The Romantic Revolution

June 6, 2011
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.

August 1, 2011

The Romantic movement of the mid-18th to mid-19th centuries, asserts Blanning (formerly modern European history, Univ. of Cambridge; The Triumph of Music: The Rise of Composers, Musicians and Their Art), was as radical in its consequences as the age's political and economic revolutions, changing permanently the way writers, thinkers, and artists perceived themselves. Blanning describes the ways Romantics turned inward (the cult of genius, the privileged status accorded dreams and nightmares), away from the emphasis on reason urged by Enlightenment thinkers. One writer railed against "the tyranny of reason." Another boldly asserted: "God is a poet, not a mathematician." Hegel pondered Romanticism's "absolute inwardness." Blanning analyzes the Romantics' modes of engagement with the world (exaltation of history, love of nature, medievalism) and makes acute observations on the dialectical, not cyclical, progress of the arts up through today. VERDICT It's a pleasure to read a relatively concise piece of scholarship of so high a caliber, especially expressed as well as in this fine book, with images and phrases that illumine the subject and stick in the mind. It will appeal not only to academics but to all readers with an interest in the history of literature, philosophy, and art.--David Keymer, Modesto, CA

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2011
Poor Voltaire! Poor Reynolds! Poor Haydn! No sooner had Enlightenment aesthetics triumphed than Rousseau swept aside objectivity, reason, and order in the arts. In Rousseau's wake, feeling, subjectivity, raw nature, the past, the irrational, and spirituality erupted in literature, music, painting and sculpture, even architecture. The idea of transcendent artistic genius sprang up, with Beethoven to embody it; also that of the philistine public, too material-minded to appreciate the divinity of great art. The night and nightmares, visions and madness, and the suicides of thwarted lovers and artists were exalted. Passions for vernacular languages, historic architecture, and myths and legends burgeoned, contributing vitally to nationalist movements that changed the map of nineteenth-century Europe. Blanning recaps those developments with gusto and, buttressed by cartloads of reference notes, authority. Finally, he conjures an archromantic conception, Hegelian dialectics, to submit that neither Enlightenment aesthetics nor Romanticism ever dies. Rather, each changes and returns, cyclically. Thus, realism succeeded Romanticism; symbolism, realism; modernism, symbolism; and now we have Romanticism's latest avatarpostmodernism. A fine and dandy introduction to its subject.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)