Title: Art Periods: ROMANTICISM
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Content: Where Enlightenment thinkers and artists assumed that humankind is essentially similar across all ages and geographic origins (hence their emphasis on the imitation of the best of the worlds of ancient Greece and Rome), romantics generally believed in the uniqueness of individual expression as it is constituted by life experience, an important dimension of which is frequently national character. R omantic thought often features an organic conception of individual life, society, and the interconnections of humanity, nature, and divinity. Such a view stresses origins. For a romantic political thinker like Edmund Burke, whose Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) opposed the Enlightenment rationalism of the French political experiment, society is an organic growth, nurtured and formed over centuries of practice in ways indigenous to a nation. For a critical romantic thinker like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a poem should aspire to the fullness and wholeness of a living thing. The notion of the individual imagination as the only significant interpreter of nature and humankind motivates writers as profoundly different as William Wordsworth and George Gordon, Lord Byron. LITERATURE
D espite having been both the country whose political events most clearly shaped European romanticism and the working home of the movement's philosophic progenitor, Swiss-born Jean-Jacques Rousseau, France experienced a late flowering of romanticism, which did not reach its height until the 1830s and 40s, when its force had weakened in England and Germany. Reasons for this lie in France's having been the center of Enlightenment thought and its having served throughout the Revolutionary period as a test bed for progressive ideology. B itter controversies involving political and religious loyalties accompanied the emergence of romanticism in France. The main strife took place in the theater.