Romanticism Research Paper

Romanticism was an art movement that started around 1798, stemming from the publication of musical compositions. Romanticism best existed as a rejection of Classicism, a predecessor in art movements that had focused on the idealization and order of the human species. The movement in itself was the exploration of individuality and a rebuttal against Enlightenment ideas. While the movements before Romanticism were more focused on creating the perfect individuals and exploring the more concrete aspects of the world, Romanticists were encouraged to explore the emotion thought process of individual humans and of their own selves. With the realization of each individual, Romanticism broke away from the concept of only rationality present in artwork;

The art movement prevailed during and before these revolts as people started to become more self-serving and that injustices towards them could be defeated. With the American Revolution and the French Revolution producing further ideas and promoting Romanticism, Romanticism became an art movement that stretched far across Europe. Not only had Romanticism carried an air of new art styles, but it centered around more than art. While other movements in the past were more interested in how the world existed, Romanticism's focus on the imagination and the grand world for the individual became a popular method of thought throughout the western world. Imagination became the most significant portion of the human soul, according to Romanticists, from which without there would be nothing to the human body but a soulless shell. Rather than reason, revoking imagination was revoking the rights of the people as they left them without their own wills and their own powers throughout the government and their daily lives. The Revolution's spirit is most clearly seen here in the movement. As more and more people became aware that having their rights revoked from them, no matter how reasonable they were played out to be, the more they wanted to be left to their own imaginations to create and establish order. Humans did not exist merely to exist; rather, humans were there to create in the

With the encouragement of the Romanticism movement to elaborate on human nature instead of mere logic or nonfiction works, books such as Frankenstein by Mary Shelley were published. Romanticism explored elements untouched upon before. Some of the most popular Romantic literature came from Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Wordsworth, Walt Whitman, Lord Byron, and Mary Shelley. Lyrical Ballads, published by Wordsworth and Coleridge, was considered to be the start of the Romantic period. Romanticist works focused on the delicate elaboration of the environment and how each individual person felt in their writing, such as in The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Hawthorne explored a world considered undignified and wrong at the time with Hester Prynne, someone accused of adultery. His writing most clearly brings out the ideas of the Romanticist period with long descriptions and less dialogue. One chapter has no dialogue at all, and only a description of what has been happening through the novel. Romanticist writers tended to be progressive, such as Hawthorne, and provided a new way to see the world and ideas that had been considered immoral to