When and where: Approximately 1780 to 1830 (late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-centuries) in Western European countries

Who: Prominent political thinkers (Edmund Burke, Adam Smith), literary figures and intellectuals (Percy Bysshe and Mary Shelley, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake, the Grimm Brothers, Hölderlin, Victor Hugo, Goethe, Byron), artists (Joshua Reynolds, Blake, John Constable, Caspar David Friedrich), philosophers (Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Schlegel, Wilhelm von Humboldt), musicians (Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert), scientists (Alexander von Humboldt, Goethe), and feminists (Mary Wollstonecraft).

What:  You might already be familiar with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales, or Hegel’s philosophies. A few general statements can be made about the characteristics of Romanticism:

-    Sometimes (falsely) characterized as a revolt against the Age of Reason and Enlightenment in that it prioritized passion, feeling, sentiment, and imagination over reason and logic, but in fact writers express ambivalence about such oppositions (see: sensibility).

-    Stressed the universe’s unity, beauty, and goodness, leading sometimes to a celebration of individual spirituality (secular or otherwise). This quality of universality led many thinkers, writers, and artists to embrace social equality (such as the abolition of slave trade, the breaking down of class barriers, or the extension of human rights to women).

-    Pictured the hero as a rebel or outlaw in revolt against social convention.

-    Idealized the escape from modern life into primitive, unspoiled, and picturesque nature.

-    Used subjects such as the natural or common man, folklore and legends, or supernatural events.

Why: A number of historical and social factors can be said to have inspired the Romantic movement:

-    Political upheavals: Increasing awareness of governmental ineptitude and corruption, leading to the American and French Revolutions (among others) and Napoleonic Wars

-    Economics: Early Industrial movement (shift away from working at home to working in the cities) creates less dependency on feudal (i.e., aristocratic) ties and the rise of the bourgeoisie (middle class)

-    Social: Increasing movement from the countryside to the city; rise in population and literacy rates creates a wide and an intelligent audience; wave of immigration brings Europeans into contact with the New World (as explorers and colonizers), leading to some sympathy with the abolition of slavery and partial recognition of the need to foster democracy worldwide; and rise of the middle class.

Technological: New weapons of destruction (guillotine) and mechanization of human life shock the public and lead, in part, to some of the calls for humanitarian reform

What is “romantic” about Romanticism?

I. Modified from the Oxford English Dictionary):

1. a. Of the nature of, having the qualities of, romance in respect of form or content.

 2. a. Of a fabulous or fictitious character; having no foundation in fact. b. Having no real existence; imaginary; purely ideal. Obs.

 3. Of projects, etc.: Fantastic, extravagant, quixotic; going beyond what is customary or practical.

4. a. Having a bent or tendency towards romance; readily influenced by the imagination.

b. Tending towards, characterized by, romance as a basis or principle of literature or art. (Opposed to classical.) Hence used of persons connected with, or things relating to, literature, art, etc. of this kind. [late nineteenth century/twentieth century]

5. a. Characterized or marked by, invested or environed with, romance or imaginative appeal. The examples given here illustrating the collocation of the adjective with love, lover, friendship, and the like, provide evidence of the emergence of its common present-day use to convey the idealistic character or quality of a love affair.

 b. Of places: Redolent or suggestive of romance; appealing to the imagination and feelings. c. Similarly of persons, their character, etc.d

II. Romanticism in Context:

• The term “romantic” in relation to literature was first used by Friedrich Schlegel, a professor and novelist in Germany, to talk about qualities of the novel vs. drama and the influence of Eastern literature and culture on European works around 1800. Etymologically, the term comes from the French for romantique, an older form of romance, novel. The novel also signifies something new, as opposed to old or Classical. (In German, the word for a novel is Roman).
  

Romantic can also signify an ideal state of being, which around 1790s - 1800 often meant living in harmony with nature. The following is an example. In her novel, Walsingham; or the Pupil of Nature (1797), former actress Mary Robinson writes from the perspective and about the childhood of her male protagonist, Walsingham Ainsforth:

•     I was neither watched nor cherished, but permitted to stroll wherever my inclinations led me. Many a time was I brought home by the peasantry, who found me sleeping on the margin of the river, whose rapid current foamed along the valley, or wandering on the steep sides of the mountains in the vincinty of Glenowen. The recollection of these my early days has frequently led me to bow before the muse, who has been my only consolation, when the cold, unfeeling world, frowned upon my sorrows. With a mournful exactitude I recollect the earliest occupations of childhood; they were romantic, almost to incredibility" (Robinson 65).

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