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Romanticism   /roʊmˈæntəsˌɪzəm/   Listen
Romanticism

noun
1.
Impractical romantic ideals and attitudes.
2.
A movement in literature and art during the late 18th and early 19th centuries that celebrated nature rather than civilization.  Synonym: Romantic Movement.
3.
An exciting and mysterious quality (as of a heroic time or adventure).  Synonym: romance.






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"Romanticism" Quotes from Famous Books



... scented all this crass and forward romanticism between the trivial lines of her communications; "why does she write, when she hasn't got ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller

... literary tastes; but there the resemblance ceases. It was not that there was nothing romantic in Hortense's character; she was among the first to become interested in the Middle Ages, the Gothic revival, the imitation of the troubadours; but her romanticism was wholly different from that of her husband. Her ideal was, perhaps, a young and handsome soldier, pensive when away from the lady of his thoughts, but not when in her company." M. Rville goes on: "Such a character could not ...
— The Court of the Empress Josephine • Imbert de Saint-Amand

... surrender of the cause, but the count was ultra-romantic, ultra-patriotic, ultra-Italian all over in point of fact. Not even for love's sake would he throw over his country, and, oddly enough, it was this bit of romanticism which clinched the ...
— In Direst Peril • David Christie Murray

... call upon them to protect German ways and German customs." The Kaiser's crusading appeals are not hypocritical or consciously insincere: they are simply many centuries out of date—a grotesque medley of medieval romanticism and royal megalomania. What was possible for the warrior knights in North-East Germany five or six centuries ago is a tragic absurdity and an outrageous crime to-day among a spirited and sensitive people like the Poles—still more so in a highly civilised national ...
— The War and Democracy • R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern,

... wrote German with a French accent and a warrior who seems to have wandered out of the pages of mediaeval romance. Yet with all his mock-heroic notoriety, the toller Pueckler was by no means destitute of those practical qualities which tempered the Teutonic Romanticism, even in its earliest and most extravagant developments. He was skilled in all manly exercises, a brave soldier, an intelligent observer, and—his most substantial claim to remembrance—the father of landscape-gardening in Germany, a veritable ...
— Little Memoirs of the Nineteenth Century • George Paston

... this unsympathetic attitude. But when every deduction is made, it is impossible to deny their importance and significance. For they represent a distinct stage in an organized movement—the reaction against romanticism in the novel and lyrism in the theatre. And there is some basis for their bold assertion that they led the way in every other development of the modern French novel. They believed that they had founded the naturalistic ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt

... his face to the past, gazed sorrowfully at Carthage and wrote an epic of the French bourgeois. Zola and his crowd delved into a moral morass, and the world grew weary of them. And then the faint, fading flowers of romanticism were put into albums where their purple harmonies and subtle sayings are pressed into sweet twilight forgetfulness. Berlioz, mad Hector of the flaming locks, whose orchestral ozone vivified the scores of Wagnerand Liszt, began to sound garishly empty, brilliantly superficial; "the ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker

... have been accorded any welcome had I been anything but an ordinary person. Let this be waived. I was as covered with "fads" as a distinguished foreigner with stars. Naturalism I wore round my neck, Romanticism was pinned over the heart, Symbolism I carried like a toy revolver in my waistcoat pocket, to be used on an emergency. I do not judge whether I was charlatan or genius, I merely state that I found all—actors, ...
— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore

... word, with the advantages of ripeness and perhaps of boldness." Such a change would be suited also to the new aspect of society. In literature it was no longer the time for training, tending, and watering, but the season of gathering the fruit, selecting the good and rejecting the unsound. Romanticism as a school had done its work and was now extinct. Every one went his separate way. Questions of form were no longer mooted; the public tolerated everything. Whoever had an idea on any subject wrote about it, and whoever chose to write was a litterateur. "With ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 102, April, 1866 • Various

... girl to consult her mirror, and to foreknow that the King of England would probably be in love with her for months and months: but then, as she philosophically reflected, all women have to submit to being annoyed by the romanticism of men. So she dried her big bright eyes, and sent ...
— Figures of Earth • James Branch Cabell

... to the clear and penetrating intellect of Grimm, with its vein of German romanticism, that Mme. d'Epinay was indebted for the finest appreciation and the most genuine sympathy. "Bon Dieu," he writes to Diderot, "how this woman is to be pitied! I should not be troubled about her if she were as strong as she is courageous. She is sweet and trusting; ...
— The Women of the French Salons • Amelia Gere Mason

... they were invested by youthful imagination, become absolutely loathsome—just as when we see tamely by daylight the tawdry stage which last night made a world for us full of all the paraphernalia of high romanticism—silver and velvet robes, plumed hats, dim woodland vistas and the echo of a distant high note, youthful beauty, rope-ladders, balconies, daggers, poison, and passionate love-strains. This skeleton framework of the illusion, these well-worn contrivances, tarnished gold lace and mock ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various

... Edward H. Cole, is a pleasing and judicious appreciation of a later Latin poet, showing how a bard of the decaying Roman Empire approached in certain passages the spirit of modern romanticism. Mr. Cole's translated extracts are beautifully phrased, and his comment upon the subject well exhibits his wide and careful scholarship. Articles of this quality are rarely found in the amateur press, and it will be interesting to note what effect their more ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft

... that had we only been "taken" in the Paris of that period as we had been taken in New York we might have come in for celebrities—supremely fine, perhaps supremely rank, flowers of the histrionic temperament, springing as they did from the soil of the richest romanticism and adding to its richness—who practised that braver art and finer finish which a comparatively homogenous public, forming a compact critical body, still left possible. Rachel was alive, but dying; ...
— A Small Boy and Others • Henry James

... more than once that such pre-emancipation periods, including those that evidently prove abortive, offer the most favorable conditions for all kinds of mental and cultural revolutions. Liberty as a hope invariably arouses greater enthusiasm for self-rejuvenation, than liberty as a fact, when the romanticism of the unknown ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow



Words linked to "Romanticism" :   artistic style, humanistic discipline, arts, classicism, romantic, stardust, idealism, romanticist, humanities, liberal arts, idiom, romanticistic, Romantic Movement, quality



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