Romanticism

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Rousseau

• Childhood
• Individual Expression
• Society corrupts

Immanuel Kant

Kant

• Subjectivity of sensory experience
• Mind imposes its own categories
• Importance of conscience and morality

Romantic as Pejorative

• Unreal
• Sentimental
• Fanciful
• Gothic

German and English Literature and Poetry

• Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron
• Schlegel and Goethe
• Stressed imagination and artistic freedom
• Often ignored politeness and convention

Romantic Art and Architecture

John Constable - Salisbury Cathedral

Caspar David Friedrich - The Polar Sea

JMW Turner - Rain, Steam, and Speed

Religion

Religion and Romanticism

• Rejected dogma and orthodoxy
• Emphasized intuition, emotional devotion

German Culture and Nationalism

Romantic Nationalism

• Volk - the people, folklore, folk songs
• Ethnic Nationalism - exclusionary
• Identity comes from common culture and common people
• Anti-Semitism - Jews could never assimilate or understand

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Appareled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore-
Turn whereso’er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can
see no more. --William Wordsworth