Byron changes the original telling of the story and instead of creating a womanizing character, he makes Don Juan someone easily seduced by women. It describes the reflections of a young man who is seeking new beginnings in foreign countries after experiencing many years of war.
This poem is significant because it introduced the Byronic hero , typically a handsome and intelligent man with a tendency to be moody, cynical, and rebellious against social norms. During the Romantic Period the novel grew in popularity and became one of the major sources of entertainment for middle class citizens.
Authors began to tailor their writing to appeal to this audience. Sir Walter Scott gained popularity during this time, both in Britain and around Europe. He mainly wrote within the genre of historical romances and made this a viable form of fiction for later writers. Scott also focused on his home country of Scotland, often writing about its beauty and romanticism. The rebellious group sought to restore the Stuart dynasty to Charles Edward Stuart. The hero, Edward Waverly, is commissioned to the army and sent to Scotland in While there, he joins the Jacobite groups even though he knows they will fail and is imprisoned; however, he is ultimately freed.
While this was his first success, generally The Antiquary , Old Mortality , and The Heart of Midlothian are considered his masterpieces.
During the second half of the 18 th century, gothic fiction began to increase in popularity in Great Britain. This came from a look back to medieval times. Often this genre would combine supernatural and mysterious elements with the castles and dungeons of the past.
The gothic novel combines the intense emotions of terror, anguish, fear, and even love. Shelley combines elements of love and the supernatural in her gothic novel, Frankenstein.
Victor Frankenstein harnesses the power of life and uses it to animate a creature he has built. The Romantic Period saw more successful women writers, a precursor to their popularity in the Victorian era. The most significant female writer during this period was Jane Austen. Writing toward the end of the period, Austen did not always adhere to the strict Romantic Period guidelines and mocked some of the more extravagant plots of previous writers.
Instead, Austen chose to highlight the everyday lives of average people, making a turn toward social realism. Her novels include relatable heroines with adventures that the ordinary reader would likely encounter. She was also able to better depict the lives of women in this way. She understood that women had very little class mobility at the time and used many of her novels as a way to show this. Pride and Prejudice is still widely read today and tells the story of Elizabeth Bennet, the second eldest daughter among five.
When Mr. Bingley and Mr. Darcy move into the neighborhood, the Bennet family hopes they will wed two of the unmarried daughters. The popularity of landscape painting in this region, during this time, was in part a reflection of the virtual disappearance of religious art in the Netherlands, which was then a Calvinist society.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, religious painting declined across all of Europe, and the movement of Romanticism spread, both of which provided important historical ingredients for landscape painting to ascend to a more prominent place in art. In England, landscapes had initially only been painted as the backgrounds for portraits, and typically portrayed the parks or estates of a landowner.
This changed as a result of Anthony van Dyck, who, along with other Flemish artists living in England, began a national tradition. In the 18th century, watercolor painting, mostly of landscapes, became an English speciality.
The nation had both a buoyant market for professional works of this variety, and a large number of amateur painters. By the beginning of the 19th century, the most highly regarded English artists were all, for the most part, dedicated landscapists, including John Constable, J. Turner, and Samuel Palmer. French painters were slower to develop an interest in landscapes, but in , the Salon de Paris exhibited the works of John Constable, an extremely talented English landscape painter.
His rural scenes influenced some of the younger French artists of the time, moving them to abandon formalism and to draw inspiration directly from nature. They formed what is referred to as the Barbizon School. During the late s, the Barbizon painters attracted the attention of a younger generation of French artists studying in Paris. Nationalism has been implicated in the popularity of 17th century Dutch landscapes, and in the 19th century, when other nations, such as England and France, attempted to develop distinctive national schools of their own.
Painters involved in these movements often attempted to express the unique nature of the landscape of their homeland. In the United States, a similar movement, called the Hudson River School, emerged in the 19th century and quickly became one of the most distinctive worldwide purveyors of landscape pieces.
American painters in this movement created works of mammoth scale in an attempt to capture the epic size and scope of the landscapes that inspired them.
Both championed, from a position of secular faith, the spiritual benefits that could be gained from contemplating nature. Some of the later Hudson River School artists, such as Albert Bierstadt, created less comforting works that placed a greater emphasis with a great deal of Romantic exaggeration on the raw, terrifying power of nature. The Oxbow by Thomas Cole, : Thomas Cole was a founding member of the pioneering Hudson School, the most influential landscape art movement in 19th century America.
Privacy Policy. Skip to main content. European and American Art in the 18th and 19th Centuries. Search for:. Neoclassicism and Romanticism. Romanticism Romanticism, fueled by the French Revolution, was a reaction to the scientific rationalism and classicism of the Age of Enlightenment. Learning Objectives Discuss the political and theoretical foundations of Romanticism.
Romanticism was a revolt against the aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment and also a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature. Romanticism legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority, which permitted freedom from classical notions of form in art.
Accuracy of observation, however, was not sought for its own sake. Romantic nature poetry is essentially a poetry of meditation. Symbolism and Myth Symbolism and myth were given great prominence in the Romantic conception of art.
In the Romantic view, symbols were the human aesthetic correlatives of nature's emblematic language. They were valued too because they could simultaneously suggest many things, and were thus thought superior to the one-to-one communications of allegory.
Partly, it may have been the desire to express the "inexpressible"--the infinite--through the available resources of language that led to symbol at one level and myth as symbolic narrative at another. Emphasis on the activity of the imagination was accompanied by greater emphasis on the importance of intuition, instincts, and feelings, and Romantics generally called for greater attention to the emotions as a necessary supplement to purely logical reason.
When this emphasis was applied to the creation of poetry, a very important shift of focus occurred. Wordsworth's definition of all good poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings" marks a turning point in literary history. By locating the ultimate source of poetry in the individual artist, the tradition, stretching back to the ancients, of valuing art primarily for its ability to imitate human life that is, for its mimetic qualities was reversed.
In Romantic theory, art was valuable not so much as a mirror of the external world, but as a source of illumination of the world within. Among other things, this led to a prominence for first-person lyric poetry never accorded it in any previous period. The "poetic speaker" became less a persona and more the direct person of the poet.
Wordsworth's Prelude and Whitman's "Song of Myself" are both paradigms of successful experiments to take the growth of the poet's mind the development of self as subject for an "epic" enterprise made up of lyric components. Confessional prose narratives such as Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther and Chateaubriand's Rene , as well as disguised autobiographical verse narratives such as Byron's Childe Harold , are related phenomena. The interior journey and the development of the self recurred everywhere as subject material for the Romantic artist.
The artist-as-hero is a specifically Romantic type. Contrasts With Neoclassicism Consequently, the Romantics sought to define their goals through systematic contrast with the norms of "Versailles neoclassicism. We have already noted two major differences: the replacement of reason by the imagination for primary place among the human faculties and the shift from a mimetic to an expressive orientation for poetry, and indeed all literature.
In addition, neoclassicism had prescribed for art the idea that the general or universal characteristics of human behavior were more suitable subject matter than the peculiarly individual manifestations of human activity. From at least the opening statement of Rousseau's Confessions , first published in "I am not made like anyone I have seen; I dare believe that I am not made like anyone in existence.
If I am not superior, at least I am different. The Everyday and the Exotic The attitude of many of the Romantics to the everyday, social world around them was complex. It is true that they advanced certain realistic techniques, such as the use of "local color" through down-to-earth characters, like Wordsworth's rustics, or through everyday language, as in Emily Bronte's northern dialects or Whitman's colloquialisms, or through popular literary forms, such as folk narratives.
Yet social realism was usually subordinate to imaginative suggestion, and what was most important were the ideals suggested by the above examples, simplicity perhaps, or innocence. Earlier, the 18th-century cult of the noble savage had promoted similar ideals, but now artists often turned for their symbols to domestic rather than exotic sources--to folk legends and older, "unsophisticated" art forms, such as the ballad, to contemporary country folk who used "the language of commen men," not an artificial "poetic diction," and to children for the first time presented as individuals, and often idealized as sources of greater wisdom than adults.
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