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Supernatural Elements Of The Nineteenth Century

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The beginning of the nineteenth century was also the start of a legendary movement in literature, known as Romanticism. Authors during this period created their own worlds by using their imaginations. Individuals no longer saw themselves a measure of everything around them, but rather as one more component of the great source of life and creativity: nature. The Romantics placed emphasis on emotions such as apprehension, terror, and awe as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, as well as the feelings that accompany confronting the sublimity and beauty of nature, especially. Supernatural elements are not present in all Romantic literature; however, the supernatural approach was an important and arguably crucial strategy for Romanticism to achieve its purposes. In order to fully understand how supernatural themes played such a large role in Romanticism, we must further explore what Romanticism really is. This spiritual and artistic movement rejected rationalism, and emerged as a reaction against ‘the age of enlightenment’, which put strong emphasis on reason and logic. Thus, for the Romantics, literary creation was what the artist produced after reconstructing or developing a new interpretation of the world around him. It was the offspring of imagination applied to the writer’s impressions of real life. Authors such as Coleridge, Blake, and Shelley, believed that literary creation was the product of transforming reality into something beyond reason, but not beyond the

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