ENGL200B Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: French Revolution, On Being, Anna Laetitia Barbauld
Document Summary
In everyday usage, people take romantic to mean mushy or pertaining to a private and usually sexual relationship between two people, usually a man and a woman . As such, this meaning of romantic has nothing to do with the period from about 1785-1830 which literary scholars designate as the period of romanticism. In fact, our private feelings are radically political, and we no longer even see it, largely due to the achievement of european romanticism, which, during a forty year period at the end of the. 18th c. and the beginning of the 19th c. , established for themselves and for all of us afterward, the right to self-expression. Important artists and theoreticians in germany (goethe 1749-1832: werther 1774), france (rousseau 1712-1778; social contract 1762; confessions 1782) and england, in particular. Strictly defined, romanticism took place between two groups of revolutions: the first and most crucial was the french revolution (1789; king louis xvi executed.
