Title: Lasting Impact of Romanticism | Synonym
Headings: Lasting Impact of Romanticism
Lasting Impact of Romanticism
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1 Nature
2 Childhood
3 Individualism
4 Imagination

Content: For the Romantics, nature was innocent, something to protect against industrial development and urban expansion. This view placed children in a new perspective. The notion of children's proximity to nature remained the same, but its significance changed. The Romantics mourned maturing children's progressive acculturation and alienation from nature. They wished to mitigate the process that predecessors had striven to accelerate. The impulse to protect children's innocence -- the very notion of children's innocence -- is a Romantic legacy. 3 Individualism
Attempts to recover the lost wisdom of childhood led Romantics to reflection and introspection. This fascination with subjectivity contributed to the Romantic Movement's veneration of individualism. Romantic individualism, however, is hardly confined to the period from 1770 to 1840. Writing in 1830, Victor Hugo called Romanticism "liberalism in literature," and despite 21st-century politics' specialized use of "liberalism," the term chiefly denotes an assumption of inborn autonomy, free will and personal liberty.