Chapter+17+-+Romanticism+and+Realism

=Chapter Summary=

By 1800, Neoclassicism was the dominant style in European art and architecture. But Romanticism was beginning to emerge. While classicism was based on logic, rigor, clarity, and exactitude, romanticism stressed inexactitude and indeterminacy. One notable Romantic painter was Francisco Goya, who was the most important chronicler of France's war with Spain. French painting wold oscillate for four decades between the classical and intellectual paintings of artists such as Jean-Auguste-Dominique Igres and the romantic and emotional paintings of Delacroix. In the Romantic era, sculpture fell out of favor. Romantics embraced Gothic architecture. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's autobiographical "Confessions" was a celebration of the self and a powerful example of reflective self-analysis. The unity of humanity with nature was a special theme of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Living close to nature was, for Henry David Thoreau, the very source of humankind's strength. Much nineteenth century literature focused on human ignorance and the search for truth. Examples include Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" where Captain Ahab is seeking a final truth in the form of a great white whale, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "Sherlock Holmes" who is always trying to figure out "who done it." William Blake's poetry showed him to be a man with a profound interest in human emotions. Probably the most important literary event in the Romantic era was the publication in 1798 of the "Lyrical Ballads" co-authored by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, which rejected the sophisticated syntax and vocabulary of Neoclassical writing. One of the great English Romantic poets was Lord Byron, a free spirit who was known for his unconventional behavior. Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights" is a fully Romantic work that breaks new ground in the violence of its scene and the extravagance of its style. Perhaps the most influential writer of the Romantic era was Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe, who witnessed the shift form the Enlightenment emphasis on reason, objectivity, and scientific fact to the Romantic concern for emotion, subjectivity, and imaginative truth. His play "Faust" has been described as a defining work of European Romanticism. The two outstanding American poets of the nineteenth century were Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Whitman experimented with language and form, while Dickinson's poems are partly rooted in the metaphysical poetry of John Donne. While innovative romantic composer Hector Berlioz wrote mostly in large forms, Frederic Chopin wrote in small ones. Where Berlioz wrote for orchestra, Chopin wrote mostly for pianos. Italy's greatest Romantic composer was Guisseppe Verdi, composer of "Rigoletto." As Beethoven dominated the musical world for the first half of the nineteenth century, Richard Wagner dominated the second half. In Realist art and literature, the aim was to tell the truth about he realities of modern life, especially the lives of the working class. According to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the working class had no effective political voice other than revolution and were alienated from their labor by an increasingly mechanized industrial system. In 1848, as they were writing "The Communist Manifesto," Europe was undergoing an unprecedented economic decline. Revolution quickly followed in France, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Poland, and Italy. One of the first truly successful painters of the working class was Rosa Bonheur, who heroized the French peasant. The other great Realist of the day was Gustave Courbet, who refused to idealize working life. Photography was invented in 1839 and literally changed the way that we see the world. The American Civil War was the first war to be documented by photography. Mathew Brady was the best known war photography. While France and the rest of Europe were enduring class struggle, Americans had one thing on their minds: the Civil War. It was the Civil War that gave the impetus to American realism. By 1850 new technological achievements offered architects and sculptors new possibilities. The Crystal Palace in London, which extended the idea of a glass-frame greenhouse, was built for the Great Exhibition of 1851. The Statue of Liberty was designed in 1875 by Frederic-Auguste Bartholdi an given to the United States by France. Realist writers such as Honore de Balzac aimed to represent contemporary life with precision and objectivity. The Realist novel that represented the most thorough attack on the Romantic sensibility was "Madame Bovary" by Gustave Flaubert. Important Realists novelists of the time included Charles dickens, Anthony Trollope, and George Eliot. The interest in the precise was shared by the Realists scientists such as Louis Pasteur and Charles Darwin. Darwin, Darwin was famous for his theory of evolution.

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