The romantic revolution: a history

From the preeminent historian of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries comes a superb, concise account of a cultural upheaval that still shapes sensibilities today. Long overshadowed by the contemporaneous American, French, and Industrial revolutions, the Romantic Revolution finally receives its due in Tim Blanning?s bold and brilliant work. A rebellion against the rationality of the Enlightenment, a rejection of?the Academy? in favor of public opinion, Romanticism was a profound shift in expression that altered the arts and ushered in modernity, even as it championed a return to the intuitive and the primitive. Blanning describes its beginnings in Rousseau?s novel La Nouvelle Héloïse, the biggest bestseller of the eighteenth century, a work that placed the creator?and not the created?at the center of aesthetic activity and led to the virtual worship of creative geniuses by the general public. Blanning reveals the glamorizing of artistic madness and suicide in Goethe?s novel The Sufferings of Young Werther and the ballet Giselle; the role of sex as a psychological force in Friedrich Schlegel?s novel Lucinde; the importance of mind-altering drugs to the fictional protagonist of Confessions of an English Opium Eater and to the composer Hector Berlioz in his Symphonie fantastique; and the use of naïve, dreamlike imagery in Goya?s paintings of monsters.

The crisis of the Age of Reason. Rousseau on the road to Vincennes ; Rousseau's lovers : from a mimetic to an expressive aesthetic ; Nature and nature's laws ; The cult of genius ; The elevation of the artist and the sacralization of art ; The Philistine public -- The dark side of the moon. Dreams and nightmares ; The wonder-world of the night ; The sleep of reason ; The opiate of the artists; Great wits are sure to madness near allied ; Romantic heroes and heroines -- Language, history, and myth. The language of the people ; The history of the people ; Medievalism ; Landscape and myth ; Conservatives and revolutionaries -- Conclusion. Death and transfiguration.