The romantic age and the industrial revolution
Avvenimenti più importanti dell'età romantica in Gran Bretagna e la Rivoluzione industriale (2 pagine formato doc)
THE ROMANTIC AGE (1760-1830)
In the last thirty years of the 18th century a new sensibility became dominant which came to be known in literature as “Romanticism” which was characterized by a distrust on the reason and comprised elements of introspection, nostalgia, emotionalism and individualism: Romantics saw the individual essentially in the solitary state; they exalted the atypical, the outcast, the rebel.
This attitude led on the cult of the hero and on the other hand to the view of society as an evil force. The newly born appeal to the hearth and to the relationship between reason and emotions expressed itself in various ways.
Nature wasn’t an abstract idea or something submitted by men, but was seen as a real concrete part of man’s life, something that exist. The country was the place where man's relationship with nature was still intact, opposite to industrial town.
A need was felt to form images celebrating natural life to set against the artificial industrial society. The rediscovery of the art and the popular traditions of the Middle Ages manifested itself in the “Gothic Vogue”, in other words the interest in what was wild, irrational, supernatural, horrific.
Imagination assumed a key role as a way to express emotional experience far from the reason
The willingness to explore less conscious aspects of feeling was accompanied by a serious concern about the experience of childhood. In a Romantic mind a child was purer than an adult because he was uncivilized. His uncorrupted sensitivity meant he was even closer to God and the sources of creation, therefore childhood was a state to be admired and cultivated.
Jacques Rousseau thought that natural or individualism behavior were good and society, with its rules, represented an obstacle for it. The cult of exotic was anything that was exotic, because it was strange and unpredictable. It was far away both in space and time, because the inexplicable symbols for modes of human experience.