Turning Away from the Realistic: the Romantic Era

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Romanticism or the Romantic Era is a complex artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the eighteenth century in Germany and England. Romanticism is like a ferry that takes people’s minds to different lands. As Romanticism occurred during a time of strife, partially during the Black Plague, it was a get-away cruise to fantasy and the unrealistic. It became a very popular movement as by the nineteenth century, it had swept throughout Europe and was a voice of revolution and clashed with the rationalistic ideas of the Enlightenment from the seventeenth century. This literary movement had many unique aspects such as folklore and popular art, nature, and individualism and the imagination that shaped and influenced the ideas of the modern world. Several of the earliest stirrings of the Romantic movement are traced back to the mid-eighteenth-century interest in folklore, which arose in Germany--with Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm collecting popular fairy tales and other scholars like Johann Gottfried von Herder studying folk songs--and in England with Joseph Addison and Richard Steele treating old ballads as if they were high poetry. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, people of the early seventeenth century turned “a new attention to national origins, as attested by the collection and imitation of native folklore, folk ballads and poetry, folk dance and music.” These activities set the tone and mood for one aspect of Romanticism: the belief that works of the uncultivated imagination could surpass those of educated court poets and composers who had previously dominated the attentions of scholars and connoisseurs. While during much of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, learned allusions, complexity and grandiosity were prized, the new romantic taste favored simplicity and naturalness. This new penchant was thought to flow most
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