I.

Introduction

Romanticism, in the literature of virtually every country of Europe, the United States, and Latin America, a movement that lasted from the late 18th century to the mid-19th century, characterized by reliance on the imagination and subjectivity of approach, freedom of thought and expression, and an idealization of nature. The term Romantic first appeared in 18th-century English and originally meant “romance-like”, that is, resembling the fanciful character of medieval romances.

II.

Origins and Inspiration

By the late 18th century in France and Germany literary taste began to turn from Classical and Neo-Classical conventions. Inspiration for the Romantic approach came, initially, from two great shapers of thought, the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

A.

The Romantic Spirit

It was Rousseau who established the cult of the individual and championed the freedom of the human spirit, announcing, “I felt before I thought”. More formal precepts came from Goethe and his compatriots, the philosopher and critic Johann Gottfried von Herder and the historian Justus Möser, who collaborated on a group of essays entitled Von deutscher Art und Kunst (1773, Of German Style and Art). In this work the authors extolled the Romantic spirit as manifested in German folk songs, Gothic architecture, and the plays of Shakespeare. Goethe sought to imitate Shakespeare's free and untrammelled style in his Götz von Berlichingen (1773; trans. 1799), a historical drama of a 16th-century robber knight. The play, which justifies revolt against political authority, inaugurated the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) movement, a forerunner of German Romanticism. In this tradition also was Goethe's novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774; The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1779). One of the great influential documents of Romanticism, this work exalts sentiment, even to the point of justifying committing suicide over unrequited love. It set a tone and mood much copied by the Romantics in their works and often in their personal lives: a fashionable tendency to frenzy, melancholy, world-weariness, even self-destruction.

B.

The Romantic Style

Of prime importance also as a manifesto of literary Romanticism was the preface to the second edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800), the work of the English poets William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Here, they affirmed the importance of feeling and imagination to poetic creation and disclaimed conventional literary forms and subjects. Thus, in Romantic literature everywhere, as it developed, imagination was praised over reason, emotion over logic, and intuition over science—making way for a vast body of literature of great sensibility and passion, literature that emphasized content over form, encouraged the development of complex and fast-moving plots, and allowed mixed genres (tragicomedy and the mingling of the grotesque and the sublime) and freer style.

No longer tolerated, for example, were the fixed Classical conventions, such as the famous three unities (time, place, and action) of tragedy. An increasing demand for spontaneity and lyricism—qualities that the adherents of Romanticism found in folk poetry and in medieval romance—led to a rejection of regular metres, strict forms, and other conventions of the Classical tradition. In English poetry, for example, blank verse largely superseded the rhymed couplet that dominated 18th-century poetry. The opening lines of the swashbuckling melodrama Hernani (1830; trans. 1830), by the great French Romantic writer Victor Hugo, are a departure from the conventional 18th-century rules of French versification; and in the preface to his drama Cromwell (1827; trans. 1896), a famous critical document in its own right, Hugo not only defended his breaking away from traditional dramatic structure but also justified the introduction of the grotesque into art. In their choice of heroes, also, the Romantic writers replaced the static universal types of classical 18th-century literature with more complex, idiosyncratic characters; and much drama, fiction, and poetry was devoted to a celebration of Rousseau's “common man”.

III.

The Great Romantic Themes

As the Romantic movement spread from France and Germany to England and then to the rest of Europe and across the western hemisphere, certain themes and moods, often intertwined, became the concern of almost all 19th-century writers.

A.

Libertarianism

Many of the libertarian and abolitionist movements of the late 18th and early 19th centuries were engendered by the Romantic philosophy—the desire to be free of convention and tyranny, the new emphasis on the rights and dignity of the individual. Just as the insistence on rational, formal, and conventional subject matter that had typified Neo-Classicism was bound to experience reversal, the authoritarian regimes that had encouraged and sustained Neo-Classicism in the arts were inevitably subjected to popular revolutions. Political and social causes became dominant themes in Romantic poetry and prose throughout the Western world, producing many still pertinent, vital human documents. The year 1848, in which the Continent was racked by political upheaval, in fact marked the flood tide of European Romanticism in Italy, Austria, Germany, and France.

In Wilhelm Tell (1804; trans. 1825), by the German dramatist Friedrich von Schiller, an obscure medieval mountaineer becomes an immortal symbol of opposition to tyranny and foreign rule. In the novel The Betrothed (1827; trans. 1828), by the Italian writer Alessandro Manzoni, a peasant couple become instruments in the final crushing of feudalism in northern Italy. Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, who for readers of English poetry perhaps most typify the Romantic poet (in their personal lives as well as in their work), wrote resoundingly in protest against social and political wrongs and in defence of the struggles for liberty in Italy and Greece. The Russian poet Aleksandr Sergeyevich Pushkin, whose admiration for the work of Byron is clearly manifested, attracted notoriety for his “Ode to Liberty” (1820); like many other Romantics, he was persecuted for political subversion and sent into exile.

This general Romantic dissatisfaction with the organization of society was often channelled into specific criticism of urban society. La Maison du berger (1844, The Shepherd's Hut), by the French poet Alfred Victor de Vigny, expresses the view that such an abode has more nobility than a palace. Earlier, Rousseau had written that people were born free but that everywhere civilization put them in chains. This feeling of oppression was frequently expressed in poetry—in the work of the English visionary William Blake, writing in the poem “Milton” (c. 1808) of the “dark Satanic mills” that were beginning to deface the English countryside; or in Wordsworth's long poem The Prelude (1805; pub. 1850), which speaks of “... the close and overcrowded haunts/Of cities, where the human heart is sick”.

B.

Nature

Basic to such sentiments was an interest central to the Romantic movement, the concern with nature and natural surroundings. Delight in unspoiled scenery and in the (presumably) innocent life of rural dwellers is perhaps first recognizable as a literary theme in such a work as “The Seasons” (1726-1730), by the Scottish poet James Thomson. The work is commonly cited as a formative influence on later English Romantic poetry and on the nature tradition represented in English literature, most notably by Wordsworth. Often combined with this feeling for rural life is a generalized Romantic melancholy, a sense that change is imminent, that a way of life is being threatened. Such intimations were early evinced in William Collins's “Ode to Evening” (1747), Thomas Gray's “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751), and George Crabbe's The Borough (1810). The melancholic strain later developed as a separate theme, as in John Keats's “Ode on Melancholy” (1820), or—in a different time and place—in the works of American writers: the novels and tales of Nathaniel Hawthorne, which probe the depths of human nature in puritanical New England, or the macabre tales and melancholy poetry of Edgar Allan Poe.

C.

The Lure of the Exotic

In the spirit of their new freedom, Romantic writers in all cultures expanded their imaginary horizons spatially and chronologically. They turned back to the Middle Ages for themes and settings, and chose locales ranging from the awesome Hebrides of the Ossianic tradition, as in the work of the Scottish poet James MacPherson (see Ossian and Ossianic Ballads), to the Oriental setting of Xanadu evoked by Coleridge in his unfinished lyric “Kubla Khan” (c. 1797). A seminal work was the compilation of old English and Scottish ballads by Thomas Percy; his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) exerted a significant influence on the form and content of later Romantic poetry. The nostalgia for the Gothic past mingled with the tendency to the melancholic and produced a fondness for ruins, graveyards, and the supernatural as themes. In English literature, Wordsworth's “Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey” (from the Lyrical Ballads), the Gothic novels of Matthew Gregory Lewis, and The Castle of Otranto (1764) by Horace Walpole are representative. The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805), by the Scottish writer Sir Walter Scott, and his historical novels, the Waverley series (1814-1825), combine all these concerns: love of the picturesque, preoccupation with the heroic past, and delight in mystery and superstition.

D.

The Supernatural

The trend towards the irrational and supernatural was an important component of English and German Romantic literature. It was reinforced on the one hand by disillusion with 18th-century rationalism and on the other by the rediscovery of a body of older literature—folktales and ballads—collected by Percy and by the German scholars Jacob and Wilhelm Karl Grimm and the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen. From such material comes, for example, the motif of the doppelgänger (German, “double”). Many Romantic writers, especially in Germany, were fascinated with this concept, perhaps because of the general Romantic concern with self-identity. The poet Heinrich Heine wrote a lyric apocryphally titled “Der Doppelgänger” (1827; trans. 1846); The Devil's Elixir (1815-1816; trans. 1824), a short novel by E. T. A. Hoffmann, is about a double; and Peter Schlemihl's Remarkable Story (1814; trans. 1927), by Adelbert von Chamisso, the tale of a man who sells his shadow to the devil, can be considered a variation on the theme. Much later the Russian master Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky wrote his famous novel The Double (1846), an analysis of paranoia in a humble clerk.

IV.

Decline of the Tradition

By about the middle of the 19th century, Romanticism began to give way to new literary movements: the Parnassians and the Symbolist movement in poetry and Realism and, later, Naturalism in prose.

For additional information on the Romantic movement, see material under appropriate sub-headings in the individual articles on national literatures, for example, English Literature; French Literature; German Literature.