The Counter-Enlightenment refers to a loose collection of intellectual stances that arose during the European Enlightenment in opposition to its mainstream attitudes and ideals. The Counter-Enlightenment is generally seen to have continued from the 18th century into the early 19th century, especially with the rise of Romanticism . Its thinkers did not necessarily agree to a set of counter-doctrines but instead each challenged specific elements of Enlightenment thinking, such as the belief in progress , the rationality of all humans, liberal democracy , and the increasing secularisation of European society.
137-783: Scholars differ on who is to be included among the major figures of the Counter-Enlightenment. In Italy, Giambattista Vico criticised the spread of reductionism and the Cartesian method , which he saw as castrating the arts and humanities of the Renaissance . Decades later, Joseph de Maistre in Sardinia and Edmund Burke in Britain both criticised the anti-religious ideas of the Enlightenment for leading to
274-567: A philosophe (albeit an erratic one) who shared the basic beliefs of his Enlightenment contemporaries. But similar to McMahon, Garrard traces the beginning of Counter-Enlightenment thought back to France and prior to the German Sturm und Drang movement of the 1770s. Garrard's book Counter-Enlightenments (2006) broadens the term even further, arguing against Berlin that there was no single "movement" called "The Counter-Enlightenment". Rather, there have been many Counter-Enlightenments, from
411-504: A reverence for nature and the supernatural , an idealization of the past as a nobler era , a fascination with the exotic and the mysterious , and a celebration of the heroic and the sublime . The Romanticist movement had a particular fondness for the Middle Ages , which to them represented an era of chivalry , heroism, and a more organic relationship between humans and their environment. This idealization contrasted sharply with
548-468: A "Late Romantic" period and " Neoromantic " revivals are also discussed. These extensions of the movement are characterized by a resistance to the increasingly experimental and abstract forms that culminated in modern art , and the deconstruction of traditional tonal harmony in music. They continued the Romantic ideal, stressing depth of emotion in art and music while showcasing technical mastery in
685-660: A centre of German Romanticism, where writers and poets such as Clemens Brentano , Achim von Arnim , and Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff ( Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts ) met regularly in literary circles. Important motifs in German Romanticism are travelling, nature, for example the German Forest , and Germanic myths . The later German Romanticism of, for example E. T. A. Hoffmann 's Der Sandmann ( The Sandman ), 1817, and Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff 's Das Marmorbild ( The Marble Statue ), 1819,
822-504: A childhood friend, and accepted a chair in rhetoric at the University of Naples, which he held until ill-health retirement, in 1741. Throughout his academic career, Vico would aspire to, but never attain, the more respectable chair of jurisprudence ; however, in 1734, he was appointed historiographer royal , by Charles III , King of Naples, at a salary greater than he had earned as a university professor. Vico's version of rhetoric
959-629: A collection of versified folk tales, in 1806–1808. The first collection of Grimms' Fairy Tales by the Brothers Grimm was published in 1812. Unlike the much later work of Hans Christian Andersen , who was publishing his invented tales in Danish from 1835, these German works were at least mainly based on collected folk tales , and the Grimms remained true to the style of the telling in their early editions, though later rewriting some parts. One of
1096-684: A complicated history. By the 18th century, European languages—notably German, French and Slavic languages—were using the term "Roman" in the sense of the English word " novel ", i.e. a work of popular narrative fiction. This usage derived from the term "Romance languages" , which referred to vernacular (or popular) language in contrast to formal Latin . Most such novels took the form of " chivalric romance ", tales of adventure, devotion and honour. The founders of Romanticism, critics (and brothers) August Wilhelm Schlegel and Friedrich Schlegel , began to speak of romantische Poesie ("romantic poetry") in
1233-428: A considerable number always had, or developed, a wide range of conservative views, and nationalism was in many countries strongly associated with Romanticism, as discussed in detail below. In philosophy and the history of ideas, Romanticism was seen by Isaiah Berlin as disrupting for over a century the classic Western traditions of rationality and the idea of moral absolutes and agreed values, leading "to something like
1370-612: A defence of religion and the medieval spirit ( Génie du christianisme , 1802), and finally in the 1830s and 1840s his enormous autobiography Mémoires d'Outre-Tombe ("Memoirs from beyond the grave"). After the Bourbon Restoration , French Romanticism developed in the lively world of Parisian theatre , with productions of Shakespeare , Schiller (in France a key Romantic author), and adaptations of Scott and Byron alongside French authors, several of whom began to write in
1507-482: A distinct national identity and began to enjoy an international reputation. Allan Ramsay (1686–1758) laid the foundations of a reawakening of interest in older Scottish literature, as well as leading the trend for pastoral poetry, helping to develop the Habbie stanza as a poetic form . James Macpherson (1736–1796) was the first Scottish poet to gain an international reputation. Claiming to have found poetry written by
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#17327646692711644-529: A dramatist, with his play on the life of the English poet Chatterton (1835) perhaps his best work. George Sand was a central figure of the Parisian literary scene, famous both for her novels and criticism and her affairs with Chopin and several others; she too was inspired by the theatre, and wrote works to be staged at her private estate . French Romantic poets of the 1830s to 1850s include Alfred de Musset , Gérard de Nerval , Alphonse de Lamartine and
1781-536: A freer and brighter style of expression, so he can learn to draw on those arguments which are most probable and have the greatest degree of verisimilitude "; yet, in Scienza Nuova , Vico denounced defending both sides in controversies as false eloquence . As Royal Professor of Latin Eloquence, Vico prepared students for higher studies in the fields of Law and of Jurisprudence ; thus, his lessons were about
1918-487: A highly critical view of recent social changes, including urbanization , brought about by the Industrial Revolution . Romanticism lionized the achievements of "heroic" individuals—especially artists, who began to be represented as cultural leaders (one Romantic luminary, Percy Bysshe Shelley , described poets as the "unacknowledged legislators of the world" in his " Defence of Poetry "). Romanticism placed
2055-612: A longing for the unbounded and the indefinable, for perpetual movement and change, an effort to return to the forgotten sources of life, a passionate effort at self-assertion both individual and collective, a search after means of expressing an unappeasable yearning for unattainable goals". Romantic artists also shared a strong belief in the importance and inspirational qualities of Nature. Romantics were distrustful of cities and social conventions. They deplored Restoration and Enlightenment Era artists who were largely concerned with depicting and critiquing social relations, thereby neglecting
2192-502: A maieutic oratory art against the grain of the modern privilege of the dogmatic form of reason, in what he called the "geometrical method" of René Descartes and the logicians at the Port-Royal-des-Champs abbey. As he relates in his autobiography, Vico returned to Naples from Vatolla to find "the physics of Descartes at the height of its renown among the established men of letters." Developments in both metaphysics and
2329-408: A mature Romantic style. By the time of World War I , though, the cultural and artistic climate had changed to such a degree that Romanticism essentially dispersed into subsequent movements. The final Late Romanticist figures to maintain the Romantic ideals died in the 1940s. Though they were still widely respected, they were seen as anachronisms at that point. Romanticism was a complex movement with
2466-408: A novel by Laurence Sterne (1759–1767), introduced a whimsical version of the anti-rational sentimental novel to the English literary public. An early German influence came from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe , whose 1774 novel The Sorrows of Young Werther had young men throughout Europe emulating its protagonist, a young artist with a very sensitive and passionate temperament. At that time Germany
2603-605: A piece of drawing chalk. Even the rational critic is inspired by irrational dream-content under the gaze of the sharp-eyed lynx. Marshall Brown makes much the same argument as Barzun in Romanticism and Enlightenment , questioning the stark opposition between these two periods. By the middle of the 19th century, the memory of the French Revolution was fading and so was the influence of Romanticism. In this optimistic age of science and industry, there were few critics of
2740-474: A political speech according to the precepts of geometrical method is equivalent to stripping it of any acute remarks and to uttering nothing but pedestrian lines of argument. Vico's position here and in later works is not that the Cartesian method is irrelevant, but that its application cannot be extended to the civic sphere. Instead of confining reason to a string of verifiable axioms, Vico suggests (along with
2877-437: A tradition of relativist , anti-rationalist , vitalist , and organic thinkers stemming largely from Hamann and subsequent German Romantics. While Berlin is largely credited with having refined and promoted the concept, the first known use of the term in English occurred in 1949 and there were several earlier uses of it across other European languages, including by German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche . Despite criticism of
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#17327646692713014-439: A variety of viewpoints that permeated Western civilization across the globe. The movement and its opposing ideologies mutually shaped each other over time. After its end, Romantic thought and art exerted a sweeping influence on art and music , speculative fiction , philosophy , politics , and environmentalism that has endured to the present day. The movement is the reference for the modern notion of " romanticization " and
3151-583: A very typical view, and about 1830, perhaps a little later than some other critics. Others have proposed 1780–1830. In other fields and other countries the period denominated as Romantic can be considerably different; musical Romanticism , for example, is generally regarded as only having ceased as a major artistic force as late as 1910, but in an extreme extension the Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss are described stylistically as "Late Romantic" and were composed in 1946–1948. However, in most fields
3288-552: Is a product of his humanistic and pedagogic concerns. In the 1708 commencement speech De Nostri Temporis Studiorum Ratione ( On the Order of the Scholarly Disciplines of Our Times ), Vico said that whoever "intends a career in public life, whether in the courts, the senate, or the pulpit" should be taught to "master the art of topics and [to] defend both sides of a controversy, be it on Nature, Man, or politics, in
3425-459: Is epitomized by the Marquis de Sade . However, there were philosophers rejecting Adorno and Horkheimer's claim that Sade's moral skepticism is actually coherent, or that it reflects Enlightenment thought. [REDACTED] Category Giambattista Vico Giambattista Vico (born Giovan Battista Vico / ˈ v iː k oʊ / ; Italian: [ˈviko] ; 23 June 1668 – 23 January 1744)
3562-445: Is most evident in the aesthetics of romanticism, where the notion of eternal models, a Platonic vision of ideal beauty, which the artist seeks to convey, however imperfectly, on canvas or in sound, is replaced by a passionate belief in spiritual freedom, individual creativity. The painter, the poet, the composer do not hold up a mirror to nature, however ideal, but invent; they do not imitate (the doctrine of mimesis), but create not merely
3699-651: Is now most highly regarded for his short lyrics and his generally unromantic prose writings, especially his letters, and his unfinished satire Don Juan . Unlike many Romantics, Byron's widely publicised personal life appeared to match his work, and his death at 36 in 1824 from disease when helping the Greek War of Independence appeared from a distance to be a suitably Romantic end, entrenching his legend. Keats in 1821 and Shelley in 1822 both died in Italy, Blake (at almost 70) in 1827, and Coleridge largely ceased to write in
3836-469: Is often called "romantic originality". The translator and prominent Romantic August Wilhelm Schlegel argued in his Lectures on Dramatic Arts and Letters that the most valuable quality of human nature is its tendency to diverge and diversify. According to Isaiah Berlin , Romanticism embodied "a new and restless spirit, seeking violently to burst through old and cramping forms, a nervous preoccupation with perpetually changing inner states of consciousness,
3973-447: Is recognised as one of the first Counter-Enlightenment figures in history. The Latin aphorism Verum esse ipsum factum ("truth is itself something made") coined by Vico is an early instance of constructivist epistemology . He inaugurated the modern field of the philosophy of history , and, although the term philosophy of history is not in his writings, Vico spoke of a "history of philosophy narrated philosophically." Although he
4110-536: Is required in equal measure in both spheres. One of the clearest and earliest forms of this argument is available in the De Italorum Sapientia , where Vico argues that to introduce geometrical method into practical life is "like trying to go mad with the rules of reason", attempting to proceed by a straight line among the tortuosities of life, as though human affairs were not ruled by capriciousness, temerity, opportunity, and chance. Similarly, to arrange
4247-785: The Ancien Régime , and the French Revolution had been more of an inspiration to foreign writers than those experiencing it at first-hand. The first major figure was François-René de Chateaubriand , an aristocrat who had remained a royalist throughout the Revolution, and returned to France from exile in England and America under Napoleon, with whose regime he had an uneasy relationship. His writings, all in prose, included some fiction, such as his influential novella of exile René (1802), which anticipated Byron in its alienated hero, but mostly contemporary history and politics, his travels,
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4384-504: The Origin of Species , the transition from widespread revolution in Europe to a more conservative climate, and a shift in public consciousness to the immediate impact of technology and urbanization on the working class . By World War I , Romanticism was overshadowed by new cultural, social, and political movements, many of them hostile to the perceived illusions and preoccupations of
4521-416: The encyclopédistes and fought to prevent the dissemination of Enlightenment ideas in the second half of the century. Many people from earlier times attacked the Enlightenment for undermining religion and the social and political order. It later became a major theme of conservative criticism of the Enlightenment. After the French Revolution, it appeared to vindicate the warnings of the anti-philosophes in
4658-585: The Crusades that he had researched to a degree that was new in literature. In contrast to Germany, Romanticism in English literature had little connection with nationalism, and the Romantics were often regarded with suspicion for the sympathy many felt for the ideals of the French Revolution , whose collapse and replacement with the dictatorship of Napoleon was, as elsewhere in Europe, a shock to
4795-545: The Lake Poets were widely regarded as a marginal group of radicals, though they were supported by the critic and writer William Hazlitt and others. In contrast, Lord Byron and Walter Scott achieved enormous fame and influence throughout Europe with works exploiting the violence and drama of their exotic and historical settings; Goethe called Byron "undoubtedly the greatest genius of our century". Scott achieved immediate success with his long narrative poem The Lay of
4932-455: The Reign of Terror and an Orwellian police state following the French Revolution . The ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Georg Hamann were also significant to the rise of the Counter-Enlightenment with French and German Romanticism respectively. In the late 20th century, the concept of the Counter-Enlightenment was popularised by pro-Enlightenment historian Isaiah Berlin as
5069-556: The Romantic movement or Romantic era ) was an artistic and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century. The purpose of the movement was to advocate for the importance of subjectivity , imagination , and appreciation of nature in society and culture in response to the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution . Romanticists rejected
5206-404: The national poet of Scotland and a major influence on the Romantic movement. His poem (and song) " Auld Lang Syne " is often sung at Hogmanay (the last day of the year), and " Scots Wha Hae " served for a long time as an unofficial national anthem of the country. Scott began as a poet and also collected and published Scottish ballads. His first prose work, Waverley in 1814, is often called
5343-526: The natural sciences . Romanticism had a significant and complex effect on politics: Romantic thinking influenced conservatism , liberalism , radicalism , and nationalism . Romanticism prioritized the artist's unique, individual imagination above the strictures of classical form. The movement emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience. It granted a new importance to experiences of sympathy , awe , wonder , and terror , in part by naturalizing such emotions as responses to
5480-423: The orator (rhetorician) as the transmitter of the oratio , a speech with ratio (reason) at the centre. What is essential to the oratorical art (Gr. ῥητορική, rhētorikē ) is the orderly link between common sense and an end commensurate with oratory; an end that is not imposed upon the imagination from above (in the manner of the moderns and dogmatic Christianity), but that is drawn from common sense, itself. In
5617-515: The philosophes to the instability in France in the 1790s. His Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) identifies the Enlightenment as the principal cause of the French revolution. In Burke's opinion, the philosophes provided the revolutionary leaders with the theories on which their political schemes were based. Augustin Barruel 's Counter-Enlightenment ideas were well developed before
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5754-481: The rationalism , universalism and empiricism that are commonly associated with the Enlightenment. Berlin's essay "The Counter-Enlightenment" was first published in 1973, and later reprinted in a collection of his works, Against the Current , in 1981. The term has been more widely used since. Berlin argues that, while there were opponents of the Enlightenment outside of Germany (e.g. Joseph de Maistre ) and before
5891-475: The social conventions of the time in favour of a moral outlook known as individualism . They argued that passion and intuition were crucial to understanding the world, and that beauty is more than merely an affair of form , but rather something that evokes a strong emotional response. With this philosophical foundation, the Romanticists elevated several key themes to which they were deeply committed:
6028-634: The supernatural / occult and human psychology . Romanticism tended to regard satire as something unworthy of serious attention, a view still influential today. The Romantic movement in literature was preceded by the Enlightenment and succeeded by Realism . The precursors of Romanticism in English poetry go back to the middle of the 18th century, including figures such as Joseph Warton (headmaster at Winchester College ) and his brother Thomas Warton , Professor of Poetry at Oxford University . Joseph maintained that invention and imagination were
6165-399: The "beautiful" and the "sublime". Romantics stressed the nobility of folk art and ancient cultural practices, but also championed radical politics , unconventional behavior, and authentic spontaneity. In contrast to the rationalism and classicism of the Enlightenment , Romanticism revived medievalism and juxtaposed a pastoral conception of a more "authentic" European past with
6302-730: The "romantic harp" and "classic lyre", but in 1820 Byron could still write, perhaps slightly disingenuously, It is only from the 1820s that Romanticism certainly knew itself by its name, and in 1824 the Académie française took the wholly ineffective step of issuing a decree condemning it in literature. The period typically called Romantic varies greatly between different countries and different artistic media or areas of thought. Margaret Drabble described it in literature as taking place "roughly between 1770 and 1848", and few dates much earlier than 1770 will be found. In English literature, M. H. Abrams placed it between 1789, or 1798, this latter
6439-621: The "sleeping partner" of the Age of Enlightenment . Despite having been relatively unknown in his 18th-century time, and read only in his native Naples, the ideas of Vico are predecessors to the ideas of the intellectuals of the Enlightenment. Moreover, recognition of Vico's intellectual influence began in the 19th century, when the French Romantic historians used his works as methodological models and guides. In Capital: Critique of Political Economy (1867), Karl Marx 's mention of Vico indicates their parallel perspectives about history,
6576-545: The 1770s (e.g. Giambattista Vico ), Counter-Enlightenment thought did not take hold until the Germans "rebelled against the dead hand of France in the realms of culture, art and philosophy, and avenged themselves by launching the great counter-attack against the Enlightenment." This German reaction to the imperialistic universalism of the French Enlightenment and Revolution, which had been forced on them first by
6713-479: The 1790s, contrasting it with "classic" but in terms of spirit rather than merely dating. Friedrich Schlegel wrote in his 1800 essay Gespräch über die Poesie ("Dialogue on Poetry"): The modern sense of the term spread more widely in France by its persistent use by Germaine de Staël in her De l'Allemagne (1813), recounting her travels in Germany. In England Wordsworth wrote in a preface to his poems of 1815 of
6850-406: The 1820s. Wordsworth was by 1820 respectable and highly regarded, holding a government sinecure , but wrote relatively little. In the discussion of English literature, the Romantic period is often regarded as finishing around the 1820s, or sometimes even earlier, although many authors of the succeeding decades were no less committed to Romantic values. The most significant novelist in English during
6987-539: The 18th-century Age of Reason for both 18th and 20th-century totalitarianism also resurged. The locus classicus of this view is Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno 's Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), which traces the degeneration of the general concept of enlightenment from ancient Greece (epitomized by the cunning "bourgeois" hero Odysseus ) to 20th-century fascism . The authors take "enlightenment" as their target including its 18th-century form – which we now call "The Enlightenment". They claim it
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#17327646692717124-551: The Counter-Revolutionary antipathy towards the philosophes . All three directly blamed the philosophes in France and the Aufklärer in Germany for devaluing beauty, spirit and history in favour of a view of man as a soulless machine and a view of the universe as a meaningless, disenchanted void lacking richness and beauty. One particular concern to early Romantic writers was the allegedly anti-religious nature of
7261-498: The Enlightenment (2001), historian Darrin McMahon extends the Counter-Enlightenment back to pre-Revolutionary France and down to the level of " Grub Street ". McMahon focuses on the early opponents to the Enlightenment in France, unearthing a long-forgotten " Grub Street " literature in the late 18th and early 19th centuries aimed at the philosophes . He delves into the obscure world of the "low Counter-Enlightenment" that attacked
7398-431: The Enlightenment and the Revolution. They blamed the Enlightenment for undermining traditional beliefs that sustained the ancien regime . As the Revolution became increasingly bloody, the idea of "Enlightenment" was discredited, too. Hence, the French Revolution and its aftermath have contributed to the development of Counter-Enlightenment thought. Edmund Burke was among the first of the Revolution's opponents to relate
7535-546: The Enlightenment being a widely discussed topic in twentieth- and twenty-first century thought, the term "Counter-Enlightenment" was slow to enter general usage. It was first mentioned briefly in English in William Barrett 's 1949 article "Art, Aristocracy and Reason" in Partisan Review . He used the term again in his 1958 book on existentialism, Irrational Man; however, his comment on Enlightenment criticism
7672-428: The Enlightenment might not actually be a creation of its opponents, but the other way round. The fact that the term "Enlightenment" was first used in 1894 in English to refer to a historical period supports the argument that it was a late construction projected back onto the 18th century. By the mid-1790s, the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution fueled a major reaction against the Enlightenment. Many leaders of
7809-462: The Enlightenment since the philosophes and Aufklärer were generally deists , opposed to revealed religion . Some historians, such as Hamann , nevertheless contend that this view of the Enlightenment as an age hostile to religion is common ground between these Romantic writers and many of their conservative Counter-Revolutionary predecessors. However, not many have commented on the Enlightenment, except for Chateaubriand, Novalis, and Coleridge, since
7946-447: The Enlightenment, and few explicit defenders. Friedrich Nietzsche is a notable and highly influential exception. After an initial defence of the Enlightenment in his so-called "middle period" (late 1870s to early 1880s), Nietzsche turned vehemently against it. After World War II , the Enlightenment re-emerged as a key organizing concept in social and political thought and the history of ideas. The Counter-Enlightenment literature blaming
8083-534: The Enlightenment. According to him, "the revolutionary storm is an overwhelming force of nature unleashed on Europe by God that mocked human pretensions." In the 1770s, the " Sturm und Drang " movement started in Germany. It questioned some key assumptions and implications of the Aufklärung and the term " Romanticism " was first coined. Many early Romantic writers such as Chateaubriand , Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge inherited
8220-548: The French retreat from Moscow in 1812, fantasies of heroism and adventure had little appeal for him, and like Goya he is often seen as a forerunner of Realism. His most important works are Le Rouge et le Noir ( The Red and the Black , 1830) and La Chartreuse de Parme ( The Charterhouse of Parma , 1839). Romanticism in Poland is often taken to begin with the publication of Adam Mickiewicz 's first poems in 1822, and end with
8357-451: The French Revolution and their supporters made Voltaire and Rousseau , as well as Marquis de Condorcet 's ideas of reason, progress , anti-clericalism, and emancipation, central themes to their movement. It led to an unavoidable backlash to the Enlightenment as there were people opposed to the revolution. Many counter-revolutionary writers, such as Edmund Burke , Joseph de Maistre and Augustin Barruel , asserted an intrinsic link between
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#17327646692718494-616: The Last Minstrel in 1805, followed by the full epic poem Marmion in 1808. Both were set in the distant Scottish past, already evoked in Ossian ; Romanticism and Scotland were to have a long and fruitful partnership. Byron had equal success with the first part of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage in 1812, followed by four "Turkish tales", all in the form of long poems, starting with The Giaour in 1813, drawing from his Grand Tour , which had reached Ottoman Europe, and orientalizing
8631-643: The New Religion of Sincerity", in the American Political Science Review (Vol. 90, No. 2), Arthur M. Melzer corroborates Everdell's view in placing the origin of the Counter-Enlightenment in the religious writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau , further showing Rousseau as the man who fired the first shot in the war between the Enlightenment and its opponents. Graeme Garrard follows Melzer in his "Rousseau's Counter-Enlightenment" (2003). This contradicts Berlin's depiction of Rousseau as
8768-436: The Romantic interest in folk literature, but neither had a fully Romantic approach to life or their work. Though they have modern critical champions such as György Lukács , Scott's novels are today more likely to be experienced in the form of the many operas that composers continued to base on them over the following decades, such as Donizetti 's Lucia di Lammermoor and Vincenzo Bellini 's I puritani (both 1835). Byron
8905-472: The Romantic period is said to be over by about 1850, or earlier. The early period of the Romantic era was a time of war, with the French Revolution (1789–1799) followed by the Napoleonic Wars until 1815. These wars, along with the political and social turmoil that went along with them, served as the background for Romanticism. The key generation of French Romantics born between 1795 and 1805 had, in
9042-498: The Romanticist movement and its ideals. The events and ideologies of the French Revolution were also direct influences on the movement; many early Romantics throughout Europe sympathized with the ideals and achievements of French revolutionaries. A confluence of circumstances led to Romanticism's decline in the mid-19th century, including (but not limited to) the rise of Realism and Naturalism , Charles Darwin 's publishing of
9179-530: The Romantics. However, Romanticism has had a lasting impact on Western civilization, and many works of art, music, and literature that embody the Romantic ideals have been made after the end of the Romantic Era. The movement's advocacy for nature appreciation is cited as an influence for current nature conservation efforts. The majority of film scores from the Golden Age of Hollywood were written in
9316-658: The act of "romanticizing" something. For most of the Western world, Romanticism was at its peak from approximately 1800 to 1850. The first Romantic ideas arose from an earlier German Counter-Enlightenment movement called Sturm und Drang (German: "Storm and Stress"). This movement directly criticized the Enlightenment's position that humans can fully comprehend the world through rationality alone, suggesting that intuition and emotion are key components of insight and understanding. Published in 1774, " The Sorrows of Young Werther " by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe began to shape
9453-710: The ancient bard Ossian , he published translations that acquired international popularity, being proclaimed as a Celtic equivalent of the Classical epics . Fingal , written in 1762, was speedily translated into many European languages, and its appreciation of natural beauty and treatment of the ancient legend has been credited more than any single work with bringing about the Romantic movement in European, and especially in German literature, through its influence on Johann Gottfried von Herder and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe . It
9590-497: The ancients) that appeals to phronēsis (φρόνησις or practical wisdom ) must also be made, and likewise appeals to the various components of persuasion that comprise rhetoric. Vico would reproduce this argument consistently throughout his works, and would use it as a central tenet of the Scienza Nuova . Vico is best known for his verum factum principle, first formulated in 1710 as part of his De antiquissima Italorum sapientia, ex linguae latinae originibus eruenda (1710) ("Of
9727-448: The beginning of a tradition of resistance to Enlightenment rationalism—a "Counter-Enlightenment"— to be associated most closely with German Romanticism . Another early definition comes from Charles Baudelaire : "Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in the way of feeling." The end of the Romantic era is marked in some areas by a new style of Realism , which affected literature, especially
9864-421: The best known works, which became a paradigm of the French Romantic movement. The preface to his unperformed play Cromwell gives an important manifesto of French Romanticism, stating that "there are no rules, or models". The career of Prosper Mérimée followed a similar pattern; he is now best known as the originator of the story of Carmen , with his novella published 1845. Alfred de Vigny remains best known as
10001-434: The body of his work, Vico's rhetoric begins from a central argument ( medius terminus ), which is to be clarified by following the order of things as they arise in our experience. Probability and circumstance retain their proportionate importance, and discovery —reliant upon topics ( loci )—supersedes axioms derived through reflective, abstract thought. In the tradition of classical Roman rhetoric, Vico sets out to educate
10138-526: The boy was seven years old. Giovan Battista's formal education was at the University of Naples from which he graduated in 1694, as Doctor of Civil and Canon Law. In 1686, after surviving a bout of typhus , he accepted a job as a tutor, in Vatolla, south of Salerno , which became a nine-year professional engagement that lasted till 1695. Four years later, in 1699, Vico married Teresa Caterina Destito,
10275-478: The brothers, Jacob , published in 1835 Deutsche Mythologie , a long academic work on Germanic mythology. Another strain is exemplified by Schiller's highly emotional language and the depiction of physical violence in his play The Robbers of 1781. In English literature , the key figures of the Romantic movement are considered to be the group of poets including William Wordsworth , Samuel Taylor Coleridge , John Keats , Lord Byron , Percy Bysshe Shelley and
10412-418: The chief qualities of a poet. The Scottish poet James Macpherson influenced the early development of Romanticism with the international success of his Ossian cycle of poems published in 1762, inspiring both Goethe and the young Walter Scott . Thomas Chatterton is generally considered the first Romantic poet in English. Both Chatterton and Macpherson's work involved elements of fraud, as what they claimed
10549-482: The consequent collapse of society. In that vein, Vico proposed a social need for religion, for a supernatural divine providence to keep order in human society. In Orientalism (1978), Edward Said acknowledged his scholar's debt to Vico, whose "ideas anticipate and later infiltrate the line of German thinkers I am about to cite. They belong to the era of Herder and Wolff , later to be followed by Goethe , Humboldt , Dilthey , Nietzsche , Gadamer , and finally
10686-707: The crushing of the January Uprising of 1863 against the Russians. It was strongly marked by interest in Polish history. Polish Romanticism revived the old "Sarmatism" traditions of the szlachta or Polish nobility. Old traditions and customs were revived and portrayed in a positive light in the Polish messianic movement and in works of great Polish poets such as Adam Mickiewicz ( Pan Tadeusz ), Juliusz Słowacki and Zygmunt Krasiński . This close connection between Polish Romanticism and Polish history became one of
10823-541: The decades prior to 1789. Cardiff University professor Graeme Garrard claims that historian William R. Everdell was the first to situate Rousseau as the "founder of the Counter-Enlightenment" in his 1971 dissertation and in his 1987 book, Christian Apologetics in France, 1730–1790: The Roots of Romantic Religion . In his 1996 article, "the Origin of the Counter-Enlightenment: Rousseau and
10960-437: The defining qualities of the literature of Polish Romanticism period, differentiating it from that of other countries. They had not suffered the loss of national statehood as was the case with Poland. Influenced by the general spirit and main ideas of European Romanticism, the literature of Polish Romanticism is unique, as many scholars have pointed out, in having developed largely outside of Poland and in its emphatic focus upon
11097-524: The difficulty of defining Romanticism in his seminal article "On the Discrimination of Romanticisms" in his Essays in the History of Ideas (1948); some scholars see Romanticism as essentially continuous with the present, some like Robert Hughes see in it the inaugural moment of modernity , while writers of the 19th Century such as Chateaubriand , Novalis and Samuel Taylor Coleridge saw it as
11234-664: The early nineteenth century, caused Edinburgh to emerge as the cultural capital of Britain and become central to a wider formation of a "British Isles nationalism". Scottish "national drama" emerged in the early 1800s, as plays with specifically Scottish themes began to dominate the Scottish stage. Theatres had been discouraged by the Church of Scotland and fears of Jacobite assemblies. In the later eighteenth century, many plays were written for and performed by small amateur companies and were not published and so most have been lost. Towards
11371-444: The end of the century there were " closet dramas ", primarily designed to be read, rather than performed, including work by Scott, Hogg, Galt and Joanna Baillie (1762–1851), often influenced by the ballad tradition and Gothic Romanticism. Romanticism was relatively late in developing in French literature , more so than in the visual arts. The 18th-century precursor to Romanticism, the cult of sensibility, had become associated with
11508-414: The exotic and historical settings pioneered by the Romantics, but experimentation with form and technique was generally reduced, often replaced with meticulous technique, as in the poems of Tennyson or many paintings. If not realist, late 19th-century art was often extremely detailed, and pride was taken in adding authentic details in a way that earlier Romantics did not trouble with. Many Romantic ideas about
11645-620: The fields of intellectual history and literary history throughout the 20th century, without any great measure of consensus emerging. That it was part of the Counter-Enlightenment , a reaction against the Age of Enlightenment , is generally accepted in current scholarship. Its relationship to the French Revolution , which began in 1789 in the very early stages of the period, is clearly important, but highly variable depending on geography and individual reactions. Most Romantics can be said to be broadly progressive in their views, but
11782-499: The first historical novel. It launched a highly successful career, with other historical novels such as Rob Roy (1817), The Heart of Midlothian (1818) and Ivanhoe (1820). Scott probably did more than any other figure to define and popularise Scottish cultural identity in the nineteenth century. Other major literary figures connected with Romanticism include the poets and novelists James Hogg (1770–1835), Allan Cunningham (1784–1842) and John Galt (1779–1839). Scotland
11919-409: The flamboyant Théophile Gautier , whose prolific output in various forms continued until his death in 1872. Stendhal is today probably the most highly regarded French novelist of the period, but he stands in a complex relation with Romanticism, and is notable for his penetrating psychological insight into his characters and his realism, qualities rarely prominent in Romantic fiction. As a survivor of
12056-471: The following years. The historian James Schmidt questioned the idea of "Enlightenment" and therefore of the existence of a movement opposing it. As the conception of "Enlightenment" has become more complex and difficult to maintain, so has the idea of the "Counter-Enlightenment". Advances in Enlightenment scholarship in the last quarter-century have challenged the stereotypical view of the 18th century as an " Age of Reason ", leading Schmidt to speculate on whether
12193-499: The formal aspects of the canon of rhetoric, including the arrangement and the delivery of an argument. Yet he chose to emphasize the Aristotelian connection of rhetoric with logic and dialectic , thereby placing ends (rhetoric) at their center. Vico's objection to modern rhetoric is that it is disconnected from common sense ( sensus communis ), defined as the "worldly sense" that is common to all men. In lectures and throughout
12330-543: The francophile Frederick II of Prussia , then by the armies of Revolutionary France and finally by Napoleon , was crucial to the shift of consciousness that occurred in Europe at this time, leading eventually to Romanticism . The consequence of this revolt against the Enlightenment was pluralism . The opponents to the Enlightenment played a more crucial role than its proponents, some of whom were monists , whose political, intellectual and ideological offspring have been terreur and totalitarianism . In his book Enemies of
12467-547: The great twentieth century Romance philologists Erich Auerbach , Leo Spitzer , and Ernst Robert Curtius ." As a humanist and early philologist, Vico represented "a different, alternative model that has been extremely important to me in my work", which differed from mainstream Western prejudice against the Orient and the dominating "standardization" that came with modernity and culminated in National Socialism . That
12604-476: The highest importance on the freedom of the artists to authentically express their sentiments and ideas. Romantics like the German painter Caspar David Friedrich believed that an artist's emotions should dictate their formal approach; Friedrich went as far as declaring that "the artist's feeling is his law". The Romantic poet William Wordsworth , thinking along similar lines, wrote that poetry should begin with "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings", which
12741-576: The historical cycles by which societies rise and fall. Born to a bookseller in Naples , Italy, Giovan Battista Vico attended several schools, but ill health and dissatisfaction with the scholasticism of the Jesuits led to his being educated at home by tutors. Evidence from his autobiographical work indicates that Vico likely was an autodidact educated under paternal influence, during a three-year absence from school, consequence of an accidental fall when
12878-454: The imagination of born artists followed instinctively when these individuals were, so to speak, "left alone" during the creative process. These "natural laws" could support a wide range of different formal approaches: as many, perhaps, as there were individuals making personally meaningful works of art. Many Romantics believed that works of artistic genius were created " ex nihilo ", "from nothing", without recourse to existing models. This idea
13015-451: The interdependence of human history and culture facilitates the scholars' task to "take seriously Vico's great observation that men make their own history, that what they can know is what they have made, and extend it to geography. As geographical and cultural entities—to say nothing of historical entities—such locales, regions, and geographical sectors as 'Orient' and 'Occident' are man-made." Romanticism Romanticism (also known as
13152-495: The late 1820s. Cliques of pro- and anti-Romantics developed, and productions were often accompanied by raucous vocalizing by the two sides, including the shouted assertion by one theatregoer in 1822 that "Shakespeare, c'est l'aide-de-camp de Wellington" ("Shakespeare is Wellington 's aide-de-camp "). Alexandre Dumas began as a dramatist, with a series of successes beginning with Henri III et sa cour (1829) before turning to novels that were mostly historical adventures somewhat in
13289-521: The lives of the poor in his native Lake District , or his feelings about nature—which he more fully developed in his long poem The Prelude , never published in his lifetime. The longest poem in the volume was Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner , which showed the Gothic side of English Romanticism, and the exotic settings that many works featured. In the period when they were writing,
13426-409: The lush orchestral Romantic style, and this genre of orchestral cinematic music is still often seen in films of the 21st century. The philosophical underpinnings of the movement have influenced modern political theory, both among liberals and conservatives . Romanticism was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism as well as the glorification of the past and nature, preferring
13563-444: The manner of Scott, most famously The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo , both of 1844. Victor Hugo published as a poet in the 1820s before achieving success on the stage with Hernani —a historical drama in a quasi-Shakespearean style that had famously riotous performances on its first run in 1830. Like Dumas, Hugo is best known for his novels, and was already writing The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831), one of
13700-408: The means but the goals that they pursue; these goals represent the self-expression of the artist's own unique, inner vision, to set aside which in response to the demands of some "external" voice—church, state, public opinion, family friends, arbiters of taste—is an act of betrayal of what alone justifies their existence for those who are in any sense creative. Arthur Lovejoy attempted to demonstrate
13837-401: The medieval over the classical. Romanticism was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution , and the prevailing ideology of the Age of Enlightenment , especially the scientific rationalization of Nature. The movement's ideals were embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature; it also had a major impact on historiography , education, chess , social sciences , and
13974-433: The melting away of the very notion of objective truth", and hence not only to nationalism, but also fascism and totalitarianism , with a gradual recovery coming only after World War II. For the Romantics, Berlin says, in the realm of ethics, politics, aesthetics it was the authenticity and sincerity of the pursuit of inner goals that mattered; this applied equally to individuals and groups—states, nations, movements. This
14111-526: The mid-century the undoubtedly Romantic novels of the Yorkshire -based Brontë family appeared, most notably Charlotte 's Jane Eyre and Emily 's Wuthering Heights , both published in 1847, which also introduced more Gothic themes. While these two novels were written and published after the Romantic period is said to have ended, their novels were heavily influenced by Romantic literature they had read as children. Byron, Keats, and Shelley all wrote for
14248-484: The middle of the 18th century to the 20th century among critical theorists, postmodernists and feminists. The Enlightenment has opponents on all points of its ideological compass, from the far left to the far right, and all points in between. Each of the Enlightenment's challengers depicted it as they saw it or wanted others to see it, resulting in a vast range of portraits, many of which are not only different but incompatible. The idea of Counter-Enlightenment has evolved in
14385-556: The mind perceives itself, it does not make itself." This criterion for truth would later shape the history of civilization in Vico's opus, the Scienza Nuova ( The New Science , 1725), because he would argue that civil life—like mathematics —is wholly constructed. The New Science (1725, Scienza Nuova ) is Vico's major work. It has been highly influential in the philosophy of history, and for historicists such as Isaiah Berlin and Hayden White. Samuel Beckett 's first published work, in
14522-514: The most ancient wisdom of the Italians, unearthed from the origins of the Latin language"). The principle states that truth is verified through creation or invention and not, as per Descartes , through observation: "The criterion and rule of the true is to have made it. Accordingly, our clear and distinct idea of the mind cannot be a criterion of the mind itself, still less of other truths. For while
14659-607: The movement. Though his novels celebrated Scottish identity and history, Scott was politically a firm Unionist, but admitted to Jacobite sympathies. Several Romantics spent much time abroad, and a famous stay on Lake Geneva with Byron and Shelley in 1816 produced the hugely influential novel Frankenstein by Shelley's wife-to-be Mary Shelley and the novella The Vampyre by Byron's doctor John William Polidori . The lyrics of Robert Burns in Scotland, and Thomas Moore from Ireland, reflected in different ways their countries and
14796-436: The much older William Blake , followed later by the isolated figure of John Clare ; also such novelists as Walter Scott from Scotland and Mary Shelley , and the essayists William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb . The publication in 1798 of Lyrical Ballads , with many of the finest poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge, is often held to mark the start of the movement. The majority of the poems were by Wordsworth, and many dealt with
14933-491: The natural sciences abounded as the result of Cartesianism. Widely disseminated by the Port Royal Logic of Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole , Descartes's method was rooted in verification: the only path to truth, and thus knowledge, was through axioms derived from observation. Descartes's insistence that the "sure and indubitable" (or, "clear and distinct") should form the basis of reasoning had an obvious impact on
15070-557: The nature and purpose of art, above all the pre-eminent importance of originality, remained important for later generations, and often underlie modern views, despite opposition from theorists. In literature, Romanticism found recurrent themes in the evocation or criticism of the past, the cult of " sensibility " with its emphasis on women and children, the isolation of the artist or narrator, and respect for nature. Furthermore, several romantic authors, such as Edgar Allan Poe , Charles Maturin and Nathaniel Hawthorne , based their writings on
15207-414: The novel and drama, painting, and even music, through Verismo opera. This movement was led by France, with Balzac and Flaubert in literature and Courbet in painting; Stendhal and Goya were important precursors of Realism in their respective media. However, Romantic styles, now often representing the established and safe style against which Realists rebelled, continued to flourish in many fields for
15344-459: The other hand, Johann Georg Hamann and his fellow philosophers believe that a more organic conception of social and political life, a more vitalistic view of nature, and an appreciation for beauty and the spiritual life of man have been neglected by the eighteenth century. Isaiah Berlin established this term's place in the history of ideas . He used it to refer to a movement that arose primarily in late 18th- and early 19th-century Germany against
15481-422: The peak Romantic period, other than Walter Scott, was Jane Austen , whose essentially conservative world-view had little in common with her Romantic contemporaries, retaining a strong belief in decorum and social rules, though critics such as Claudia L. Johnson have detected tremors under the surface of many works, such as Northanger Abbey (1817), Mansfield Park (1814) and Persuasion (1817). But around
15618-417: The poet then "recollect[s] in tranquility", enabling the poet to find a suitably unique form for representing such feelings. The Romantics never doubted that emotionally motivated art would find suitable, harmonious modes for expressing its vital content—if, that is, the artist steered clear of moribund conventions and distracting precedents. Samuel Taylor Coleridge and others thought there were natural laws
15755-402: The prevailing views of logic and discourse. Studies in rhetoric—indeed all studies concerned with civic discourse and the realm of probable truths—met with increasing disdain. Vico's humanism and professional concerns prompted an obvious response that he would develop throughout the course of his writings: the realms of verifiable truth and human concern share only a slight overlap, yet reasoning
15892-451: The reader to identify the protagonists with the poets themselves." This quality in Romantic literature, in turn, influenced the approach and reception of works in other media; it has seeped into everything from critical evaluations of individual style in painting, fashion, and music, to the auteur movement in modern filmmaking. The group of words with the root "Roman" in the various European languages, such as "romance" and "Romanesque", has
16029-399: The relationship between people and Nature. Romantics generally believed a close connection with Nature was beneficial for human beings, especially for individuals who broke off from society in order to encounter the natural world by themselves. Romantic literature was frequently written in a distinctive, personal "voice". As critic M. H. Abrams has observed, "much of romantic poetry invited
16166-484: The rest of the century and beyond. In music such works from after about 1850 are referred to by some writers as "Late Romantic" and by others as "Neoromantic" or "Postromantic", but other fields do not usually use these terms; in English literature and painting the convenient term "Victorian" avoids having to characterise the period further. In northern Europe, the Early Romantic visionary optimism and belief that
16303-456: The revolution. He worked as an editor for the anti- philosophes literary journal, L'Année Littéraire . Barruel argues in his Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism (1797) that the Revolution was the consequence of a conspiracy of philosophes and freemasons. In Considerations on France (1797), Joseph de Maistre interprets the Revolution as divine punishment for the sins of
16440-401: The role of historical actors, and an historical method of narrative. Marx and Vico saw social-class warfare as the means by which men achieve the end of equal rights ; Vico called that time the "Age of Men". Marx concluded that such a state of affairs is the optimal end of social change in a society, but Vico thought that such complete equality of rights would lead to socio-political chaos and
16577-609: The selection of critical essays on James Joyce entitled Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress , is "Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce". In it, Beckett sees a profound influence of Vico's philosophy and poetics—as well the cyclical form of the Scienza Nuova —on the avant-garde compositions of Joyce, and especially the titular Work in Progress, viz. Finnegans Wake . In Knowledge and Social Structure (1974), Peter Hamilton identified Vico as
16714-528: The stage, but with little success in England, with Shelley's The Cenci perhaps the best work produced, though that was not played in a public theatre in England until a century after his death. Byron's plays, along with dramatizations of his poems and Scott's novels, were much more popular on the Continent, and especially in France, and through these versions several were turned into operas, many still performed today. If contemporary poets had little success on
16851-563: The stage, the period was a legendary one for performances of Shakespeare , and went some way to restoring his original texts and removing the Augustan "improvements" to them. The greatest actor of the period, Edmund Kean , restored the tragic ending to King Lear ; Coleridge said that "Seeing him act was like reading Shakespeare by flashes of lightning." Although after union with England in 1707 Scotland increasingly adopted English language and wider cultural norms, its literature developed
16988-488: The term itself did not exist at the time and most of their contemporaries ignored it. The historian Jacques Barzun argues that Romanticism has its roots in the Enlightenment. It was not anti-rational, but rather balanced rationality against the competing claims of intuition and the sense of justice. This view is expressed in Goya's Sleep of Reason , in which the nightmarish owl offers the dozing social critic of Los Caprichos
17125-424: The themes of the Gothic novel in verse. These featured different variations of the " Byronic hero ", and his own life contributed a further version. Scott meanwhile was effectively inventing the historical novel , beginning in 1814 with Waverley , set in the 1745 Jacobite rising , which was a highly profitable success, followed by over 20 further Waverley Novels over the next 17 years, with settings going back to
17262-424: The tradition of Socrates and Cicero , Vico's true orator will be midwife to the birth of "the true" (as an idea) from "the certain", the ignorance in the mind of the student. Rediscovery of "the most ancient wisdom" of the senses, a wisdom that is humana stultitia ("human foolishness"), Vico's emphases on the importance of civic life and of professional obligations are in the humanist tradition. He would call for
17399-459: The values of their contemporary industrial society, which they considered alienating for its economic materialism and environmental degradation . The movement's illustration of the Middle Ages was a central theme in debates, with allegations that Romanticist portrayals often overlooked the downsides of medieval life. The consensus is that Romanticism peaked from 1800 until 1850. However,
17536-422: The words of one of their number, Alfred de Vigny , been "conceived between battles, attended school to the rolling of drums". According to Jacques Barzun , there were three generations of Romantic artists. The first emerged in the 1790s and 1800s, the second in the 1820s, and the third later in the century. The more precise characterization and specific definition of Romanticism has been the subject of debate in
17673-490: The world was in the process of great change and improvement had largely vanished, and some art became more conventionally political and polemical as its creators engaged polemically with the world as it was. Elsewhere, including in very different ways the United States and Russia, feelings that great change was underway or just about to come were still possible. Displays of intense emotion in art remained prominent, as did
17810-555: Was a multitude of small separate states, and Goethe's works would have a seminal influence in developing a unifying sense of nationalism . Another philosophic influence came from the German idealism of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Schelling , making Jena (where Fichte lived, as well as Schelling, Hegel , Schiller and the brothers Schlegel ) a centre for early German Romanticism (see Jena Romanticism ). Important writers were Ludwig Tieck , Novalis , Heinrich von Kleist and Friedrich Hölderlin . Heidelberg later became
17947-460: Was also popularised in France by figures that included Napoleon . Eventually it became clear that the poems were not direct translations from Scottish Gaelic , but flowery adaptations made to suit the aesthetic expectations of his audience. Robert Burns (1759–96) and Walter Scott (1771–1832) were highly influenced by the Ossian cycle. Burns, an Ayrshire poet and lyricist, is widely regarded as
18084-437: Was also the location of two of the most important literary magazines of the era, The Edinburgh Review (founded in 1802) and Blackwood's Magazine (founded in 1817), which had a major impact on the development of British literature and drama in the era of Romanticism. Ian Duncan and Alex Benchimol suggest that publications like the novels of Scott and these magazines were part of a highly dynamic Scottish Romanticism that by
18221-527: Was an Italian philosopher , rhetorician , historian , and jurist during the Italian Enlightenment . He criticized the expansion and development of modern rationalism , finding Cartesian analysis and other types of reductionism impractical to human life, and he was an apologist for classical antiquity and the Renaissance humanities , in addition to being the first expositor of the fundamentals of social science and of semiotics . He
18358-455: Was darker in its motifs and has gothic elements. The significance to Romanticism of childhood innocence, the importance of imagination, and racial theories all combined to give an unprecedented importance to folk literature , non-classical mythology and children's literature , above all in Germany. Brentano and von Arnim were significant literary figures who together published Des Knaben Wunderhorn ("The Boy's Magic Horn" or cornucopia ),
18495-474: Was earlier literature that they had discovered or compiled was, in fact, entirely their own work. The Gothic novel , beginning with Horace Walpole 's The Castle of Otranto (1764), was an important precursor of one strain of Romanticism, with a delight in horror and threat, and exotic picturesque settings, matched in Walpole's case by his role in the early revival of Gothic architecture . Tristram Shandy ,
18632-442: Was not an historicist , contemporary interest in Vico usually has been motivated by historicists, such as Isaiah Berlin , a philosopher and historian of ideas , Edward Said , a literary critic , and Hayden White , a metahistorian. Vico's intellectual magnum opus is the book Scienza Nuova or New Science (1725), which attempts a systematic organization of the humanities as a single science that recorded and explained
18769-423: Was very limited. In Germany, the expression "Gegen-Aufklärung" has a longer history. It was probably coined by Friedrich Nietzsche in "Nachgelassene Fragmente" in 1877. Lewis White Beck used this term in his Early German Philosophy (1969), a book about Counter-Enlightenment in Germany. Beck claims that there is a counter-movement arising in Germany in reaction to Frederick II 's secular authoritarian state. On
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