Title: Romanticism
Headings: Introduction to Romanticism
Introduction to Romanticism
Historical Considerations
Imagination
Nature
Symbolism and Myth
Other Concepts: Emotion, Lyric Poetry, and the Self
Contrasts With Neoclassicism
Individualism: The Romantic Hero
The Everyday and the Exotic
The Romantic Artist in Society
Spread of the Romantic Spirit
Recent Developments

Content: Certain special features of Romanticism may still be highlighted by this contrast. We have already noted two major differences: the replacement of reason by the imagination for primary place among the human faculties and the shift from a mimetic to an expressive orientation for poetry, and indeed all literature. In addition, neoclassicism had prescribed for art the idea that the general or universal characteristics of human behavior were more suitable subject matter than the peculiarly individual manifestations of human activity. From at least the opening statement of Rousseau's Confessions, first published in 1781--"I am not made like anyone I have seen; I dare believe that I am not made like anyone in existence. If I am not superior, at least I am different. "--this view was challenged. Individualism: The Romantic Hero
The Romantics asserted the importance of the individual, the unique, even the eccentric.