Historically Romanticism was an artistic and philosophical movement of the mid-to-late eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century. The years vary from country to country. In Great Britain, the period is usually defined as running from 1760 to 1832, the year of the passing of the Reform Act, which greatly extended the democratic rights of men to vote. In France, the Romantic period is 1802-1856, while in Germany the period is only 1801-1822. But by the 1850s Romanticism was dead in all places, although individual elements continued to live on.

Romanticism was a reaction to Classicism and the Enlightenment, but as a movement it was nebulous. There was no school of romanticism, no coordinated international movement, no figurehead. Romanticism was considerably more amorphous than well-defined. So in speaking of its background, its elements, and what it was reacting to, I’m perforce trying to be specific about things that were neither specific nor aligned to begin with. Indeed, as Marilyn Butler noted, it’s doubtful whether writers of the time would have felt they belonged to the same movement: “some Romantic writers were fired by opposition to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, some by the ideals of the French Revolution, others by admiration for ‘sublime’ natural phenomena–mountains, rivers, storms–and still others by the mysteries of Orientalism and the East.”¹

The movement preceding Romanticism was Classicism, a movement in which ancient Greece and Rome were held up as models to be emulated, being the supposed incarnations of humanism and reason and the wellsprings of civilization. As Hartley S. Spatt writes,

the influence of Greek and Roman models on Romantic writers was paradoxical. Classicism was linked to the heavy hand of eighteenth-century prescriptivism; its appeal to absolute, rational judgment and its claims to be the universal and the permanent were antithetical to Romantic relativism and intuition. Yet, at the same time, the purity of its forms served as the perfect backdrop for Romantic investigations of impure, unpredictable human emotion. Thus, even as they rejected the spirit of Classicism, the Romantics embraced its incarnation....²

To Classicists and intellectuals of the eighteenth century, Greece “symbolized purity and tranquility, an ideal Arcadian state of existence which had been lost to successive occupations,”³ a civilization based upon humanism and reason above all else.

Romanticism was a reaction against this. It called into question the basic principles of Classicism and became, in Francis Claudon’s words, the “driving force of spiritual life, philosophy, the arts, society and mores, and the social and political revolutions of the time.”⁴ This book is most interested in literary Romanticism, so it is that that I will be spending most of my attention on.

The critic M.H. Abrams noted five critical principles of Romantic poetry, which is a good place to start: poetry is a representation of the inner feelings of the author, not an imitation of life; poetry should be spontaneous, free from traditional poetic rules and effects; a reverence for nature, especially nature “unsullied” by man; the elevation of the humble and rustic life; the sense of a supernatural dimension, the land of dreams.

Romanticism was intimately involved in the past. Called “romanticism” because it took its freedoms–freedom from rules, freedom to act–from the old romances, Romanticism was tied up with a sense of time’s passing, in the love of (and the finding of poetic inspiration in) ruins and antiquity, especially inspired by the discovery in 1755 of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Paradoxically, however, Romanticism was seen as the movement of the present. The established political systems were seen as corrupt and fading–revolution was what was called for, metaphysically as well as socially and politically, of themes, sentiments, and of national liberation. Romanticism was tied in with the revolutionary movements of the era, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, with the dissatisfaction of the individual with established power structures and the individual’s yearning for change. These revolutions were wholly new, and did not have classical examples which they could be compared to or which could be looked to for inspirations or judgment. In politics as well as in literature, the revolution of freedom versus authority and freedom and individualism versus tradition took place.

This desire for revolution was also a desire for a new place, an ideal place, untouched by the past and free from tyranny–in painting, landscape paintings of notable melancholy, but in literature and politics, a desire for the new, the exotic (Spain, Greece, Asia), and the unexplored (the Americas). This desire for the exotic was attached to a desire for revolt, so that Hellenism and other national struggles became identified with and a part of Romanticism, as well as national literatures like folklore.

The Romantic not only yearned for new places, but wanted himself to be new and pristine, untouched by previous tyrannies. He–and it was usually he, women were objects rather than subjects to the Romantic–refused to be a successor to tradition, something unlike his Classical or Renaissance predecessors. The outsider became the Romantic, and vice-versa, and outsiders of previous eras were adopted by Romantics as predecessors to the movement.

The feeling that the times the Romantic were living in was revolutionary was widespread, as was the notion that these times would be seen by later generations as new and out of the ordinary. Democratism was new. So, too, was what the novel became, suddenly seen as a political form with which to attack the affects of aristocratic literature. Before 1814, when Waverley was published, the novel was seen as the lowest literary form, one read by women rather than men, with the female bildungsroman (a coming of age novel in which the quest for marriage and stability is foremost) with the predominant plot. But thanks to Walter Scott and Waverley–as well as to changes in book publishing and the huge expansion in the reading public during the Romantic era–the novel became seen not just as something not everyone could write (unlike during the eighteenth century), but as a particularly male form of literature, one with a heightened social and literary status, a role to play (in the form of moral instruction of young men), and a new origin and history. The novel was no longer a part of aristocratic literature, it was now about ordinary humans and their day-to-day lives, as well as the state of society.

The writer of novels, too, became something special. He (and rarely she) became a political partisan, unlike the a-political or conservative writers of the previous century. He was supposed to be an isolated genius, a poet at odds with coarse, materialistic society and belonging to two worlds, the material world and the world of the soul and dreams. The latter world had to be evoked by poetry and myths and by manipulating the unconscious. The world of dreams was a magical world, a secondary world that art made reference to and which became a place for Romantics to escape to. Dreams became vitally important, with unconsciousness being the necessity for the revelations of art.

This unreal world was a feminine one, and women became worshiped and praised above everything else. A mythology of Woman developed, and their passions and suffering were explored through art. Love became a major theme, and the rights of lovers, rather than the duties of lovers, also became a major theme. Women became thought of as angels, and love as something which trumped logic.

But woman became seen as the cause of pain–the concept of the femme fatale first began during the Romantic age. There were other negative aspects of the Romantic era. Personal revolution and the desire for the new became the French mal du siècle and the German weltschmertz and English dandyism, disenchantment, and world weariness. The fall of Rome and the death of what was beautiful in Classicism engendered an almost hatred of life itself and an obsession with the unspeakable. What Mario Praz called “Black Romanticism,”⁵ a fascination with the abominable, manifested itself in the confusion of pleasure and pain and beauty and horror. Satan, monsters, demons and witches appear. For some critics of Romanticism, what was Classical was healthy and clean, and what was Romantic was unhealthy and soiled.

Francis Claudon, The Concise Encyclopedia of Romanticism (Chartwell Books, 1980).

Iain McCalman, ed. An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture 1776-1832 (Oxford University Press, 1999).

“Romanticism: an Overview” http://www.victorianweb.org/previctorian/misc/romanticov.html

¹ Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background, 1760-1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 38.

² Harley S. Spatt, “Classicism,” in Laura Dabundo, ed., Encyclopedia of Romanticism: Culture in Britain, 1780s-1830s (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), 96.

³ Spatt, “Classicism,” 97.

⁴ Francis Claudon, The Concise Encyclopedia of Romanticism (New York: Chartwell Books, 1980), iv.

⁵ See Praz’s Liebe, Tod und Teufel: Die schwarze Romantik (München: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1994).