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Literature And Artwork Of Romanticism

Romanticism was an intellectual and artistic movement which originated in late 18th century Western Europe (wikipedia.org). It was in part a rebellion against the aristocratic, social, and political norms of the Enlightenment period. It was also a reaction against the rationalization of nature. "In art and literature it stressed strong emotion as a source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror, and the awe experienced in confronting the sublimity of nature" (wikipedia.org). Romanticism was influenced by some of the ideas of the Enlightenment, most specifically evolution and epistemology based on usage and custom (wikipedia.org).
It was also influenced by schemes of the Enlightenment, elevating medievalism along with the elements of art and narratives perceived to come from the medieval period. "The name "romantic" itself comes from the term "romance" which is a prose or poetic narrative originating in the medieval" (wikipedia.org). Romanticism gave emphasis to imagination along with feeling. "But a precise characterization and a specific description of Romanticism have been objects of intellectual history and literary history for all of the twentieth century without any great measures of consensus emerging" (wikipedia.org). "Arthur Lovejoy attempted to demonstrate the difficulty of this problem in his seminal article "On the Discrimination of Romanticisms" in his "Essays in the History of Ideas" (wikipedia.org).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_ideas
Poets, such as Edgar Allan Poe, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow all produced works that followed the Romantic vein. Beginning in Germany and England in the 1770's, Romanticism had moved throughout Europe before finally conquering the French (wsu.edu). From there it quickly traveled to the Western hemisphere. One of the great artists of the Romantic era was Caspar David Friedrich. Born in 1774, he was a nineteenth century painter who was...