Blackwell Reference Online

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In 1798, among the Schlegel circle in Jena, the word “romantic” (German romantisch) was definitively attached to a kind of literature and distinguished from another kind, “classic” (klassisch); it was soon attached to the Schlegel circle itself as a “school” of literature, and the rest is history. But the word already had behind it a good deal of history, which made it the almost inevitable choice.Nonetheless the word came down to the Schlegels and their friends through some interesting accidents. It is one of the oddities of etymology that “romantic” ultimately derives from Latin Roma, the city of Rome, for surely the ancient Romans, as we usually think of them, were the least romantic of peoples. It is then a pleasant irony of cultural history that one of the distinctive themes of writers (and painters) whom we now call Romantic was the ruins of Rome – as in Chateaubriand's René (1802), Wilhelm Schlegel's “Rom: Elegie” (1805), Staël's Corinne (1807), Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto 4 (1812), Lamartine's “La Liberté ou une nuit à Rome” (1822), and so on – while a large share of the Italian tourism industry today depends on the image of Rome as The Romantic City. Indeed the romantic ruins of ancient Rome could be taken as an emblem of the meaning and history of the word “romantic” itself.The odd turn in its etymology took place in the Middle Ages. From the adjective Romanus ... log in or subscribe to read full text