Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The term ‘Romanticism’ is usually used to describe a literary and philosophical movement that occurred in the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries. The term is often used to distinguish the thought and literature of the period from that of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, or of the ‘Enlightenment’, and the expressions ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘Romanticism’ are frequently used to suggest contrasting ways of looking at the world. Simply put, such a contrast might be expressed in terms of binary oppositions, such as reason versus emotion; objectivity versus subjectivity; spontaneity versus control; limitation versus aspiration; empiricism versus transcendentalism; society versus the individual; public versus private; order versus rebellion; the cosmopolitan versus the national, and so on. Recent writing, however, has tended to problematize this opposition, arguing that there is not so clean a break between the ideas of the eighteenth century and those of the Age of Romanticism as might at first be apparent. Nevertheless, it can be argued that the canonical Romantic poets were both building upon and reacting against the thought of their predecessors, sometimes breaking with the major trends (as in the case of Coleridge's rejection of Enlightenment empiricism) or alternatively pushing that body of thought into more extreme positions than were usual in the Enlightenment ... log in or subscribe to read full text