Title: Overview of Romanticism in Literature
Headings: Overview of Romanticism in Literature
Overview of Romanticism in Literature
Content: 11 Rather than trust in machines, industry, and scientifically-based progress, Romanticism encouraged people to look inward, trusting themselves and their own intuition. Romantics also directed their own and others’ attention to nature, where all organic processes could be observed, celebrated, and from which lessons could be learned. Through these shifts in focus, the Romantics argued, it would become possible for people to know themselves and the world better and more fully. Whereas the preceding age of Enlightenment had promised that reason, logic, and scientific processes would lead to knowledge, success, and a better society, the Romantics challenged that notion, and changed the equation. It was no longer necessary to follow traditional formulae; rather, new literary forms and new modes of expression could be created. “ The major Romantic questers," write Bloom and Trilling, offered through their own examples the possibility of “engage [ing] in the extraordinary enterprise of seeking to re-beget their own selves, as though through the imagination a man might hope to become his own father, or at least his own heroic precursor". 12 Perhaps Romanticism was adopted so quickly and on such a widespread scale across Europe and then, not long after, to America, because it was an antidote to the hyper-accelerated period of change that the Industrial Revolutions had ushered in during the previous epoch. Given that the Industrial Revolution had caused such dramatic shifts in all aspects of society, changing the ways that people thought, felt, worked, and related with one another, it would not be unreasonable to hypothesize that such a shift in paradigm and in practice created a sort of cognitive dissonance. Such dissonance might only have been possible to resolve by embracing the backlash that Romanticism represented to the Enlightenment ideas and ideals.