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Victor Frankenstein becoming disgusted at his creation. Illustration from the frontispiece of the 1831 edition of Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Steel engraving by Theodore Von Holst. License: Public Domain.
The pinnacle of European Romanticism is Goethe's Faust (Part One, 1806; Part Two 1832). Its title character embodies many, if not most, of Romanticism's ideals: love of nature, emotional insights, individuality, and a never-ending search for knowledge and higher truth. Unlike Victor Frankenstein, Faust ultimately is successful in his search, although it comes at a cost. Romantics did not see a world without pain; they saw emotions, including pain, as a conduit to greater understanding. Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) and Les Misérables (1862) address social injustice through the lens of Romanticism. The poetry of Mikhail Lermontov includes Byronic heroes and other outcasts from society, which also describes Aleksandr Pushkin's Eugene Onegin (1832).
Homunculus in the phial. Famulus Wagner and Mephistopheles. Illustration to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust. Part Two, Act II, Laboratory. Illustrated by Franz Xaver Simm. License: Public Domain.
Literary movements are, of course, fluid and overlapping. Some scholars date the end of Romanticism to the early 1830s, while others extend Romanticism to as late as 1870. In British literature, Victorianism (1837-1901), which coincides with the reign of Queen Victoria, covers the transition from Romanticism to Realism; while poets such as Tennyson and Robert Browning are clearly descendants of Romanticism, their work contains realistic elements that do not technically fit into Romanticism. American Romanticism as a movement spanned roughly 1840-1865, and while it owed its initial existence to British Romanticism, it developed its own vision of the movement. American Transcendentalism was an early version of Romanticism in America. Influenced by Unitarianism and Hindu texts, Transcendentalism posited that human beings are fundamentally good; as such, they need no authority, but can be trusted to use their intuition and imagination to understand the world around them. In fact, Transcendentalists believed that many aspects of society served only to corrupt human beings, so nature offered an escape from society: both a temporary respite and an alternative way of living. Nature's purity, it was thought, would restore mankind's purity. Over time, American Romanticism took on a character quite different from English Romanticism. With writers like Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, and Herman Melville, American literature started coming into its own, inspired not only by its own revolutionary past, but also by a different version of nature found in the American wilderness. As both Transcendentalism and Romanticism were slowly replaced by Realism, ideas such as rugged individualism continued in the American consciousness. In many ways, Romanticism lives on in popular culture; elements of Romanticism continue into the present day in literature, film, and television.
Written by Laura Getty
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