Pgs 603-608 | Due 1/16/2007

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Disclaimer: Notes are not a replacement for doing the required reading, they are only a supplement and I recommend only skimming these notes and always doing the required reading. ALWAYS. I DO NOT always hit every single detail. Also I’m sorry but I CANNOT guarantee an A with these notes lol. Sorry xD.

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Culture in an Age of Reaction and Revolution: The Mood of Romanticism

• Enlightenment (based on finding the truths of life) was challenged by Romanticism which was the belief that reason should be balanced with feeling, intuition, emotions, and imagination.

The Characteristics of Romanticism (bottom of 603-604)

• Romantic writers emphasized feelings, emotion, and sentiment.
• The Sorrows of the Young Werther by German Writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Werther was a Romantic figure who wanted freedom in order to satisfy himself.
• Werther was always misunderstood by society and believed he could achieve his own worth through inner feelings but his love for a girl that rejected him caused him to kill himself.
• Soon many books about young maidens being taken away from their male lovers by tuberculosis appeared.
• Romanticism also stressed individualism, the unique traits of a person.
• Long hair and beards reinforced the individual traits.
• Romantic Hero (also refer to Smithyman’s HCAII Hero Notes – you need MS Word, WordPerfect, or OpenOffice, etc.)- a solitary genius who was ready to defy the world and sacrifice his life for a great cause.
• In Thomas Carlyle’s works, the hero was not destroyed but instead transformed society.
• Romanticists were also interested with the past. The Grimm brothers published old fairy tales and Hans Christian Andersen followed suit in Denmark.
• Gothic architecture was also reintroduced in the cities.
• Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe described the fight between Saxon and Norman knights. Gothic literature was evident in the works of Edgar Allan Poe and in Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley. Shelley’s book was about a mad scientist that creates a human-like beast.
• Some Romanticists went too far and began pursuing states of experience in dreams, nightmares, suicidal depressions, etc. Or they turned into druggies and experimented with cocaine, opium, and pot.

Romantic Poets and Love of Nature (604)

• Romantic poets were seen as seers that revealed the invisible world to others.
• Percy Bysshe Shelley was expelled from school for advocating atheism. He set out to reform the world. He wrote Prometheus Unbound, which paints a picture of humans revolting against the oppression of laws and customs. He died at sea in a storm.
• Lord Byron described himself as a romantic hero in his work, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage. He died while fighting in the Greek revolution against the Turks.
• Romantic poetry emphasized nature. William Wordsworth believed nature was a mysterious force that taught a poet; a mirror for humans to look at and learn about themselves.
• Romanticists IDed God as the great force in nature, defying the deist theories of Enlightenment.
• Wordsworth and other Romanticists believed that science and mechanistic materialism reduced nature to a cold boring subject that left no room for imagination.
• In Frankenstein, the monster symbolizes that dangers of science would come if science tried to conquer nature.
• Romantics believed that the industrialization also hindered a person from identifying with his or her inner self.

Romanticism in Art and Music (starting bottom of 605-608)

• Romantics believed that a painting should reflect the artist’s vision of the world. It should be his or her own imagination.
• Beauty was not timeless, it depended on age and culture. Also classical restraint for warmth, emotion, and movement were abandoned.
• Caspar David Friedrich had a lifelong experience with God and nature and painted many landscapes.
• Nature was a manifestation of divine life as shown in the Woman Gazing at the Moon.
• Artist approach depended on a person’s “inner eye”.
• Malford William Turner also was a artist that produced thousands of landscapes. He let his objects “melt into their surroundings”.
• Eugene Delacroix was the most famous French Romantic artist. He was fascinated by colors and the exotic.
• The Death of Sardanapalus (on pg. 607) showed this with the daring use of colors.

Subcategory: Music

• Music was the most Romantic of arts according to Romantics because it enabled the composer to probe deeply into human emotions.
• Although this was the period of Romanticism and the 18th century was the period of Classicism, the elements of classical music did carry over in each century.
• Ludwig van Beethoven served as the bridge from Classicism to Romanticism. His music must reflect his inner feelings.
• Beethoven came from a family of musicians born in Bonn. He studied music briefly under Haydn in Vienna. Soon this was his permanent residence.
• Originally he followed the classicist influences until he wrote Eroica (The Third Symphony) which was written for Napoleon originally. He then broke into romanticism.
• Beethoven was the bridge and many followed him in this romanticism footsteps.
• Symphonic Fantastique by Hector Berloiz used music to evoke passionate emotions of a tortured love affair.

Revival of Religion in the Age of Romanticism (608-End)

• Enlightenment reduced the religious influences. The restoration of the nobility after revolution restored them. Romanticism then furthered them.
• Catholicism benefited from the enthusiasm for religion by romanticism movements.
• Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand wrote Genius of Christianity which was soon labeled the “Bible of Romanticism”.
• Instead of justifying Catholicism through a theological, historical, or rational standpoint he used Romantic sentiment.
• The cathedrals brought a person right into the presence of God.
• Protestantism was also revived and began earlier in the 18th century with the Methodists and the Pietists in Britain and Germany.
• Methodist missionaries carried their message to liberal Protestant churches in France and Switzerland.
• German preachers also found that messages of hellfire and emotional conversion created a ready response among people that were alienated by the upper level clergy.