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Essays on Romanticism

What makes a good romanticism essay topics.

When it comes to writing an essay on Romanticism, choosing the right topic is crucial. A good essay topic should be engaging, thought-provoking, and provide ample opportunity for critical analysis. But how do you go about brainstorming and choosing the right topic for your Romanticism essay? Here are some recommendations to consider:

  • First, it's important to consider your interests and passions. What aspect of Romanticism speaks to you the most? Whether it's the literature, art, music, or philosophy of the Romantic period, choosing a topic that resonates with you will make the writing process much more enjoyable and fulfilling.
  • Next, consider the scope of your essay. Are you looking to explore a specific theme, literary work, or artist from the Romantic period? Narrowing down your focus will help you to delve deeper into the subject matter and provide a more comprehensive analysis.
  • It's also important to consider the availability of research material. A good Romanticism essay topic should have ample scholarly sources and critical analysis available to support your arguments and insights.
  • Finally, a good essay topic should be original and unique. Avoid choosing overused or cliché topics, and instead, look for fresh and innovative ideas that will captivate your readers and demonstrate your creativity and critical thinking skills.

Best Romanticism Essay Topics

  • The Role of Nature in Romantic Literature
  • The Influence of Romanticism on Modern Art
  • The Sublime in Romantic Poetry
  • Gender and Sexuality in Romantic Literature
  • Individualism and Rebellion in Romantic Philosophy
  • The Romantic Hero in Literature and Film
  • The Gothic and Romanticism
  • Romanticism and the Industrial Revolution
  • Nationalism and Romanticism in Music
  • Romantic Love in Poetry and Prose
  • Transcendentalism and Romanticism
  • The Romantics and the Supernatural
  • The Influence of Romanticism on Environmentalism
  • Romanticism and Revolution
  • The Romantics and the City
  • Folklore and Mythology in Romantic Literature
  • Romanticism and the Subversion of Traditional Values
  • The Romantics and the Cult of Emotion
  • The Romantics and the Exotic
  • Romanticism and the Pursuit of the Ideal Self

Romanticism essay topics Prompts

  • Imagine you are a Romantic poet living in the 19th century. Write a letter to a fellow poet discussing your views on nature and its role in your poetry.
  • Choose a piece of Romantic art and analyze how it reflects the ideals and themes of the Romantic movement.
  • Create a modern-day adaptation of a Romantic literary work, setting it in a contemporary context and exploring how the themes and ideas of the original text are still relevant today.
  • Compare and contrast the portrayal of love and relationships in two Romantic literary works, exploring how they reflect the cultural and social values of the Romantic period.
  • Write a persuasive essay arguing for the importance of studying Romanticism in the modern-day, demonstrating how the ideas and themes of the Romantic period continue to resonate and influence contemporary culture and society.

Choosing a good Romanticism essay topic requires careful consideration and creativity. By following these recommendations and exploring the best Romanticism essay topics and prompts provided, you'll be well on your way to crafting an engaging and insightful essay that demonstrates your understanding and appreciation of the Romantic period.

Enlightenment Vs. Romanticism: Unveiling Similarities

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The Romantic Era: Imagination as a Rebellion Against Rationalism

Nature and the speaker's mind in wordsworth's "i wandered lonely as a cloud", the romanticism of wordsworth and shelley: a poetry of the "happiest moments", representation of romanticism in edgar allen poe’s poetry, let us write you an essay from scratch.

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Romanticism in The Masque of The Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe

William wordsworth’s expostulation and reply: a neoclassical and romantic analysis, review on the relationship between poetic form and political significance, isolation and the sublime in rousseau and wordsworth, get a personalized essay in under 3 hours.

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Comparison of William Blake and William Wordsworth's Writing Styles

Class system and morality in jane austen's novels, two interpretations of "a slumber did my spirit seal", primary and secondary nature in wordsworth’s "the thorn", the union of opposing elements by wordsworth and coleridge, victorian, romantic and modernist literature: style as cultural commentary, naturalism in tintern abbey, european romanticism in the 19th century and its role in the rene novella, how learning leads to the sublime in the works of william wordsworth, the creative function of ekphrasis in the work of shelley, keats, and wordsworth, romanticism: love and revolution, analyzing romanticism in pushkin's "the shot", sublimity in wordsworth and smith, forms of psychoanalysis in keats, smith and wordsworth, analysis of "mariana", a common theme in hardy’s "arcadia" and stoppard’s "poems 1912-1913’, wordsworth’s references to nature in resolution and independence, planning a romantic gateway for your loved one’s, the rise of musical romanticism, the act of travel in wordsworth’s "i travelled among unknown men".

From the late 18th to the mid-19th century.

Romanticism was an artistic, historiographical, literary, musical, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe somewhere between 1770 to 1850. This movement is typically emphasized individualism, imagination and strong emotion.

In literature, Romanticism presented such themes as the cult of "sensibility" with its emphasis on women and children, the isolation of the artist or narrator and respect for nature. The Scottish poet James Macpherson influenced the early development of Romanticism. An early German influence came from Goethe with the novel "The Sorrows of Young Werther". The poets such as Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Byron were the key figures in Romanticism in English literature.

Nature was a main source of inspiration in the visual arts of the Romantic Movement. Romantic artists depicted nature as beautiful, powerful, unpredictable and destructive. The most known artists of the movement was Caspar David Friedrich, J. M. W. Turner, Thomas Bewick, Samuel Palmer, John Constable.

The term “Romanticism” appeared in music from the 1820s until 1910. The Romantic Movement in music was marked by emphasis on individuality, personal emotional expression, freedom and experimentation of form. The most known Romantic composers in Europe were Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn, Frédéric Chopin, Hector Berlioz, Felix Mendelssohn, and latest works of Ludwig van Beethoven.

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essay on romanticism

Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History Essays

  • Romanticism

Boxers

Théodore Gericault

Evening: Landscape with an Aqueduct

Evening: Landscape with an Aqueduct

Alfred Dedreux (1810–1860) as a Child

Alfred Dedreux (1810–1860) as a Child

The Start of the Race of the Riderless Horses

The Start of the Race of the Riderless Horses

Horace Vernet

Jean-Louis-André-Théodore Gericault (1791–1824)

Jean-Louis-André-Théodore Gericault (1791–1824)

Inundated Ruins of a Monastery

Inundated Ruins of a Monastery

Karl Blechen

Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds

Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds

John Constable

Faust

Eugène Delacroix

Royal Tiger

Royal Tiger

Stormy Coast Scene after a Shipwreck

Stormy Coast Scene after a Shipwreck

French Painter

Mother and Child by the Sea

Mother and Child by the Sea

Johan Christian Dahl

The Natchez

The Natchez

Wanderer in the Storm

Wanderer in the Storm

Julius von Leypold

The Abduction of Rebecca

The Abduction of Rebecca

Jewish Woman of Algiers Seated on the Ground

Jewish Woman of Algiers Seated on the Ground

Théodore Chassériau

Sunset

The Virgin Adoring the Host

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres

Ovid among the Scythians

Ovid among the Scythians

Kathryn Calley Galitz Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

October 2004

Romanticism, first defined as an aesthetic in literary criticism around 1800, gained momentum as an artistic movement in France and Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century and flourished until mid-century. With its emphasis on the imagination and emotion, Romanticism emerged as a response to the disillusionment with the Enlightenment values of reason and order in the aftermath of the French Revolution of 1789. Though often posited in opposition to Neoclassicism , early Romanticism was shaped largely by artists trained in Jacques Louis David’s studio, including Baron Antoine Jean Gros, Anne Louis Girodet-Trioson, and Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. This blurring of stylistic boundaries is best expressed in Ingres’ Apotheosis of Homer and Eugène Delacroix’s Death of Sardanapalus (both Museé du Louvre, Paris), which polarized the public at the Salon of 1827 in Paris. While Ingres’ work seemingly embodied the ordered classicism of David in contrast to the disorder and tumult of Delacroix, in fact both works draw from the Davidian tradition but each ultimately subverts that model, asserting the originality of the artist—a central notion of Romanticism.

In Romantic art, nature—with its uncontrollable power, unpredictability, and potential for cataclysmic extremes—offered an alternative to the ordered world of Enlightenment thought. The violent and terrifying images of nature conjured by Romantic artists recall the eighteenth-century aesthetic of the Sublime. As articulated by the British statesman Edmund Burke in a 1757 treatise and echoed by the French philosopher Denis Diderot a decade later, “all that stuns the soul, all that imprints a feeling of terror, leads to the sublime.” In French and British painting of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the recurrence of images of shipwrecks ( 2003.42.56 ) and other representations of man’s struggle against the awesome power of nature manifest this sensibility. Scenes of shipwrecks culminated in 1819 with Théodore Gericault’s strikingly original Raft of the Medusa (Louvre), based on a contemporary event. In its horrifying explicitness, emotional intensity, and conspicuous lack of a hero, The Raft of the Medusa became an icon of the emerging Romantic style. Similarly, J. M. W. Turner’s 1812 depiction of Hannibal and his army crossing the Alps (Tate, London), in which the general and his troops are dwarfed by the overwhelming scale of the landscape and engulfed in the swirling vortex of snow, embodies the Romantic sensibility in landscape painting. Gericault also explored the Romantic landscape in a series of views representing different times of day; in Evening: Landscape with an Aqueduct ( 1989.183 ), the dramatic sky, blasted tree, and classical ruins evoke a sense of melancholic reverie.

Another facet of the Romantic attitude toward nature emerges in the landscapes of John Constable , whose art expresses his response to his native English countryside. For his major paintings, Constable executed full-scale sketches, as in a view of Salisbury Cathedral ( 50.145.8 ); he wrote that a sketch represents “nothing but one state of mind—that which you were in at the time.” When his landscapes were exhibited in Paris at the Salon of 1824, critics and artists embraced his art as “nature itself.” Constable’s subjective, highly personal view of nature accords with the individuality that is a central tenet of Romanticism.

This interest in the individual and subjective—at odds with eighteenth-century rationalism—is mirrored in the Romantic approach to portraiture. Traditionally, records of individual likeness, portraits became vehicles for expressing a range of psychological and emotional states in the hands of Romantic painters. Gericault probed the extremes of mental illness in his portraits of psychiatric patients, as well as the darker side of childhood in his unconventional portrayals of children. In his portrait of Alfred Dedreux ( 41.17 ), a young boy of about five or six, the child appears intensely serious, more adult than childlike, while the dark clouds in the background convey an unsettling, ominous quality.

Such explorations of emotional states extended into the animal kingdom, marking the Romantic fascination with animals as both forces of nature and metaphors for human behavior. This curiosity is manifest in the sketches of wild animals done in the menageries of Paris and London in the 1820s by artists such as Delacroix, Antoine-Louis Barye, and Edwin Landseer. Gericault depicted horses of all breeds—from workhorses to racehorses—in his work. Lord Byron’s 1819 tale of Mazeppa tied to a wild horse captivated Romantic artists from Delacroix to Théodore Chassériau, who exploited the violence and passion inherent in the story. Similarly, Horace Vernet, who exhibited two scenes from Mazeppa in the Salon of 1827 (both Musée Calvet, Avignon), also painted the riderless horse race that marked the end of the Roman Carnival, which he witnessed during his 1820 visit to Rome. His oil sketch ( 87.15.47 ) captures the frenetic energy of the spectacle, just before the start of the race. Images of wild, unbridled animals evoked primal states that stirred the Romantic imagination.

Along with plumbing emotional and behavioral extremes, Romantic artists expanded the repertoire of subject matter, rejecting the didacticism of Neoclassical history painting in favor of imaginary and exotic subjects. Orientalism and the worlds of literature stimulated new dialogues with the past as well as the present. Ingres’ sinuous odalisques ( 38.65 ) reflect the contemporary fascination with the exoticism of the harem, albeit a purely imagined Orient, as he never traveled beyond Italy. In 1832, Delacroix journeyed to Morocco, and his trip to North Africa prompted other artists to follow. In 1846, Chassériau documented his visit to Algeria in notebooks filled with watercolors and drawings, which later served as models for paintings done in his Paris studio ( 64.188 ). Literature offered an alternative form of escapism. The novels of Sir Walter Scott, the poetry of Lord Byron, and the drama of Shakespeare transported art to other worlds and eras. Medieval England is the setting of Delacroix’s tumultuous Abduction of Rebecca ( 03.30 ), which illustrates an episode from Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe .

In its stylistic diversity and range of subjects, Romanticism defies simple categorization. As the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1846, “Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor in exact truth, but in a way of feeling.”

Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “Romanticism.” In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History . New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/roma/hd_roma.htm (October 2004)

Further Reading

Brookner, Anita. Romanticism and Its Discontents . New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux; : , 2000.

Honour, Hugh. Romanticism . New York: Harper & Row, 1979.

Additional Essays by Kathryn Calley Galitz

  • Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “ The Legacy of Jacques Louis David (1748–1825) .” (October 2004)
  • Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “ Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) .” (May 2009)
  • Galitz, Kathryn Calley. “ The French Academy in Rome .” (October 2003)

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  1. Free Romanticism Essays and Research P…

    October 2004. Romanticism, first defined as an aesthetic in literary criticism around 1800, gained momentum as an artistic movement in France and Britain in the early decades of the nineteenth century and flourished until mid-century. With its emphasis on the imagination …