Romanticism

Оглавление

Léon Rosenthal. Romanticism

I. The Precursors of Romanticism

II. The Romantic Period

III. The Romantic Inspiration

IV. The Expressive Moods of Romanticism

Conclusion

Extracts from Literary Texts

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) Reveries of the Solitary Walker

James MacPherson (1736–1796) Fragments of Ancient Poetry

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) Faust

William Blake (1757–1827) Poems. The Echoing Green

Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (1759–1805) The Bride of Messina

Germaine Necker, Baroness de Staël-Holstein, called Madame de Staël (1766–1817) Germany

Benjamin Constant (1767–1830) Adolphe

François René Chateaubriand, vicomte de Chateaubriand (1768–1848) René

William Wordsworth (1770–1850) Lyrical Ballads. The Thorn

Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg, called Novalis (1772–1801) Hymn to Night

Friedrich von Schlegel (1772–1829) Philosophy of Life

Ernst Theodor Amadeus Hoffmann (1776–1822) The Devil’s Elixir

Joseph von Görres (1776–1848) Bayard, or the Death of the True Hero

Henri Beyle, called Stendhal (1783–1842) The Charterhouse of Parma

George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824) The Prayer of Nature

James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) The Last of the Mohicans

Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869) Poetical Meditations. The Lake

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) Alastor or the Spirit of Solitude

John Keats (1795–1821) Poems

Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) Intermezzo

Alfred de Vigny (1797–1863) Chatterton

Victor Hugo (1802–1885) Hernani

Aurore Dupin, Baroness Dudevant, called George Sand (1804–1876) The Devil’s Pool

Alfred de Musset (1810–1857) The Confession of a Child of the Century

Mikhail Yuryevich Lermontov (1814–1841) A Hero of Our Time

Major Artists

Hubert Robert (Paris, 1733–1808)

Johann Heinrich Füssli, called Henry Fuseli (Zürich 1741 – London 1825)

Francisco de Goya y Lucientes (Fuendetodos, 1746 – Bordeaux, 1828)

John Robert Cozens (London, 1752–1797)

William Blake (London, 1757–1827)

Antoine Jean Gros, Baron Gros (Paris, 1771–1835)

Caspar David Friedrich (Greiswald, 1774 – Dresden, 1840)

Joseph Mallord William Turner (London, 1775–1851)

John Constable (East Bergholt, 1776 – London, 1837)

Philipp Otto Runge (Walgast, 1777 – Hamburg, 1810)

Théodore Géricault (Rouen, 1791 – Paris 1824)

Arie Scheffer, called Ary Scheffer (Dort, 1795 – Argenteuil, 1858)

Eugène Delacroix (Saint-Maurice, 1798 – Paris, 1863)

Richard Parkes Bonington (Nottingham, 1802 – London, 1828)

Théodore Chassériau (Sainte-Barbe-de-Samana, 1819 – Paris, 1856)

François Rude (Dijon, 1784 – Paris, 1855)

Pierre Jean David, called David d’Angers (Angers, 1788 – Paris, 1856)

Jean-Jacques Pradier, called James Pradier (Geneva, 1790 – Bougival, 1852)

Antoine-Louis Barye (Paris, 1796–1875)

Jean-Étienne Chaponnière (Geneva, 1801 – Mornex, 1835)

Antoine Augustin Préault, called Auguste Préault (Paris, 1809–1879)

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (Valenciennes, 1827 – Courbevoie, 1875)

Bibliography

Отрывок из книги

The Romantic Age! Youth, ardour, a generous faith in art, excessive passions; amongst fevers, exaggerations, errors, it was a period really full of ideas, personalities and works. Literary Romanticism has been subject to great arguments and violent controversy, particularly because it was considered to be responsible for divisive religious, political or social tendencies. Romantic art received less attention, perhaps because it seemed comparatively unimportant. However, it is possible to dissociate the two movements. They were linked not because of personal friendships developing by chance between a few painters and writers but because those movements, in their different ways, share in the same origin. Born from a common mindset, they had developed in the same atmosphere. There was a Romantic generation the members of which applied their minds to literature and the arts as well as to science, philosophy, politics or industry – in fact to all the forms of activity to which their minds could possibly be applied.

The canons of Romanticism were first formulated in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century. As early as 1770 and 1780 representatives of Sturm und Drang, a movement both literary and political, meaning literally ‘storm and stress’, were rebelling against the Enlightenment and its values. Friedrich von Schiller and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe were amongst the followers of Sturm und Drang, who made a religion of individualism and nature as advocated by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the middle of the eighteenth century. However, despite that wave of protest the rejection of classical rules was only partial. Sturm und Drang turned its back on classical traditions and literary conventions but its canons of beauty were still based on Antiquity and prescribed the perfection and harmony of forms. Classicism was totally rejected as a whole by the intellectuals contributing to the journal Athenaeum, amongst whom were Wilhelm von Schelling and Novalis representing the ‘Iena Romantics’ group. In contrast with earlier values they put an emphasis on the feeling of infinity, mysticism and the expression of irrationality.

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Musée national du château et des Trianons, Versailles.

Eugène Delacroix, The Massacre at Chios, 1824.

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