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Definition: Romanticism from The SAGE Glossary of the Social and Behavioral Sciences

A cultural and artistic movement in Europe and America between 1770 and 1860. It is generally seen as a reaction against Enlightenment values and industrialism. It is characterized by a privileging of individualism, passion, imagination, social transformation, and nature. While Romanticism is typically associated with literature (Wordsworth and Keats in England, Goethe and Höelderlin in Germany, and Emerson and Whitman in America), music (Beethoven and Chopin) and painting (Turner and Goya) were also significantly influenced.

Romanticism

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia with Atlas and Weather Guide
In literature and the visual arts, a style that emphasizes the imagination, emotions, and creativity of the individual artist. Romanticism also refers specifically to late-18th- and early-19th-century European culture, as contrasted with 18th-century classicism . See also English literature . Inspired by the ideas of Jean Jacques Rousseau and by contemporary social change and revolution (American and French), Romanticism emerged as a reaction to 18th-century values, asserting emotion and intuition over rationalism, the importance of the individual over social conformity, and the exploration of natural and psychic wildernesses over classical restraint. Major themes of Romantic art and literature include a love of atmospheric landscapes (see sublime ); nostalgia for the past, particularly the Gothic; a love of the primitive, including folk traditions; cult of the individual hero figure, often an artist or political revolutionary; romantic passion; mysticism; and a fascination with death. …
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Full text Article Romanticism

From The Thames & Hudson Dictionary of Art Terms
In the visual arts, as in literature and music, Romanticism can be defined in both negative and positive terms. Its negative aspect is a sometimes disordered revolt against the formality, containment and intellectual discipline of Neo-Classicism . Its positive — and more important — aspect is its…
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Full text Article romanticism

From Continuum Encyclopedia of American Literature
A revolutionary movement in art, literature, music, and philosophy that began in Europe in the early years of the 18th c. and continued well into the 19th c. In America, the romantic movement began with the “preromantic” verse of Philip FRENEAU and continued through the advent of Walt WHITMAN . …
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Full text Article romanticism

From Continuum Encyclopedia of British Literature
Embracing the historical period from the 1770s to the 1830s or 1840s, Romanticism represents a complex interaction of cultural, political, social, philosophical, and aesthetic responses to the unrest set off by the American Revolution, the French Revolution, the age of Napoleon, and the spirit of…
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From Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Political Thought
Primarily used to denote the artistic and cultural movement which began in eighteenth-century Europe, and of which the following are regarded as early manifestations: in France, the writings of Rousseau ; in Germany, the Sturm und Drang movement; in Britain, the poems of ‘Ossian’ and the literary…
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Full text Article ROMANTICISM

From The Essentials of Philosophy and Ethics
Romanticism is notoriously difficult to define, both as a historical movement and a school of thought. It has no definitive beginning or end points, and its influence spans several disciplines. Writers, painters, musicians and philosophers all refer to it, but mean different things. However, the…
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Full text Article ROMANTICISM

From The Welsh Academy Encyclopaedia of Wales
Although Romanticism appeared in Wales at the end of the 18th century, its roots are to be found in the work of antiquarians at the end of the 17th, with their enthusiasm for the remote Celt ic and druidic past ( see Archaeology and Antiquarianism ). Romanticism helped to raise the prestige of Welsh…
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From The Dictionary of Alternatives
‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!’. (The Prelude, X, 692–3) William Wordsworth’s famous exclamation in his epic autobiographical poem The Prelude emphasizes the link between the UTOPIAN aspirations of English Romanticism and the drama of the French REVOLUTION…
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Full text Article ROMANTICISM

From Dictionary of Visual Discourse: A Dialectical Lexicon of Terms
A period concept and world-view dating to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, typically contrasted with Enlightenment and rationalist conceptions of the world. In its popular form, Romanticism questions the key values of the Enlightenment (faith in reason, universalism, …
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A name for a historical literary-philosophical movement which emerged in the late eighteenth century in Germany spreading across Europe, and also for a constellation of artistic styles in music , literature and the visual arts distinctive of the nineteenth century, which is often dubbed the…
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Full text Article Romanticism

From The Classical Tradition
At the end of the 18th century, both the inventory and the ground map of the ancient world had expanded. Artworks of Greek and Roman antiquity were available in increasingly large numbers. Excavations, prominently at Pompeii and Herculaneum from 1748, had brought to light new objects abroad and…
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