Title: Overview of Romanticism in Literature
Headings: Overview of Romanticism in Literature
Overview of Romanticism in Literature
Content: 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. Whereas the Enlightenment could be interpreted as having drained the creativity and spontaneity out of life, making tasks and relationships predictable through mechanization, Romanticism offered the hope of restoration through small and unexpected pleasures. Romanticism invited people to dream again, to imagine, to give in to flights of fancy, to explore the border between conscious experience and unconscious dreams and desires. 13
These ideals of Romanticism, first articulated by the English poets, spread to other artistic genres, including music and the visual arts, as well as to other countries. For those countries which had not yet coalesced in terms of their own national identity, the Romanticism offered a creative framework for defining and expressing what was unique to that region, for Romanticism was inherently creative and imaginative, inviting its adherents to envision possibilities that might never have been entertained before. As a result, the value of the individual, of the arts, and of emotional expression, was able to regain a place in thought and practice, tempering the logic-bound tendencies of science with the shifting philosophies of emotion.