Romanticism

موضوع: Romanticism الأربعاء أبريل 27, 2011 4:02 pm

Romanticism

Romanticism
is a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that
originated in the second half of the 18th century in Western Europe, and
gained strength during the Industrial Revolution.[1] It was partly a
revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of
Enlightenment and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of
nature, and was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and
literature.

The movement stressed strong emotion as a source of
aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as
trepidation, horror, and the awe experienced in confronting the
sublimity in untamed nature and its qualities that are "picturesque",
both new aesthetic categories. It elevated folk art and custom, as well
as arguing for a "natural" epistemology of human activities as
conditioned by nature in the form of language, custom and usage.

Our
modern sense of a romantic character is sometimes based on Byronic or
Romantic ideals. Romanticism reached beyond the rational and Classicist
ideal models to elevate medievalism and elements of art and narrative
perceived to be authentically medieval, in an attempt to escape the
confines of population growth, urban sprawl and industrialism, and it
also attempted to embrace the exotic, unfamiliar and distant in modes
more authentic than chinoiserie, harnessing the power of the imagination
to envision and to escape.

The ideologies and events of the
French Revolution, rooted in Romanticism[citation needed], affected the
direction it was to take, and the confines of the Industrial Revolution
also had their influence on Romanticism, which was in part an escape
from modern realities; indeed, in the second half of the nineteenth
century, "Realism" was offered as a polarized opposite to Romanticism.
Romanticism elevated the achievements of what it perceived as
misunderstood heroic individuals and artists that altered society. It
also legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority
which permitted freedom from classical notions of form in art. There was
a strong recourse to historical and natural inevitability, a Zeitgeist,
in the representation of its ideas.