What is Romanticism?

Raymond Immerwahr (1972) suggests that although “the word romantic emerged as a term of cultural history shortly after 1760 and almost

simultaneously began to take on connotations for literary criticism as well, it has never become a definable concept” (17).

What do you consider romantic?

(a) a sunny island

(b) a thundering waterfall in the mountains

(c) roses and a box of chocolates as a gift

(d) Valentine’s Day

(e) an orchard and babbling brook

(f) an exhilarating feeling you get when you do something exciting

(g) a vampire

(h) a nice Sunday drive

The origins of “romantic” the first instance of the term in the English language is found in 1650, with

the adjective being used to describe medieval romances and legends surrounding knights, including contemporary imitations of such romances (18)

in the 1660s the term was extended to include landscapes too (20); e.g., Aubrey’s Monumenta Brittanica (1663) refers to hunting in a “romantick country…,” 18th-cent. expeditions to the Pacific islands of Juan Fernandez, Tinian, and Tahiti describe these places as “romantic paradise[s]” (25)

by the 1770s, the term picturesque is used by Reverend Gilpin to distinguish between romantic scenes that would form an appropriate composition on canvas, and those that would not (35); e.g., 17th-cent. landscape painters Claude Lorrain, Salvator Rosa

Further connections

greater specialization in how terms such as romantic and picturesque are used by the later 18th-cent. also leads to other ideas (cf. the sublime; will elaborate on this in a separate slideshow)

renewed interest in Shakespeare in the second half of the 18th cent., and more broadly in drama that does not necessarily follow strict classical rules of composition (e.g., unity of time, place, setting) as set down by Aristotle; Voltaire considered that Shakespeare had some smart phrases, but that a search for them was similar to looking for diamonds in a dunghill

Immerwahr suggests that the term romantique never established itself in common usage in France (forever tied to landscape gardening), that in England the term romantic was too common a part of the language to be subsumed by cultural movements, while in Germany the term romantisch was tied more closely to the imagination, and it is this understanding of the term that was eventually imported into France and England by the 1770s (88-90; and into Russia by the 1820s)

Salvator Rosa, Harbour with Ruins (1640)Claude Lorrain, Italian Coastal Landscape (1642)

Works Cited

Immerwahr, Raymond. “‘Romantic’ and Its Cognates in England, Germany, and France before 1790.” ‘Romantic’ and Its Cognates / The European History of a Word. Ed. Hans Eichner. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972. 17-90.