The Romantic Movement

Unknown
The movement of romance
Where the words softly dance
Inside people's hearts and minds
like the stars at nights

Introduction
Source: http://www.wisegeek.com/what-was-the-romantic-movement-in-literature.htm

The Romantic Movement in literature began around the end of the 18th century in Western Europe and flourished in the first half of the 19th century. The movement came from the rebellious feeling against the Enlightenment, which was created in the previous century, what its focus was on scientific and rational. The Romantic Movement literature did the opposite, as it characterized by any emphasis on emotion, passion and the natural world.

Nationalism was an important factor of the Romantic Movement. Therefore many authors turned to folk tales and native mythologies and saw them as their source material. What also remarks the Romantic Movement, is the return of aesthetics and ethos.

Early Romantic literature was emerged in Germany, where the most important literary figure of the period lived. His name was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. He published his first novel, The Sorrow of Young Werther as the story is about a young, sensitive artist. Besides writing novel, he also used myth and local folklore as subjects for his poetry and helped a sense of German nationalism in the decades before a unified Germany. Some wars like American and French Revolutions in the late 18th century, added to the popularity of such romantic ideals as freedom, liberty and national pride.

In the 19th century Romanticism dominated the English literature. The art of poetry was the style of most important works in those days. The British poets who were Romantic poets were: William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. Common themes in their work include religious fervour, nature and Ancient Greek aesthetics and emotional response to beauty. The emotions such as fear and love were the two emotions which were exploited a lot in the 19th century in Britain.
Here are some examples: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. In the still young United States of America, Romantic Movement also flourished and brought famous writers ‘alive’ such as Edger Allen Poe; Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The Three Main Pillars of the Romantic Movement

Source: http://mens-en-samenleving.infonu.nl/sociaal-cultureel/2549-romantiek-een-culturele-stroming.html

Feeling above rational
One of the most important remarks of the Romantic Movement is that feeling takes place of rational. The Romantics believe that individual imagination is very important than rational approaching. The individual should be on the background of a society where industrial “is the centre piece of life”. The name romance, what means in French sensitive song or story and that is why the movement is called Romantic Movement

Imagination
Imagination is another pillar that plays a great role in the Romantic Movement. The artist tries to escape the daily life and they do with imagination. Through imagination, they try to paint the invisible and endless to try to contact with the Higher Force. An example of this is very clear written in the famous romantic poem named “La belle dame sans merci” by John Keats. In this poem, is one side the dream and imagination and on the other side is reality, what is contrasting. The dream is loved subject of romantics; it is an example of imagination and the invisible.

Worldview
The romantic artist creates his own worldview. If it was on the romantic artists, was that total rule of reason and the continuously strife for objectivity over. The romantic refuse ration and praise just the subjective and the out coming creativity. According to the romantics it should be over with the empty abstract reasoning and men should with help from example imagination try to look further than the shallow reality. At the time of the uprising of Romantic, came also another movement named Realism. This was a contradict movement which painted reality how it is, than the Romantic Movement idealized the reality. That is why they are counterparts of each other.

The theme’s of the Romantic era – source literature without boundaries

The past
Some Romantic writers did not like the era they lived, so the tried through writing escape their time and glorify another time. So they wrote stories about the middle ages where the characters brave men, beautiful maladies and the scene were tournaments or adventures, where the emphasis different emotions such as love and fear. But as you know, the middle ages were everything but only good. The romantic writers had little interest in subjects such as poverty and war

Horror and Scary Elements
Another theme of the Romantic writers was horror and scary elements. They loved to write stories about dangerous middle age castles with dark halls, that is haunted by ghosts and where awful things occur. These stories were mostly written with the Middle Ages in the back head, as the middle ages was the time period of magicians, highly powers and secrecy. It needs to be stories with a mystery around. To give you an impression, I will provide you a famous example. Frankenstein, the novel written by Mary Shelley is a story about a “machine” that comes alive.

Nature
The art of poetry provided for the Romantics an ideal instrument to express his feelings, as the Romantics go on a quest as they believe that they have a gift to understand things a lot better. So they found inspiration in nature. One of the famous Romantic writers who used nature as an inspiration was William Wordsworth, who taught to believe that his poem ‘I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud” gave him clear insight on the richness nature (that is described in his poem) really has and her unnoticed beauty.

Fate
Another theme of the Romantic writers was fate. They used this subject a lot in their writings. The reason was that many Romantic writers did not believe anymore in religions, as that was the consequences of nationalism in the 18th century. So they started to see life as an adventure filled with risks. In these form of writings, they described the fate’s different forms. A poet such as Charles Baudelaire described like some other writers the dark side of the human life. In his poems, the scene is the city of Paris where he compares it with the desert, where people are thirst and hungry, living in the worst conditions and abandoned with diseases. The fate plays therefore a huge role in the writing.

The religious feeling
In the Romantic movement, they were also writers who saw the opportunity to challenge values and ideas, which were based on faith. The reason is that other kind movements and historic events changed from religious to less religiously. These let for them, to question the values and ideas with religious roots and give new perception from another point of view on those ideas. One of those Romantic writers was Emily Dickenson. She used poetry to explain the new religious feeling, an alternative of the organised religious institutions. She used unique form to paint the perfect picture of her religious and life feelings and thoughts.

Humour
The next theme that always was used is humour. This theme was used in different forms by different writers through shallow humour to irony. In this kind of humour the writers criticised everything, what was portrayed as TRUE picture. An example is the Dutch writer Hildebrand gives in his Camera Obscura an irony touch to the civilian life in the 19the century. Another example is the American writer Mark Twain (pseudonym for Samuel Clemens), who wrote classic books like Tom Sawyer, the adventures of Huckleberry Finn used humour to his maximal in the stories of his books. The writer was also a joker, sent a telegram as a practical joke) to ten very important Americans with the following text: Run, everything is discovered. The next day, nine of them left.

Here under is a little piece of the essay (How to tell a story) of Mark Twain, where he describes different kind of humours:

………but only one difficult kind – the humorous – I will talk mainly about that one. The humorous story is American, but the comic story is English and the witty story is French. The humorous story depends for its effect upon the manner of the telling; the comic story and the witty story upon the matter. - by Samuel Clemens, a.k.a. Mark Twain

The national element
Our last theme is the national element. Writers from different countries in Europe, did not only use historic event and folktales, but also expanded in retelling songs and any other forms of folktales that passed on by oral, were writing in the 19th century. These folktales were from peasants and other ordinary people and mostly uninterested subject for the people of higher classes. But that changed when the scholars showed interest and went through the country to hear these folktales. One of the famous folktales is known in these days as a fairytale named Cinderella, by the brothers Wilhelm and Jacob Grim, who retold many oral stories in their own styles. Another writer who used national element in his works was Hendrik Conscience, a Belgium (Flaming) writer, who used to speak to his people or to stimulate the national pride through his roman. These are few examples of national elements in the Romantic Movement.