21 Facts About Romantics

1.

The importance the Romantics placed on emotion is summed up in the remark of the German painter Caspar David Friedrich, "the artist's feeling is his law".

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2.

In contrast to the usually very social art of the Enlightenment, Romantics were distrustful of the human world, and tended to believe a close connection with nature was mentally and morally healthy.

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3.

The key generation of French Romantics born between 1795 and 1805 had, in the words of one of their number, Alfred de Vigny, been "conceived between battles, attended school to the rolling of drums".

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4.

In contrast to Germany, Romanticism in English literature had little connection with nationalism, and the Romantics were often regarded with suspicion for the sympathy many felt for the ideals of the French Revolution, whose collapse and replacement with the dictatorship of Napoleon was, as elsewhere in Europe, a shock to the movement.

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5.

Several Romantics spent much time abroad, and a famous stay on Lake Geneva with Byron and Shelley in 1816 produced the hugely influential novel Frankenstein by Shelley's wife-to-be Mary Shelley and the novella The Vampyre by Byron's doctor John William Polidori.

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6.

Cliques of pro- and anti-Romantics developed, and productions were often accompanied by raucous vocalizing by the two sides, including the shouted assertion by one theatregoer in 1822 that "Shakespeare, c'est l'aide-de-camp de Wellington" .

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7.

Romantics was deeply interested in Portuguese folkloric verse, which resulted in the publication of Romanceiro, that recollect a great number of ancient popular ballads, known as "romances" or "rimances", in redondilha maior verse form, that contained stories of chivalry, life of saints, crusades, courtly love, etc.

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8.

Romantics too was forced to exile to Great Britain and France because of his liberal ideals.

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9.

Romantics sought inspiration in medieval Portuguese poems and chronicles as in the Bible.

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10.

Romantics's output is vast and covers many different genres, such as historical essays, poetry, novels, opuscules and theatre, where he brings back a whole world of Portuguese legends, tradition and history, especially in Eurico, o Presbitero and Lendas e Narrativas .

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11.

Romantics's work was influenced by Chateaubriand, Schiller, Klopstock, Walter Scott and the Old Testament Psalms.

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12.

Romantics became an unquestionable master for successive Ultra-Romantic generations, whose influence would not be challenged until the famous Coimbra Question.

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13.

Romantics created polemics by translating Goethe's Faust without knowing German, but using French versions of the play.

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14.

Romantics's writings were influenced by his hatred for the Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas, and filled with themes of blood and terror, using the metaphor of a slaughterhouse to portray the violence of Rosas' dictatorship.

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15.

Romantics's projects were carried out by the architect Eugene Viollet-le-Duc.

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16.

Romantics's Liberty Leading the People remains, with the Medusa, one of the best-known works of French Romantic painting.

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17.

Romantics shared with many of the Romantic painters a more free handling of paint, emphasized in the new prominence of the brushstroke and impasto, which tended to be repressed in neoclassicism under a self-effacing finish.

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18.

Romantics justified his view on the basis of these composers' depth of evocative expression and their marked individuality.

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19.

Romantics believed that knowledge was only attainable by those who truly appreciated and respected nature.

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20.

Romantics'story writing was very strongly, and many would say harmfully, influenced by Romanticism.

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21.

Romantics regarded the oral literature of the peasants as an integral part of Serbian culture, compiling it to use in his collections of folk songs, tales and proverbs, as well as the first dictionary of vernacular Serbian.

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