1. Romanticism
An Introduction

2. Overview Meaning of the Term Time Frame Characteristics
American Romanticism

3. Meaning of the Term

4. The Meaning of the Term
Romanticism was a movement that affected almost all of the Humanities:
art and architecture
literature
music
philosophy
politics

5. The Meaning of the Term
It has little to do with our modern notion of “romantic love,” although love was often the subject of Romantic art.

6. The Meaning of the Term
The term romantic first appeared in 18th- century English and originally meant “romance-like”—that is, resembling the fanciful character of medieval romances (such as those about King Arthur and his knights)

7. The Meaning of the Term
Victor Hugo called Romanticism “liberalism in literature” Romantics sought to free the artist and writer from restraints and rules

8. Romantic Era: Time Frame

9. Liberty Leading the People,
Time Frame
The early Romantic period coincides with what is often called the “Age of Revolutions“
The American (1776)
and the French (1789) revolutions.
It was an age of upheavals in political, economic, and social traditions.
Eugene Delacroix –
Liberty Leading the People,
28th July

10. Time Frame
The Romantics interpreted the events in France as being in accordance with the apocalyptic prophecies in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures.
That is, they viewed these events as fulfilling the promise, guaranteed by an infallible text, that a short period of cleansing violence would usher in an age of universal peace and blessedness that would be the equivalent of a restored Paradise.

11. Time Frame:
Romanticism begins at least in the 1770's and continues into the second half of the nineteenth century, later for American literature than for European, and later in some of the arts, like music and painting, than in literature.
For American literature, the glory years are
The Scarlet Letter was published in 1850

12. Origins: Jean Jacques Rousseau
“Man is born free and
everywhere he is in chains.”
In other words, civilization is in part the cause of our corruption.

13. Characteristics of Romanticism

14. Imagination and Intuition
The imagination was elevated to a position as the supreme faculty of the mind. This contrasted distinctly with the traditional arguments for the supremacy of reason.
William Blake - Abel

15. Love of Nature Asher B. Durand “Kindred Spirits”
(1849)
Joseph Anton Koch “Schmadribach Waterfall in Lauterbrunnen Valley”  (1811)

16. Two Views of Nature
The first viewed nature as peaceful, calm, nurturing, a source for spiritual renewal. It often showed an innocent life of rural dwellers, a world of peace and harmony which nurtures and comforts the human spirit.

17. Two Views of Nature
But nature could also be frightening in its power, and cause a dizzying sense of awe and wonder.

18. Sympathetic Interest in the Past
Especially medieval times
The Accolade
Edmund Blair Leighton

19. Sympathetic Interest in the Past
The Enlightenment thinkers condemned the Middle Ages as "Dark Ages", a period of ignorance and irrationality.
The Romantics, on the other hand, idealized the Middle Ages as a time of spiritual depth and adventure.
Looking wistfully back to the Middle Ages, the Romantic influence led to a Gothic Revival in architecture in the 1830s. Gothic novels increased in popularity, and in art, paintings of various historical periods and exotic places came into vogue.

20. The Supernatural and Irrational
John Henry Fuseli - The Nightmare

21. The Eccentric, Irrational, and Horrific
Self-Portrait
Courbet
Saturn Devouring His Son
Francisco Goya

22. Mysticism

23. Individualism
The individual is at the center of all life And, therefore, at the center of all art

24. Goals of the Romantic Movement
Romanticism seeks to find the Absolute, the Ideal, by transcending the actual.
Later, the Realistic and Naturalistic movements value and seek the actual (the world as it is) and the scientific laws that undergird the actual, respectively. 

25. Goals of the Romantic Movement
A revolutionary energy was also at the core of Romanticism.
Those belonging to the Romantic Movement set out to transform the very way we perceive the world.
Some of its major precepts have survived into the twentieth century and still affect our contemporary period.

26. The Romantic Hero/Heroine
The Romantics preferred boldness over the preceding age's desire for restraint.
Importance of the individual, the unique, even the eccentric
Some typical types of hero/heroines that emerge are:
The hero-artist
Heaven-storming types from Prometheus to Captain Ahab
Outcasts from Cain to the Ancient Mariner and even Hester Prynne

27. American Romanticism

28. American Romanticism
Transcendentalism: intuition and the individual conscience “transcend” experience and thus are better guides to truth than are the senses and logical reason. 
Influenced by Romanticism, the Transcendentalists respected the individual spirit and the natural world, believing that divinity was present everywhere, in nature and in each person.   
The Anti-Transcendentalists (Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allen Poe) rebelled against the philosophy that man is basically good. 

29. Anti-Transcendentalists
Hold readers’ attention through dread of a series of terrible possibilities
Feature landscapes of dark forests, extreme vegetation, concealed ruins with horrific rooms, depressed characters
Used symbolism to great effect
Sin, pain, and evil exist