Cracking the AP European History Exam, 2014 Edition by Princeton Review

Author:Princeton Review [Review, The Princeton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-94623-2
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2013-09-23T16:00:00+00:00

Romanticism in Literature

Part of the inspiration for Romanticism came from the writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who in his novel Émile proposed an educational program for a young man in which the education was derived from nature and not from rote memorization of facts.

The most important of the early Romantic writers is arguably Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832). In his Sorrows of Young Werthe, an epistolary novel, young Werthe kills himself when his love for a woman is not returned. The novel proved to be so popular that young men throughout Europe began to dress in clothes similar to Werthe and, in some extreme cases, killed themselves. Goethe was the greatest figure of the Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) generation of German Romantic writers of the 1770s and 1780s, who were introduced to an interested French public by the author Madame de Staël (1766–1817), who was living in exile in Switzerland after angering Napoleon.

Artists who worked in the Romantic tradition extolled both the beauty and mystery of nature. They also exhibited a great deal of interest in the supernatural, as for example in Goethe’s Faust, which deals with a man who sells his soul to the devil in order to achieve worldly success.

Romantics explored folklore and traditional peasant life, because country people were idealized as living closer to nature. Romantics also found it necessary to break with the traditional styles of the past. In their jointly written Lyrical Ballads, the English poets William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) completely ignored the rules of punctuation, revealing their rejection of classical poetic forms.

Many of the artists who worked in the Romantic tradition became fascinated with the Middle Ages. Although their glorification of the medieval past, an age of theocratic kingship, would have seemingly pointed them into a more conservative direction, many of the Romantics were political liberals. Sir Walter Scott (1771–1832) and Victor Hugo (1802–1885) in many ways invented the popular image of the Middle Ages in novels such as Ivanhoe and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Their influence can be felt when you look at almost any church in the United States from the second half of the nineteenth century; the odds are that it’s built in the Gothic style.

Many in the Romantic movement not only rejected traditional literary and artistic styles, but also rejected the traditional political order. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1827), an English Romantic poet, rebelled against the conservative values found in his country. In Prometheus Unbound, a lyrical drama, the mythical protagonist challenges the established order by stealing fire from the gods, and Mask of Anarchy was written as a political protest after the Peterloo massacre. George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824), challenged the political status quo and ended up dying in Greece fighting in the rebellion against the Ottoman Turks. Amandine-Aurore Dupin (1804–1892), who wrote under the intentionally male-sounding pen name George Sand, challenged the endemic oppression that weighed down women. Sand was involved in a famous affair with Frederic Chopin, who initially said about her to his family, “Something about her repels me.

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