The Nineteenth Century: Romantic Period

Major writers and painters of the Romantic period interpreted the church or cathedral in its organic and spiritual dimensions as a complex expression of a matured Christian civilization. Artists of the mid-nineteenth century continued to produce both secular and religious variations upon this established referentiality. Although divergent uses reciprocally reinforced the fascination for the central imagery of the church and its multiple contexts, they also came to suggest a deeper tension in Western development between what the church had meant in an earlier Europe and what it might mean for late modernity. The threat of a permanent loss of cultural values was an issue haunting Realist approaches. A crucial revision occurred when key Symbolist poets openly revived the first Romantic themes but treated them as contents available to a decidedly post-Romantic historical consciousness. There was an analogous revival of interest in the church as a culturally charged symbol in painting around the turn of the century. Although they might apply this poetic and pictorial heritage in strikingly different ways, writers of high Modernism such as Rilke, Proust, and Kafka understood its richness and importance.

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The Nineteenth Century Romantic Period

The Year s Work in English Studies ◽

10.1093/ywes/58.1.256 ◽

1979 ◽

Vol 58 (1) ◽

pp. 256-279

Author(s):

P. DODD ◽

A. LINCOLN ◽

J. R. WATSON

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Romantic Period

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‘A Kind of Geological Novel’: Wales and Travel Writing, 1783–1819

Romanticism ◽

10.3366/rom.2018.0367 ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 24 (2) ◽

pp. 134-147 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Elizabeth Edwards

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Travel Writing ◽

Sense Of Place ◽

Early Nineteenth Century ◽

Romantic Period ◽

England And Wales ◽

The Enlightenment ◽

Ongoing Work ◽

Geological Map ◽

Humphry Davy

This article explores the layered and multivocal nature of Romantic-period travel writing in Wales through the theme of geology. Beginning with an analysis of the spectral sense of place that emerges from William Smith's 1815 geological map of England and Wales, it considers a range of travel texts, from the stones and fossils of Thomas Pennant's A Tour in Wales (1778–83), to Humphry Davy and Michael Faraday's early nineteenth-century Welsh travels, to little-known manuscript accounts. Wales is still the least-researched of the home nations in terms of the Enlightenment and the Romantic period, despite recent and ongoing work that has done much to increase its visibility. Travel writing, meanwhile, is a form whose popularity in the period is now little recognised. These points doubly position Welsh travel writing on the fringes of our field, in an outlying location compounded by the genre's status as a category that defies easy definition.

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The Aesthetic Mediation

The Folly of the Cross ◽

10.1093/oso/9780190876005.003.0004 ◽

2018 ◽

pp. 143-200

Author(s):

Richard Viladesau

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Visual Arts ◽

The Other ◽

Romantic Period ◽

Popular Piety ◽

Biblical Scholarship ◽

Other Hand ◽

The Cross ◽

The Aesthetic ◽

Naturalistic Realism

In the visual arts of the Romantic period the crucifixion of Christ often became a representation of the sufferings of humanity. Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings placed the cross in the context of the immensity of nature. Toward the end of the nineteenth century there was an increasing tendency to portray Jesus’ suffering in the genre of naturalistic realism. Some painters consciously attempted to incorporate the findings of modern biblical scholarship, rather than follow traditional models. Early film representations, on the other hand, tended to rely on classical types and popular piety.

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The Nineteenth Century: Romantic Period

The Year s Work in English Studies ◽

10.1093/ywes/62.1.277 ◽

1984 ◽

Vol 62 (1) ◽

pp. 277-305

Author(s):

B. BURNS ◽

P. DODD ◽

V. NEWEY

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Romantic Period

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XIII The Nineteenth Century: Romantic Period

The Year s Work in English Studies ◽

10.1093/ywes/65.1.387 ◽

1987 ◽

Vol 65 (1) ◽

pp. 387-415

Author(s):

V. NEWEY ◽

B. BURNS ◽

J. MICHIE

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Romantic Period

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Dandy Socialism

Maska ◽

10.1386/maska.32.185-186.134_1 ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 32 (185) ◽

pp. 134-140 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Lev Kreft

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

Mass Culture ◽

The Novel ◽

Romantic Period ◽

Daily Newspapers ◽

Political Position ◽

Class Society ◽

Aesthetic Field ◽

Young Hegelians ◽

The Aesthetic

‘It was a dark and stormy night...’ with these words Edward Bulwer-Lytton began his 1830 novel Paul Clifford. ‘Le 13 décembre 1838, par une soirée pluvieuse et froid’ are the words with which Eugène Sue begins his novel The Mysteries of Paris, its narrative following a ‘conceptual’ introductory address to the reader. There are many more features connecting these two popular literary pieces of the Romantic period. In-between, a new genre emerged – the melodramatic social(ist) novel – together with new means of communication, i.e. the novel feuilleton that was printed in daily newspapers. This subtle form of censorship suggests that a genre believed to be melodramatically mediocre had an excessive aestheticopolitical attractiveness. Eugène Sue was a star writer of nineteenth century bestsellers novels–feuilletons during the period between the two revolutions of 1830 and 1848. Afterwards he practically fell into oblivion and was barely mentioned in the company of ‘serious’ writers like Balzac and Hugo or Dickens and Thackeray, all of whom, however, took his allegedly mediocre melodramatic and popular narratives as cases to be followed. His temporary fame was confirmed by the response of Bruno Bauer’s group of young Hegelians, who found in Sue’s literary attractiveness a philosophical solution for all the mysteries and conflicts of the period. Marx’s criticism of their philosophical and political position in The Sacred Family includes a lengthy and thorough criticism of their ‘philosophical’ readings of the novel, of the novel itself, and of their and Sue’s understanding of the new bourgeois reality. Among other points, Sue’s alleged socialism is described with the help of a comparison between the police and the moral police. Can we, along with a re-establishment of the context of The Mysteries of Paris, leave behind the critique of ideology and the literary critique of popular and mass culture in order to bring back into the aesthetic field this melodramatic narrative of class society and to re-establish the politics of its aesthetics?

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Theatre, Drama, and Vision in the Romantic Age

10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199696383.013.38 ◽

2016 ◽

Author(s):

Diego Saglia

Keyword(s):

Nineteenth Century ◽

The Body ◽

Contemporary Culture ◽

Romantic Period ◽

The Creation ◽

Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽

Vantage Points ◽

The Way

Between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, European cultures saw drama and theatre as endowed with extraordinary relevance, celebrating their social and aesthetic functions, as well as those transitively metaphorical features for which this period coined the term ‘theatricality’. This neologism aptly conveys the pervasiveness of theatre and the theatrical in these decades and goes some way towards explaining why many Romantic manifestoes and diatribes were primarily concerned with the stage. Drama and theatre were crucial laboratories for the creation of new ways of seeing, forms and genres, notions of the body, and models of subjectivity. As forms of entertainment, metaphors, or hermeneutic tools, Romantic-period drama and theatre were visual vantage points for the examination of contemporary culture and history and their endless transformations. As such, they paved the way for subsequent dramatic and theatrical revolutions and for the conception of modernity emerging in the later nineteenth century.

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