/lit/ - Literature

>But even the arts of a small minority in society can still echo the thunder of the earthquakes which shake all humanity. The literature and arts of our period* did so, and the result was 'Romanticism'.

>As a style, a school, an era in the arts, nothing is harder to define or even to describe in terms of formal analysis; not even 'classicism' against which 'romanticism' claimed to raise the banner of revolt. The romantics themselves hardly help us, for though their own descriptions of what they were after were firm and decided, they were also often quite devoid of rational content.
>For Victor Hugo romanticism 'set out to do what nature does, to blend with nature's creations, while at the same time not mixing them all together: shadow and light, the gro- tesque and the sublime—in other words the body and the soul, the animal with the spiritual'. For Charles Nodier 'this last resort of the human heart, tired of ordinary feelings, is what is called the romantic genre: strange poetry, quite appropriate to the moral condition of society, to the needs of surfeited generations who cry for sensation at any cost . . .' Novalis thought romanticism meant giving 'a higher meaning to what is customary, an infinite look to the finite'. Hegel held that 'the essence of Romantic art lies in the artistic object's being free, concrete, and the spiritual idea in its very essence—all this revealed to the inner rather than the outer eye'.
>Little illumination is to be derived from such statements, which is to be expected, for the romantics preferred dim and flickering or diffused lights to clear ones.

*1789-1848