The Romantic Revolution

Author: Tim Blanning
Publisher: Modern Library
ISBN: 0679605002
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Book Description
“A splendidly pithy and provocative introduction to the culture of Romanticism.”—The Sunday Times “[Tim Blanning is] in a particularly good position to speak of the arrival of Romanticism on the Euorpean scene, and he does so with a verve, a breadth, and an authority that exceed every expectation.”—National Review From the preeminent historian of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries comes a superb, concise account of a cultural upheaval that still shapes sensibilities today. A rebellion against the rationality of the Enlightenment, Romanticism was a profound shift in expression that altered the arts and ushered in modernity, even as it championed a return to the intuitive and the primitive. Tim Blanning describes its beginnings in Rousseau’s novel La Nouvelle Héloïse, which placed the artistic creator at the center of aesthetic activity, and reveals how Goethe, Goya, Berlioz, and others began experimenting with themes of artistic madness, the role of sex as a psychological force, and the use of dreamlike imagery. Whether unearthing the origins of “sex appeal” or the celebration of accessible storytelling, The Romantic Revolution is a bold and brilliant introduction to an essential time whose influence would far outlast its age. “Anyone with an interest in cultural history will revel in the book’s range and insights. Specialists will savor the anecdotes, casual readers will enjoy the introduction to rich and exciting material. Brilliant artistic output during a time of transformative upheaval never gets old, and this book shows us why.”—The Washington Times “It’s a pleasure to read a relatively concise piece of scholarship of so high a caliber, especially expressed as well as in this fine book.”—Library Journal

The Romantic Revolution

Author: T. C. W. Blanning
Publisher: Modern Library
ISBN: 0679643591
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Book Description
A succinct chronicle by the prize-winning author of The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture evaluates the lesser-known Romantic Revolution as a fundamental and far-reaching period while revealing the range of modern cultural axioms it inspired, from views about genius and sexuality to evolving theories about dreams and the subconscious.

The Romantic Revolution

Author: Tim Blanning
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 1780225679
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 251

Book Description
A compelling and persuasive account of how the Romantic Movement permanently changed the way we see things and express ourselves. Three great revolutions rocked the world around 1800. The first two - the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution - have inspired the greatest volume of literature. But the third - the romantic revolution - was perhaps the most fundamental and far-reaching. From Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Burns, to Beethoven, Wagner, Berlioz, Rossini and Liszt, to Goya, Turner, Delacroix and Blake, the romantics brought about nothing less than a revolution when they tore up the artistic rule book of the old regime. This was the period in which art acquired its modern meaning; for the first time the creator, rather than the created, took centre-stage. Artists became the high priests of a new religion, and as the concert hall and gallery came to take the place of the church, the public found a new subject worthy of veneration in paintings, poetry and music. Tim Blanning's sparkling, wide-ranging survey traces the roots and evolution of a cultural revolution whose reverberations continue to be felt today.

The Black Romantic Revolution

Author: Matt Sandler
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1788735447
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
The prophetic poetry of slavery and its abolition During the pitched battle over slavery in the United States, Black writers—enslaved and free—allied themselves with the cause of abolition and used their art to advocate for emancipation and to envision the end of slavery as a world-historical moment of possibility. These Black writers borrowed from the European tradition of Romanticism—lyric poetry, prophetic visions--to write, speak, and sing their hopes for what freedom might mean. At the same time, they voiced anxieties about the expansion of global capital and US imperial power in the aftermath of slavery. They also focused on the ramifications of slavery's sexual violence. Authors like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, George Moses Horton, Albery Allson Whitman, and Joshua McCarter Simpson conceived the Civil War as a revolutionary upheaval on par with Europe's stormy Age of Revolutions. The Black Romantic Revolution proposes that the Black Romantics' cultural innovations have shaped Black radical culture to this day, from the blues and hip hop to Black nationalism and Black feminism. Their expressions of love and rage, grief and determination, dreams and nightmares, still echo into our present.

Romantic Sobriety

Author: Orrin N. C. Wang
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 1421404117
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 382

Book Description
Winner, 2011 Jean-Pierre Barricelli Prize, International Conference on Romanticism This book explores the relationship among Romanticism, deconstruction, and Marxism by examining tropes of sensation and sobriety in a set of exemplary texts from Romantic literature and contemporary literary theory. Orrin N. C. Wang explains how themes of sensation and sobriety, along with Marxist-related ideas of revolution and commodification, set the terms of narrative surrounding the history of Romanticism as a movement. The book is both polemical and critical, engaging in debates with modern thinkers such as Paul de Man, Jacques Derrida, Walter Benn Michaels, and Slavoj Žižek, as well as presenting fresh readings of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers, including Wordsworth, Kant, Shelley, Byron, Brontë, and Keats. Romantic Sobriety combines deeply complex, close readings with a broader reflection on Romanticism and its implications for literary study. It will interest scholars who study Romanticism from a number of perspectives, including those interested in bodily and social consumption, the roles of addiction and abstinence in literature, the connection between literary and visual culture, the intersection of critical theory and Romanticism, and the relationships among language, historical knowledge, and political practice.

Revolutionary Romanticism

Author: Max Blechman
Publisher: City Lights Books
ISBN: 9780872863514
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Book Description
Revolutionary Romanticism draws on almost two centuries of intertwined traditions of cultural and political subversion. In this rich collection of writings by artists, scholars, and revolutionaries, the transgressions of the past are recaptured and transvalued for the benefit of the struggles of today and tomorrow. Along the way, new light is shed on the radical sensibilities of Novalis, Friedrich Holderlin, and Friedrich Schlegel while the poetics of Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Lord Byron, and William Blake are revealed to be profoundly oppositional to the reigning culture. The social romanticism of Jules Michelet, the nineteenth-century historian of the French Revolution, is acclaimed for its visionary, quasi-religious breadth. The Paris Commune is figured by the arch-Romantics Karl Marx, Jules Valles, and Arthur Rimbaud. The all-but-forgotten Bavarian Council Republic of 1919 is recalled, a milieu steeped in Expressionism and anarchism, the matrix out of which B. Traven, author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, emerged-by the skin of his teeth. The romantic outlook of Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse, both strongly influenced by Surrealism ("the prehensile tail of Romanticism") is relocated in their absolute negation of the social order. And, at the end of the twentieth century, there's Guy Debord and the Situationist International, the passionate detournement of the Romantic project. Max Blechman writes, "When today aesthetic life is increasingly defined by advertising and corporate culture, and democracy has more to do with the power of private interests than the power of the public imagination, the romantic insistence on the liberatory dimension of aesthetics and on radical democracy may yet prove crucial to contemporary efforts to envision a new political freedom." Revolutionary Romanticism includes Blechman's investigation of the German idealist roots of European Romanticism, Annie Le Brun on the possibility of "romantic women," Peter Marshall on William Blake, Maurice Hindle on the political language of the early English Romantics, Arthur Mitzman on Jules Michelet, Christopher Winks on the Paris Commune, Miguel Abensour on William Morris, Peter Lamborn Wilson on the 1919 Bavarian Workers Council, Michael Lowy on Walter Benjamin and Herbert Marcuse, Marie-Dominque Massoni on Surrealism, and Daniel Blanchard on his youthful friendship with Guy Debord.

Impossible Individuality

Author: Gerald N. Izenberg
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400820669
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 367

Book Description
Studying major writers and philosophers--Schlegel and Schleiermacher in Germany, Wordsworth in England, and Chateaubriand in France--Gerald Izenberg shows how a combination of political, social, and psychological developments resulted in the modern concept of selfhood. More than a study of one national culture influencing another, this work goes to the heart of kindred intellectual processes in three European countries. Izenberg makes two persuasive and related arguments. The first is that the Romantics developed a new idea of the self as characterized by fundamentally opposing impulses: a drive to assert the authority of the self and expand that authority to absorb the universe, and the contradictory impulse to surrender to a greater idealized entity as the condition of the self's infinity. The second argument seeks to explain these paradoxes historically, showing how romantic individuality emerged as a compromise. Izenberg demonstrates how the Romantics retreated, in part, from a preliminary, radically activist ideal of autonomy they had worked out under the impact of the French Revolution. They had begun by seeing the individual self as the sole source of meaning and authority, but the convergence of crises in their personal lives with the crises of the revolution revealed this ideal as dangerously aggressive and self-aggrandizing. In reaction, the Romantics shifted their absolute claims for the self to the realm of creativity and imagination, and made such claims less dangerous by attributing totality to nature, art, lover, or state, which in return gave that totality back to the self.

Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism

Author: Andrew M. Stauffer
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139444794
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Book Description
The Romantic age was one of anger and its consequences: revolution and reaction, terror and war. Andrew M. Stauffer explores the changing place of anger in the literature and culture of the period, as English men and women rethought their relationship to the aggressive passions in the wake of the French Revolution. Drawing on diverse fields and discourses such as aesthetics, politics, medicine and the law and tracing the classical legacy the Romantics inherited, Stauffer charts the period's struggle to define the relationship of anger to justice and the creative self. In their poetry and prose, Romantic authors including Blake, Coleridge, Godwin, Shelley and Byron negotiate the meanings of indignation and rage amidst a clamourous debate over the place of anger in art and in civil society. This innovative book has much to contribute to the understanding of Romantic literature and the cultural history of the emotions.

The Romantic Machine

Author: John Tresch
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226812200
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 469

Book Description
Introduction: Mechanical Romanticism -- DEVICES OF COSMIC UNITY -- Ampère's Experiments: Contours of a Cosmic Cubstance -- Humboldt's Instruments: Even the Tools Will Be Free -- Arago's Daguerreotype: The Labor Theory of Knowledge -- SPECTACLES OF CREATION AND METAMORPHOSIS -- The Devil's Opera: Fantastic Physiospiritualism -- Monsters, Machine-Men, Magicians: The Automaton in the Garden -- ENGINEERS OF ARTIFICIAL PARADISES -- Saint-Simonian Engines: Love and Conversions -- Leroux's Pianotype: The Organogenesis of Humanity -- Comte's Calendar: From Infinite Universe to Closed World -- Conclusion: Afterlives of the Romantic Machine.

The Romantic Manifesto

Author: Ayn Rand
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 110113772X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 173

Book Description
In this beautifully written and brilliantly reasoned book, Ayn Rand throws a new light on the nature of art and its purpose in human life. Once again Miss Rand eloquently demonstrates her refusal to let popular catchwords and conventional ideas stand between her and the truth as she has discovered it. The Romantic Manifesto takes its place beside The Fountainhead as one of the most important achievements of our time.