). There is lots of Romantic literature, especially poetry.

Intellectual historians have often favored explanations relating both the Revolution and Romanticism to preexisting conditions, and in this they repeat a common assumption of the 1790s whereby massive historical changes were attributed to the power of ideas. Commentators of both left and right blamed or praised Voltaire (1694–1778), Denis Diderot (1713–1784), and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) for historical events that none of them lived to see. Many recent interpreters have assimilated Romanticism into a "long eighteenth century" starting around 1690 and extending well into the 1800s, making it central to our understanding of modernity as a whole. Others retain an allegiance to the idea of a clear break between a "classical" eighteenth century and a "modern" worldview. Michel Foucault took the second position in describing the emergence of the "sciences of man," for which biocultural life is both the origin and the object of knowledge. The compulsive reflexivity and often anxious self-consciousness emanating from this sense of temporality can also be traced in historically earlier forms, though we might agree that it comes to be dominant and impossible to ignore in the Romantic period and the Romantic attitude. Debates between the so-called ancients and moderns throughout the eighteenth century had taken up the question of how much we could expect to understand in the literature of the past, given its different conditions of production and reception. Some felt that truth was transhistorical and natural, others that meaning could only be recovered by careful and patient research (Levine).

The 1700s also saw the emergence of a biblical hermeneutics (science of interpretation) concerned to establish the origins and relative authenticities of the various parts of the Bible (Frei): the sacred book was given human time and place. Again, the Romantic interest in folk and popular culture emerged from a preexisting tradition of antiquarianism that was already implicated in a nationalist-imperialist agenda, one that became even more urgent during the European and world wars that dominated the years between 1793 and 1815. Romanticism embodies a north European, Gothic primitivism that could be invoked to support both popular democracy and the monarchist alliance against Napoleon, as well as a liberal-classicist, cosmopolitan admiration of the pagan Mediterranean that was used to critique the restorations of 1815 (Butler, ch. 5). We can look to Romanticism as containing forms of resistance to the "civilizing process" described by Norbert Elias, evident, for example, in the revolt of Lord Byron, Robert Burns (1759–1796), and Gérard de Nerval (1808–1855) against the rituals of bourgeois self-discipline. However, it includes also those forms of acutely anxious self-examination, as in William Wordsworth's or John Keats's (1795–1821) poetry, which are so clearly coincident with the taming of social violence and the internalization of revolt that Elias traced in the evolution of modern manners.

Romanticism has mostly been a polemical and politicized construction, whether in the interpretations of latter-day scholars (Simpson, 1993, 2000) or in the earliest inventions of the category itself. Hegel gave us the most forceful early definition in positing Romanticism as marked by a turn from the external to the internal, spiritual world and the afterlife. He saw this beginning in the Christian Middle Ages and intensifying in later centuries. His Romanticism is thereby somewhat coincident with the royalist, Christian, antirevolutionary movement typified by François René Chateaubriand (1768–1848) and Victor Hugo (1802–1885). A chronologically more contained Romanticism has been based on the Byronic hero, with its obvious allusions to the figure of Napoleon in its liberating as well as its tyrannical incarnations. Still another can be based on the new interest in folk culture (Johann Gottfried von Herder [1744–1803], William Wordsworth, Robert Burns, and Sir Walter Scott [1771–1832]). Romanticism has been identified with both religion (orthodox and nonconformist) and atheism, with the political right and left, with progressive optimism and besetting nostalgia, according to the needs of its various interpreters. It is perhaps best understood as an assembly of all of these tendencies (and others) within a loosely understood historical period, giving us the tools for setting about a study of individual artists or movements without imposing a prescriptive boundary.

Bibliography

Brown, Marshall. The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Vol. 5, Romanticism. Cambridge, U.K., 2000.

——. Preromanticism. Stanford, 1991.

Butler, Marilyn. Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background, 1760–1830. New York and Oxford, 1982.

Elias, Norbert. The Civilizing Process. Translated by Edmund Jephcott. Oxford, 1994.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York, 1973.

Frei, Hans W. The Eclipse of Biblical Narrative: A Study in Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Hermeneutics. New Haven and London, 1974.

Hegel, G. W. F. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Translated by T. M. Knox. Oxford, 1975.

Hilles, Frederick W., and Harold Bloom. From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle. London, Oxford, and New York, 1965.

Levine, Joseph M. The Battle of the Books: History and Literature in the Augustan Age. Ithaca, N.Y., and London, 1991.

Simpson, David. "The French Revolution." In The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Vol. 5, Romanticism, edited by Marshall Brown, pp. 49–71. Cambridge, U.K., 2000.

——. Romanticism, Nationalism and the Revolt against Theory. Chicago and London, 1993.

—DAVID SIMPSON

A movement that shaped all the arts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Romanticism generally stressed the essential goodness of human beings (see Jean-Jacques Rousseau), celebrated nature rather than civilization, and valued emotion and imagination over reason. (Compare classicism.)

A movement in literature, music, and painting in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Romanticism has often been called a rebellion against an overemphasis on reason in the arts. It stressed the essential goodness of human beings (see Jean-Jacques Rousseau), celebrated nature rather than civilization, and valued emotion and imagination over reason. Some major figures of romanticism in the fine arts are the composers Robert Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn, and Johannes Brahms, and the painter Joseph Turner.

An 18th century movement revolting against the conventional strictness of neo-classicism and placing artistic emphasis on imagination and the emotions.