The Romantic Revolution
-
- £2.99
-
- £2.99
Publisher Description
A compelling and persuasive account of how the Romantic Movement permanently changed the way we see things and express ourselves.
Three great revolutions rocked the world around 1800. The first two - the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution - have inspired the greatest volume of literature. But the third - the romantic revolution - was perhaps the most fundamental and far-reaching. From Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Burns, to Beethoven, Wagner, Berlioz, Rossini and Liszt, to Goya, Turner, Delacroix and Blake, the romantics brought about nothing less than a revolution when they tore up the artistic rule book of the old regime.
This was the period in which art acquired its modern meaning; for the first time the creator, rather than the created, took centre-stage. Artists became the high priests of a new religion, and as the concert hall and gallery came to take the place of the church, the public found a new subject worthy of veneration in paintings, poetry and music. Tim Blanning's sparkling, wide-ranging survey traces the roots and evolution of a cultural revolution whose reverberations continue to be felt today.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This romp through the origins and history of romanticism concentrates on its far-reaching influence in the arts. Cambridge University cultural historian Blanning (editor of The Oxford History of Europe) acknowledges the impossibility of pinpointing any originating moment for romanticism, which expanded slowly from the mid-18th century; in a somewhat perfunctory concluding chapter, he observes that this revolution is continuing. Despite some 50 pages of notes, this work is lively as well as informative. Blanning's cultural inclination toward continental Europe brings perhaps less familiar figures to the fore. Whereas English and American readers are more accustomed to the works of the Shelleys, Blake, and Byron, among others (all covered here), the intellectual roots of romanticism lie in figures such as Hegel and especially Rousseau. In a conversion experience almost of a Pauline magnitude, as Blanning (and Rousseau himself) describe it, Rousseau came to reject the Enlightenment ideals of science and art as corrupting the human spirit. Blanning covers a full range of romantic expression: painters (Philipp Otto Runge), art historian Winckelmann, writers (Goethe), composers (Beethoven and Wagner), and many others. This book is a fine introduction to the roots of an intellectual movement that is central to our worldview. 8 pages of color photos; 13 b&w photos.
