Romanticism (literature)

I

Introduction

Romanticism (literature), in the literature of virtually every country of Europe, the United States, and Latin America, a movement that lasted from the late 18th century to the mid-19th century, characterized by reliance on the imagination and subjectivity of approach, freedom of thought and expression, and an idealization of nature. The term Romantic first appeared in 18th-century English and originally meant “romance-like”, that is, resembling the fanciful character of medieval romances.

II

Origins and Inspiration

By the late 18th century in France and Germany literary taste began to turn from Classical and Neo-Classical conventions. Inspiration for the Romantic approach came, initially, from two great shapers of thought, the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

A

The Romantic Spirit

It was Rousseau who established the cult of the individual and championed the freedom of the human spirit, announcing, “I felt before I thought”. More formal precepts came from Goethe and his compatriots, the philosopher and critic Johann Gottfried von Herder and the historian Justus Möser, who collaborated on a group of essays entitled Von deutscher Art und Kunst (1773, Of German Style and Art). In this work the authors extolled the Romantic spirit as manifested in German folk songs, Gothic architecture, and the plays of Shakespeare. Goethe sought to imitate Shakespeare's free and untrammelled style in his Götz von Berlichingen (1773; trans. 1799), a historical drama of a 16th-century robber knight. The play, which justifies revolt against political authority, inaugurated the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) movement, a forerunner of German Romanticism. In this tradition also was Goethe's novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774; The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1779). One of the great influential documents of Romanticism, this work exalts sentiment, even to the point of justifying committing suicide over unrequited love. It set a tone and mood much copied by the Romantics in their works and often in their personal lives: a fashionable tendency to frenzy, melancholy, world-weariness, even self-destruction.

B

The Romantic Style

Of prime importance also as a manifesto of literary Romanticism was the preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800), the work of the English poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Here, they affirmed the importance of feeling and imagination to poetic creation and disclaimed conventional literary forms and subjects. Thus, in Romantic literature everywhere, as it developed, imagination was praised over reason, emotion over logic, and intuition over science—making way for a vast body of literature of great sensibility and passion, literature that emphasized content over form, encouraged the development of complex and fast-moving plots, and allowed mixed genres (tragicomedy and the mingling of the grotesque and the sublime) and freer style.

No longer tolerated, for example, were the fixed Classical conventions, such as the famous three unities (time, place, and action) of tragedy. An increasing demand for spontaneity and lyricism—qualities that the adherents of Romanticism found in folk poetry and in medieval romance—led to a rejection of regular metres, strict forms, and other conventions of the Classical tradition. In English poetry, for example, blank verse largely superseded the rhymed couplet that dominated 18th-century poetry. The opening lines of the swashbuckling melodrama Hernani (1830; trans. 1830), by the great French Romantic writer Victor Hugo, are a departure from the conventional 18th-century rules of French versification; and in the preface to his drama Cromwell (1827; trans. 1896), a famous critical document in its own right, Hugo not only defended his breaking away from traditional dramatic structure but also justified the introduction of the grotesque into art. In their choice of heroes, also, the Romantic writers replaced the static universal types of classical 18th-century literature with more complex, idiosyncratic characters; and much drama, fiction, and poetry was devoted to a celebration of Rousseau's “common man”.