E 314L Study Guide - Midterm Guide: Romanticism, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley
Document Summary
The romantic period isn"t just about love stories it was a political and social movement as well as a literary one. Romantics were reacting to an 18th century obsession with calm order, harmony, rationality, and scientific precision. Romantic writers felt that these enlightenment era thinkers missed the point about what it meant to be human. After all, they argued, you can"t write an equation to define human nature. So the romantic movement was partly a backlash against the rationalism of the. The (re)assertion of the importance of private and personal experience. The transcendental, often specifically in opposition to the strictures of the organized churches, and the view that an artist was a seer of transcendent things. 3: many attitudes parallel the events and attitudes associated with the recent french and american revolutions. Hostility to rigid established power (the state and the church, monarchy) Renewal/transformation of significance of the people (the masses, the poor, the unentitled)
