ROMANTICISM, POE, HAWTHORNE

Romanticism, Poe, and Hawthorne



Romanticism, Poe, and Hawthorne

Romanticism

Romanticism was a rich and complex body of philosophy, literature, and art that originated in Europe in the late eighteenth century. Some of its key figures included the English poets and literary theorists, William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), and the German poets and philosophers, Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843), Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829), Novalis (1772-1801), and Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805), among others. Romantic thought had an impact not only on nineteenth-century English and European culture, but also on nineteenth-century American thought through the work of Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) and especially Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882).

Two of the most influential texts of romanticism were William Wordsworth's “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” (1801) and Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment (1790). Although Kant was not a romantic in the strict sense but rather the leading philosophical voice of the Enlightenment, this text had a gigantic influence on utopian thought. It became the basis for thinking about and overcoming, one way or another, various philosophical dichotomies: for example, the dichotomy between subject and object, fact and value, freedom and nature, self and other. Wordsworth's “Preface” to the collection of poems published by himself and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads (1798), took up these same concerns, but cast them as challenges to romantic writing, especially literature, which, when successfully met, would envision a form of expressive freedom that could be realized under conditions of modern life, and through which the limitations of modern life could be overcome.

For most of the current century, romanticism has been an often maligned and just as often misunderstood philosophical, artistic, and political phenomenon. It has been variously identified with repressive forms of communitarianism and nationalism, with kitsch and cultural conservatism, and with the anesthetization of politics and the depoliticization ...