Blackwell Reference Online

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This chapter is an attempt to propose a new concept of Romanticism. Far from being consensual this new interpretation goes against the grain of much Romanticism scholarship, which is based on the apparently obvious assumption that we are dealing with a literary movement of the early nineteenth century. In our view this assumption is doubly wrong: Romanticism is much more than a literary phenomenon – although of course it has an important literary component – and it did not come to an end either in 1830 or in 1848. For us Romanticism, as a cultural protest against modern industrial/capitalist civilization, is one of the main forms of modern culture, and it extends from Rousseau – to mention the name of a founding father – to the present, that is, from the second half of the eighteenth to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Our thesis is based on a Marxist approach to cultural phenomena, albeit a heterodox one, which attempts to link literature, art, religion, and political ideas to social and historical contexts. The dominant trend in Romanticism scholarship perceives it as composed only of literary and aesthetic phenomena, defined by some common traits. This is the approach adopted by the three most famous North American specialists in the history of Romanticism: M. H. Abrams, René Wellek, and Morse Peckham. For Abrams (1973) , their diversity notwithstanding, the Romantics ... log in or subscribe to read full text