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Industrial revolution and its impact
Industrial revolution and its impact
How the industrial movement impacted romanticism
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The Age of Enlightenment opened the doors to independent thinking and development in areas such as math, astronomy, politics, philosophy and many more. Toward the end of the Age of Enlightenment, the Romantic Era was born and it seemed to be in protest to the ideas that the Enlightenment had brought to society. Although both time periods were established around more independent thinking and growth, The Enlightenment and the Romantic Era contrast significantly. These two periods differed in almost every aspect, including (but not limited to): their beliefs, reasons for coming into being, and the impacts that they have had on society.
The contrast of beliefs between the Enlightenment and the Romantic Era is intense. They have complete opposite beliefs on most aspects minus their support of independent thinking and growth. In Life Magazine, it was said that, "There, is no truth, said the Enlightenment, which cannot stand the test of reason". The Enlightenment was all about sense over sensibility; people thrived for further knowledge with everything they could. On the other hand, the Romantic Era was very much focused on the imaginative part of knowledge. Carol Ferguson, a professor at Richard Stockton College, states in one of her lectures, “The logic, ordered, rational was gradually replaced with the magnitude of the imagination, the possibilities of intuition, the importance of the emotions, and the uniqueness of the individual”. Romanticism allowed people to deviate from the constrictions of strictly “logical” thinking of the Enlightenment and concentrate on the emotional and imaginatively curious side of learning. So while both periods started off focusing on learning new things and advancing society with knowledge, they had d...
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...r any “extremes” on the spectrum of sense and sensibility.
Works Cited
"Enlightenment." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2010. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 16 Aug. 2010 .
Ferguson, Carol. "LECTURE: THE ENLIGHTENMENT AND THE ROMANTIC ERA." The Richard Stockton College of New Jersey. Web. 18 Aug. 2010. .
Kreis, Steven. "Lecture 16: The Romantic Era." The History Guide. Web. 18 Aug. 2010. .
"Romanticism." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2010. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 17 Aug. 2010 .
"The Age of Enlightenment." LIFE Magazine 15 Sept. 1947: 75+. Web. 17 Aug. 2010. .
A time period known as The Age of Reason or The Enlightenment was when philosophy, politics, science and social communications changed drastically. It helped shape the ideas of capitalism and democracy, which is the world we live in today. People joined together to discuss areas of high intellect and creative thoughts. The Enlightenment was a time period in which people discussed new ideas, and educated people, known as philosophers, all had a central idea of freedom of choice and the natural right of individuals. These philosophers include John Locke, Voltaire, Adam Smith, and Mary Wollstonecraft.
...ls of the romantic revolution, the nobility of spirit and individuality must be preserved, and intellect, whether you had it or not, was part of this, because part of being individual was coming up with some of your own ideas, possessing uniqueness of thought. Once again, this evokes a certain emotional response from the person who interprets this pseudo intellectualism, and the feeling the reader has about it is an integral part in the establishment of an identity with the characters.
Hooker, Robert. "The European Enlightenment." The European Enlightenment. Washington State University, 6 June 1999. Web. 07 Feb. 2010. .
Niles, Patricia. “The Enlightenment.” Novaonline. Niles and C.T. Evans, 7 May 2011. Web. 13 Feb. 2012. .
In short, it can be seen that while there are some basic similarities between Enlightenment and Romantic thinking -- because of the fact that they do explore nature-- their convergence, ideologically, ends there. In fact, it seems that nature’s ability to be so subjective has led to the two ideologies being exact opposites in almost every regard. The Enlightenment focuses on human’s achievement in regard to nature, while Romanticism focuses on the insignificance of humans in comparison to the immensity of nature. It seems that, in the end, the movements of Enlightenment and Romanticism were just what the description entailed – moving. It can then be wholly concluded that the two movements were far more different than alike based on their ideologies and creations.
The Enlightenment of the 18th century was an exciting period of history. For the first time since ancient Grecian times, reason and logic became center in the thoughts of most of elite society. The urge to discover and to understand replaced religion as the major motivational ideal of the age, and the upper class social scene all over Europe was alive with livid debate on these new ideas.
The Enlightenment is a unique time in European history characterized by revolutions in science, philosophy, society, and politics. These revolutions put Europe in a transition from the medieval world-view to the modern western world. The traditional hierarchical political and social orders from the French monarchy and Catholic Church were destroyed and replaced by a political and social order from the Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality(Bristow, 1). Many historians, such as Henry Steele Commager, Peter Gay, have studied the Enlightenment over the years and created their own views and opinions.
Romanticism has been described as a “‘Protestantism in the arts and letters’, an ideological shift on the grand scale from conservative to liberal ideas”. (Keenan, 2005) It was a movement into the era of imagination and feelings instead of objective reasoning.
Spiegelman, Willard. "Revolutionary Romanticism." The Wall Street Journal. Dow Jones & Company, Aug. 2009. Web. Mar. 2014. http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970204119704574236393080650258
During the Age of enlightenment people began to reform society using reason, challenge ideas of tyranny and of the Roman Catholic Curch. People for the first time started advancing knowledge through the use of the scientific method. Enlightenment type thinking has had a huge impact on the culture, politics, and g...
Griffith University Faculty 1999, Romanticism And Modern Culture Readings Booklet, Griffith University.
The preceding Enlightenment period had depended upon reason, logic and science to give us knowledge, success, and a better society. The Romantics contested that idea and changed the formula...
The Enlightenment was a period in European culture and thought characterized as the “Age of Reason” and marked by very significant revolutions in the fields of philosophy, science, politics, and society (Bristow; The Age of Enlightenment). Roughly covering the mid 17th century throughout the 18th century, the period was actually fueled by an intellectual movement of the same name to which many thinkers subscribed to during the 1700s and 1800s. The Enlightenment's influences on Western society, as reflected in the arts, were in accordance with its major themes of rationalism, empiricism, natural rights and natural law or their implications of freedom and social justice. The Enlightenment began or could be said to have been propelled by the scientific revolution of the earlier centuries, particularly the Newtonian universe, as modernizing science gradually undermined the ancient Western geocentric idea of the universe as well as accompanying set of presuppositions that had been constraining and influencing philosophical inquiry (Bristow; Lewis; Mattey).
The Enlightenment was a period of increased literacy and public interest in literature and arts that promoted learning through reason and logic (134). Romantic wr...