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Compare And Contrast Individualism And Romanticism

Decent Essays

INTRODUCTION:

The word romantic is mostly associated with feelings of love and intimacy. However, the Romantic Movement in literature incorporated so much more. Beginning in the late 18th Century, this period emphasized emotion, inspiration, subjectivity. visual beauty, love of nature, individualism, and spiritualism are just a few of the many topics covered in works written by Romantic authors. To be precise, many scholars say that the Romantic period began with the publication of "Lyrical Ballads" by William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge in 1798. The volume contained some of the best-known works from these two poets including Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and Wordsworth's "Lines Written a Few Miles from Tintern Abbey." Further, it starts as a reaction against the intellectualism of the Enlightenment, against the rigidity of social structures protecting privilege, and against the materialism of an age which, in the first stirring of the Industrial Revolution, already shows signs of making workers the slaves of machinery and of creating squalid urban environments. As a result, a mood which pervades much of western life during the past two centuries is hard to define except in terms of opposites.

I. Age of Revolution and Individualism:

The early Romantic period thus coincides with what is often called the "age of revolutions"-including, of course, the American (1776) and the French (1789) revolutions-an age of upheavals in political, economic, and social

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