Question

explain the overlapping of the arts that occurred in Romantic times. please

Answer 1

Okay, this is a long answer: Changes in society, beginning in the 18th century and continuing into our own time, underlie the romantic movement. It starts as a reaction against the intellectualism of the Enlightenment, against the rigidity of social structures protecting privilege, and against the materialism of an age which, in the first stirring of the Industrial Revolution, already shows signs of making workers the slaves of machinery and of creating squalid urban environments.

Unlike classicism or the baroque, romanticism has no definable standards. Indeed rejection of rules is almost a touchstone of the romantic temperament.










As a result a mood which pervades much of western life during the past two centuries is hard to define except in terms of opposites. The romantic temperament responds to emotion rather than reason, is excited by mystery rather than persuaded by clarity, listens more intently to the individual conscience than to the demands of society, and prefers rebellion to acceptance.

This is a mood which can inspire political activists as much as artists. It can result in the irresistible crescendo of a romantic symphony or in a mock-medieval castle perched dramatically above a craggy ravine. It can range in merit from great poetry to sentimental tales in magazines.








The new mood begins to appear in the 1760s. The year 1761 sees the publication of an immensely successful novel which satisfies both the yearnings of romanticism and the demands of convention. Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Julie, ou la Nouvelle Hélöse echoes in its title the great medieval romance of Abelard and Héloïse.

Like the true story, the novel begins with passion and ends in respectability. Julie falls in love with her tutor, St Preux, and yields to her feelings. She is forced to marry an elderly baron. Knowing his wife's inclination but trusting her honour, the baron invites St Preux to become tutor to his children. Virtue prevails. The readers, stirred by the sentiments of the first part, can relax.








The theme of impossible love in a marital triangle reappears a decade later in Germany in The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774), a romantic novel even more successful than La Nouvelle Héloi°se - and one providing the tragic end which the story demands.

Meanwhile romantics in Britain are seeking out the mysterious romance of long-forgotten literature (in Macpherson's Celtic researches) and the awesome appeal of hitherto unappreciated landscapes (in the quest for the picturesque)