Anna R :)
2011-04-16 04:49:57 UTC
The concept of Nature too was submitted to revolution. Nature was no longer seen as a philosophical idea, something which man could rule by reason; slowly it came to be felt as a real living being to be described as it actually was.
The importance of imagination and childhood
Imagination gained a key role as a means of giving expression to emotional experience not strictly accountable to reason. The willingness to explore less conscious aspects of feeling was accompanied by a serious concern about the experience of childhood. In a Romantic mind a child was purer than grown-up people because he was unspoilt by civilisation. His uncorrupted sensitiveness brought him closer to God and the sources of creation, therefore childhood was admired and cultivated.
Emphasis on the individual
Consequently great emphasis was placed on the significance of the individual. The Romantics saw the individual essentially in the solitary state; they exalted the atypical,the outcast, the rebel. This attitude led on the one hand to the cult of the hero-the “rebel” in Coleridge, the “Byronic hero”-, and on the other hand to the view of society as an evil force. The current of thought represented by Jean- Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) encouraged the notion that the conventions of civilisation represented intolerable restrictions on the individual personality and produced every kind of corruption and evil. It followed that “natural” behaviour ,that is to say, unrestrained and impulsive, is good, in contrast to behaviour which is governed by reason, and by the rules and customs of society.
The cult of the exotic
Rousseau’s theories also influenced the “cult of the exotic”,that which is far away both in space and in time. Not only were the picturesque and the frightening in scenery welcomed, but also the remote and the unfamiliar in custom and social outlook . The remotest parts of Europe and the Near East had the appeal of being strange and unpredictable; danger and disaster, adventure and the inexplicable became symbols for other modes of human experience as shown in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Coleridge.