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Notes on
Romanticism World
Masterpieces
272
J. Roth All notes owe
credit to The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, Seventh Edition,
Volume 2 Romantic Era--Late
1700's through the 1850's "The
individual will must engage itself in ethical struggle to locate and
experience the good" (419) KEY EARLY EVENTS: American Revolution--1775; French
Revolution--1789 Innocence and feeling
became valued--the innate rights of individual humans--seek reassurance in
uniqueness of individual rather than the universality of human nature.
"It was the ultimate development of Protestantism--to everyone his or
her own church" (419). ----- "Movement
to locate authority in the self rather than in the society" (419). Old view:
fallen nature of the human soul leads to potential for violence and
destructiveness. Because of this we create institutions to provide
control (420). New view
(Rousseau and others): essential goodness of human nature--dangers of
institutional restraint--corruption of the individual (420). ----- Centrality of
feeling replaces old concept of tension between passion and reason. Importance of
private (individual) experience offered tentative security, a standing place,
a temporary source of authority (421). Our present age
(early 2000's Western World) cannot understand this (the importance of the
individual) differently. To the Romantic Era, however, the shifting
emphasis to the individual rather than the group (social) view of experience
and the world was gigantic, monumental. ----- KEY LATE EVENTS: The birth of The Machine Age
(Industrialization); Science continues to generate confusion--Darwin's Origin of
the Species in 1859; Social changes--Karl Marx and Das Capital,
1867 (the inevitable fall of capitalism through the power of the working
class); the American Civil War 1860-1865. |