2.4 Romanticism
Romanticism in literature, Romanticism found recurrent themes in the rise or criticism of the past, the cult of sensibility with its emphasis on women and
children, the heroic isolation of the artist or narrator, and respect for a new, wild, loose and pure nature. Furthermore, several romantic authors, such as Edgar Allan
Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, based their writings on the supernatural occult and human psychology. Romanticism tended to think of satire as something not worth
serious attention, prejudice is still influential today.
During the Age of Reason in the Seventeenth Century, Romantic unavoidable fell into increasing disrepute, so that it is found alongside with ‘bombastic’,
‘ridiculous’ and ‘childish’. Not long afterward, Romantic begins recover its status from a term of depreciation to a term that occurs in association with ‘fine’. Romantic
could then mean captivating to the imagination. The exact meaning of the term is matter of substantial debate. According to
Brunetiere: Romantic is a movement to honor whatever classicism rejected. Classicism is the regularity of good sense,
− prefection in moderation; Romanticism is disorder in the imagination
─the rage of incorrectness. A bilnd wave of literary egotism, while Rousseau defines Romanticism is the return to the nature. Victor
Hugo defines Romanticism as liberalism in literature. Mingling the grotesque with the tragic or sublime forbidden by classicism the complete truth of life and thought
of the Middle Age.
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The word ‘romantic’ was caught by the influential German critics Friedrich and August Wilhem who gave it more a deeper and more specific group of
meanings; and through out the nineteenth century the term became more widely used for the simple reason that nothing better appeared. The Schlegel brothers were
interested in defining a contrast between the art and literature of the classical world and that of the Middle Ages and Renaissance which they called ‘modern in
antithesis to ‘ancient’. The ‘Romantic’ refuses to recognize restraint in subject matter or form and so is free to represent the abnormal grotesque and monstrous and
to mingle standpoints, genres, mode of expression such as philosophy and poetry and events the separate arts in a single works.
The Gothic Novel, starting with Horace Walpoles The Castle of Otranto 1764, an important precursor of one strain of romanticism, with a fun horror and
threat, and wonderfully exotic setting, suitable in the case of Walpole by his role in the early revival of Gothic architecture. Tristram Shandy, a novel by Laurence Sterne
1759-1767 introduced a weird version of the anti-rational public sentimental novels of English literature
Romanticism has very little to do with things popularly thought of as romantic, although love may occasionally be the subject of Romantic art. Rather, it
is an international artistic and philosophical movement that redefined the fundamental ways in which people in Western cultures thought about themselves and
about their world. It is one of the curiosities of literary history that the strongholds of the Romantic Movement were England and Germany, not the countries of the
romance languages themselves. Thus it is from the historians of English and German literature that we inherit the convenient set of terminal dates for the Romantic period,
.
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beginning in 1798, the year of the first edition of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge and of the composition of Hymns to the Night by Novalis, and ending in
1832, the year which marked the deaths of both Sir Walter Scott and Goethe.
Some aspects of Romanticism
Some aspect of Romanticism, which
quoted from
sources:
http:en.wikipedia.orgwikiensiklopediaRomanticism,. • Imagination
they are:
The Romantics tended to define and to present the imagination as our ultimate shaping or creative power, the approximate human equivalent of the creative
powers of nature or even deity. It is dynamic, an active, rather than passive power, with many functions. On a broader scale, it is also the faculty that helps humans to
constitute reality, we not only perceive the world around us, but also in part create it.
• Nature
Nature meant many things to the Romantics. As suggested above, it was often presented as itself a work of art, constructed by a divine imagination, in emblematic
language. At the same time, Romantics gave greater attention both to describing natural phenomena accurately and to capturing sensuous nuance--and this is as true
of Romantic landscape painting as of Romantic nature poetry.
• Symbolism and Myth
Symbolism and myth were given great prominence in the Romantic conception of art. In the Romantic view, symbols were the human aesthetic correlatives of
natures emblematic language. They were valued too because they could
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simultaneously suggest many things, and were thus thought superior to the one-to- one communications of allegory. Partly, it may have been the desire to express the
inexpressible--the infinite--through the available resources of language that led to symbol at one level and myth as symbolic narrative at another.
• The Individualism
The Individualism of this period is also reflected in the preference for individual and particular description. When their predecessors saw a man as a social animal,
saw him in his daily relations with his fellows, the Romantics saw him essentially in solitary state, self –communing. Where the Augustan emphasized those features that
men have in common, the interest that bring them together, the Romantics emphasized the special qualities of each individual’s mind, they exalted the atypical,
even the bizarre, they honoured the hermit, the outcast, the rebel. In the others words, the Romantic period, the age of burgeoning free enterprise and revolutionary hope,
was also an age of radical individualism, in which both the philosophers and poet put an immensely higher estimate, on human potentialities and powers.
• Supernatural and Strangeness
It is known that some Romantic poets escaped into a more beautiful past or future, while others into the realm of supernatural. Consequently, the ‘Ghotic’ stories
focus much on the idea of the past and old world, for example A Ghotic building or an ancient house, old places, darkness and moonlight. Or it might center on the idea
of in the form of he remote area, an escape from society, and alienation. Or it might deal with supernatural by depicting the presence of ghosts, demonic or Satanic
characters and heavenly creatures.
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• Ghotic and Mysterious
Ghotic in the term of literature can be defined as a melodramatic mode of fiction in the late of eighteenth century and in the early nineteenth century. The word
‘ghotic’ had to mean ‘wild’ found it attractive to cultivate in reaction againts the sedate new classicism of earlier with century culture. In literature, the ‘ghotic novel’
is a tale of terror with melodramatic and supernatural elements. Often these tales are silly stories of violence and romantic love, set Oagaints the background of spooky
ancient castle, supernatural appearance and bloody murders. The plots hanged on suspense and mystery, involving the fantastic and supernatural.
• Illogical unacceptable
As the basic maning of the word ‘illogical’; is without or contrary to logic, the literary works of the Romanticism period much consists this elements, especially for
the ghotic novels and others horror stories. Other aspects of Romanticism were intertwined with the above three concepts.
Emphasis on the activity of the imagination was accompanied by greater emphasis on the importance of intuition, instincts, and feelings, and Romantics generally called
for greater attention to the emotions as a necessary supplement to purely logical reason.
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CHAPTER III METODOLOGY OF RESEARCH
In this thesis, the writer applies the library research by searching and collecting references that contain and support the topic from the library for
accomplishing this analysis. The writer collects some relevant information from different reference book. The writer applies the online research as well for she knows
that the opinion of others might be useful to support his thesis. In analyze the short stories, the writer uses
In doing this thesis, the writer uses some steps as follows : the descriptive qualitative method
in order to understand how something is happened. Qualitative research result the descriptive data and consist of the explanation about variable which examined by
giving the explanation from other references. Then the writer continues with
selecting data or takes some quotations from statements of the short stories. After that, the writer analyses the data by interpretating. The interpretation is described in
order to find out the truth offered by the data. The writer also collects the data from books, journals, some information from the Internet,which relates to Edgar Allan
Poe, and other written sources as the library research.
3.1. Data Collecting Procedure
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