Romantic > Intro
Romanticism was the dominant aesthetic movement of the late eighteenth
century and continued to shape European intellectual and artistic
life throughout the nineteenth century. Romanticism had its roots
in Neoclassicism’s praise of reason, with its corollary emphasis
on the value of the individual as the source of knowledge. Thus,
both Neoclassicism and Romanticism are aspects of the important shift
in Western intellectual history known as the Enlightenment, which
gave rise to modern democratic and liberation movements, new literary
forms such as the novel , and the notion of the artist as a prophet
or bard who stands outside of society and as such, has a valuable
perspective for the rest of us. Romantics admired what they saw as
the democratic ideals of ancient Greece rather than the imperial
ones of ancient Rome.
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