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Essay about Romanticism

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Romanticism,

Romanticism, in a way, was a reaction against rigid Classicism, Rationalism, and Deism of the eighteenth century. Strongest in application between 1800 and 1850, the Romantic Movement differed from country to country and from romanticist to romanticist. Because it emphasized change it was an atmosphere in which events occurred and came to affect not only the way humans thought and expressed them, but also the way they lived socially and politically (Abrams, M.H. Pg. 13). “Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental,” (Thompson, E.P. Pg. 108-109). Among the characteristic attitudes of Romanticism …show more content…

(Thompson, E.P. Pgs 33-34) The first phase of Romantic Movement was in Germany, which was marked by the innovations in both content and literary style and by a preoccupation with the mystical, the subconscious, and the supernatural. (Abrams, M.H. Pg.68) The most momentous national movement was Germany’s. The Germans rebelled not only against Napoleonic rule, but also against the century old upper hand of French civilization. They rebelled not only against the French armies, but also against the philosophy of the Age of Enlightenment. “The years of the French Revolution and Napoleon were, for Germany, the year of it greatest Cultural Efflorescence.” (Abrams, M.H. Pg. 73) Germany became the most “romantic” of all countries, and German influence spread throughout Europe.

In the nineteenth century, the Germans came to be widely regarded as intellectual leaders, like the French had been a century before. Most of the German thought had come from nationalism in a broad sense. A wealth of talents, including Friedrich Hölderlin, the early Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Jean Paul, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, A.W. and Friedrich Schlegel, Wilhelm Heinrich Wackenroder, and Friedrich Schelling belong to this first phase. In Revolutionary France, the Vicomte de Chateabriande and Mme de Stael were the chief initiators of Romanticism, by virtue of

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