Romanticism has very little to do with things popularly thought of as
"romantic," although love may occasionally be the subject of Romantic
art. Rather, it is an international artistic and philosophical
movement that redefined the fundamental ways in which people in
Western cultures thought about themselves and about their world.
http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/rom.html
Romanticism is an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that
originated around the middle of the 18th century in Western Europe,
during the Industrial Revolution. It was partly a revolt against
aristocratic, social, and political norms of the Enlightenment period
and a reaction against the scientific rationalization of nature in art
and literature. It stressed strong emotion as a source of aesthetic
experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation,
horror, and the awe experienced in confronting the sublimity of
untamed nature. It elevated folk art, nature and custom, as well as
arguing for an epistemology based on nature, which included human
activity conditioned by nature in the form of language, custom and
usage. It was influenced by ideas of the Enlightenment and elevated
medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived to be from the
medieval period.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism
Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm,
harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified
Classicism in general and late 18th-century Neoclassicism in
particular. It was also to some extent a reaction against the
Enlightenment and against 18th-century rationalism and physical
materialism in general. Romanticism emphasized the individual, the
subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the
spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.
http://www.britannica.com/eb/article-9083836/Romanticism
The romantic period emphasised the self, creativity, imagination and
the value of art. This is in contrast to the Enlightenment emphasis on
Rationalism and Empiricism.
It roots can be found in the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and
Immanuel Kant. Philosophers and writers associated with the Romantic
movement include Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), Freidrich
Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854), and George Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel (1770-1831) in Germany; Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) and
William Wordsworth (1770-1850) in Britain.
Philosophically romanticism represents a shift from the objective to
the subjective: Science claims to describe the objective world, the
world understood from no particular viewpoint. Imagine three people
looking at a landscape, one is a farmer, another a property developer
and the third an artist. The farmer would see the potential for
raising crops and livestock, the property developer the chance to
build houses and the artist at the shades and subtleties of colour and
form. None of these individuals is seeing the landscape objectively;
they are seeing it from a particular or subjective viewpoint.
The move from the objective to the subjective is a result of Kant's
idea that human beings do not see the world directly, but through a
number of categories. We do not directly see "things-in-themselves";
we only understand the world through our human point of view. If we
agree with Kant that we can never know things-in-themselves, we may as
well discard them. This leads to Idealism; the belief that what we
call the "external world" is somehow created by our minds.
The Enlightenment's emphasis on the empirical deterministic universe
left little room for the freedom and creativity of the human spirit.
The romantic emphasis on art and imagination is a direct critical
reaction to the mechanical view of some Enlightenment figures.
The romantic emphasis on the individual was reflected in ideas of self-
realisation and nature. Wordsworth thought that the individual could
directly understand nature without the need for society and social
artifice, salvation is achieved by the solitary individual rather than
through political movements.
http://www.philosopher.org.uk/rom.htm
http://www.wsu.edu/~brians/hum_303/romanticism.html
http://youtube.com/watch?v=VvYXlK1rPRk
