Romanticism (~1780 – 1850)
The Enlightenment built a clean, well-lit world; Romanticism turned off the lights and asked what was moving in the dark.
What Defined It
A deliberate counter-Enlightenment. Reason is fine, the Romantics said, but it isn’t the whole mind — there’s also imagination, feeling, dream, the sublime, the demonic. The Romantic hero is a solitary figure in wild nature, wrestling with something bigger than him: the ocean, God, death, his own soul. Byron and his doomed heroes, Wordsworth communing with daffodils, Shelley writing odes to the west wind, Goethe’s Werther killing himself for love, Pushkin’s Onegin drifting through a Russia he can’t belong to.
Three ideas recur: the imagination is a cognitive power, not a decoration; nature is alive and tells us something about ourselves; the individual — especially the outsider, the exile, the genius — is the center of moral weight. Nationalism also begins here, as the Romantic interest in folk songs, language, and “the spirit of the people” gets politicized.
Key Figures
Goethe, Schiller, Hölderlin, Novalis, E.T.A. Hoffmann; Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Mary Shelley; Pushkin, Lermontov; Hugo, early Balzac, Chateaubriand; Beethoven, Chopin, Schubert; Caspar David Friedrich, Delacroix.
Why It Matters
Most modern art still runs on Romantic fuel. Whenever a film or novel treats an individual consciousness as a world worth mapping — when it privileges feeling over reason, or treats nature as a mirror of the soul — it is Romantic by inheritance. The Romantic cult of the artist-genius, still with us, is from here.
Early Balzac — especially The Wild Ass’s Skin — is classic Romantic: a fantastical magical object, a young artist burning through his life, Paris as a demonic city.
Connections
- Balzac — began as a Romantic before inventing French realism
- The Wild Ass’s Skin — Romantic symbol inside a realist project
Lineage
- Predecessors: Enlightenment (the thing it reacts against); Sturm und Drang
- Successors: 19th Century realism; French Realism; symbolism