Romanticism

David Blayney Brown​

Romanticism was a way of feeling rather than a style in art. In the period c.1775-1830 – against the background of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars – European artists, poets and composers initiated their own rebellion against the dominant political, religious and social ethos of the day. Their quest was for personal expression and individual liberation and, in the process, the Romantics transformed the idea of art, seeing it as an instrument of social and psychological change.

Larry H. Peer​

This study presents a new approach to the theory of Romanticism. Peer proceeds though key Romantic documents about form and structure, while displacing and condensing modern scholarly assumptions that interrupt modern theoretical protocol. A line of development is suggested, moving from eighteenth-century explorations in Kant, Fielding, and Diderot, through Schlegelian Romantic beginnings, and on through Emily Brontë, Pushkin, and the Romantic Manifesto, culminating in the profound achievement of Manzoni. Summarizing Romantic narrative implications by looking at the modern discipline of Comparative Literature, this book deliberately deforms both our contemporary ideas about Romanticism as well as our non-Romantic way of teaching it.

Tim Blanning​

From the preeminent historian of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries comes a superb, concise account of a cultural upheaval that still shapes sensibilities today. A rebellion against the rationality of the Enlightenment, Romanticism was a profound shift in expression that altered the arts and ushered in modernity, even as it championed a return to the intuitive and the primitive.

Nicholas Roe​

This uniquely comprehensive and wide-ranging guide to Romantic literature presents forty-six newly commissioned chapters from an international team of contributors, both long-established scholars and cutting-edge academics. It combines an introduction to the literary and historical contexts of Romanticism with material on critical and theoretical approaches and detailed readings of Romantic texts.

Michael Ferber​

In this Very Short Introduction, Michael Ferber explores Romanticism during the period of its incubation, birth, and growth, covering the years roughly from 1760 to 1860.

Duncan Wu​

Romanticism: A Critical Reader is designed both as a companion and a supplement to Blackwell’s Romanticism: An Anthology . It deals for the most part with works included in that volume while affording coverage to key elements, including fiction, beyond the anthologist’s scope to include.

Hugh Honour​

This stylish and erudite thematic study of the influence Romanticism exerts upon Western culture and particularly the visual arts is the companion volume to Honour’s equally valuable Neo-classicism…. The text is supported by a useful selection of illustrations Excellent footnotes and a good index.

Rüdiger Safranski​

The renowned scholar Rüdiger Safranski’s Romanticism: A German Affair both offers an accessible overview of Romanticism and, more critically, traces its lasting influence, for better and for ill, on German culture.

William Vaughan​

In the age of revolutions, at the end of the eighteenth century, the mental and spiritual life of North America and Europe began to undergo a historic and irreversible change. The ideas of spontaneity, direct expression and natural feeling transformed the arts, encouraging artists to explore the extremes in human nature, from heroism to insanity and despair.

Kenneth Clark​

With his extraordinary knowledge, clarity and style Kenneth Clark discusses thirteen important artists representing one of the greatest periods in the history of art – the second half of the eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth century.During the second half of the eighteenth century, when the spirit of revolution was rising through Europe, a division appeared in all the arts, deeper and more radical than any that had preceded it. Rivalry arose between two schools of painting, the Romantic and the Classic.