Knowra German Romanticism German Romanticism German Romanticism was a late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century movement in literature, philosophy, music, and the arts. It emphasized imagination, emotion, nature, and the sublime, often resisting rigid rules and purely rational accounts of experience.
Sturm und Drang : A late eighteenth-century German literary movement that championed emotional intensity, individual freedom, and resistance to convention. Its rebellious emphasis on feeling and individuality helped prepare the ground for Romanticism.
Novalis : The pen name of Friedrich von Hardenberg, a German poet and prose writer associated with Early Romanticism. His fragments and poetry embody the movement’s search for unity between poetry, philosophy, and life.
Friedrich Schlegel : A German critic and philosopher who helped shape Early Romanticism through literary criticism and aphorisms. His theory of progressive, fragmentary poetry articulated the movement’s experimental literary ideals.
Weimar Classicism : A German literary and cultural movement associated especially with Goethe and Schiller in Weimar around 1786–1805. Its ideals of balance and classical form differed from Romanticism’s emphasis on longing and the fragmentary.
Romantic nationalism : A form of nationalism that grounds collective identity in shared language, history, folklore, and culture. Romantic interest in folk traditions and cultural distinctiveness helped shape this political current.
Sublime : An aesthetic experience of overwhelming grandeur or power that exceeds ordinary comprehension. Romantic artists made overwhelming nature and feeling central sources of aesthetic experience.
Heinrich von Ofterdingen : An unfinished novel by Novalis, published posthumously in 1802, about a young poet’s formation. Its blue flower became an emblem of Romantic longing and poetic possibility.
August Wilhelm Schlegel : A German critic, translator, and poet whose lectures and translations helped establish Romantic literary criticism. His criticism and translations carried Romantic interpretations of literature across languages.
Neoclassicism : An artistic movement that revived the forms and ideals of ancient Greek and Roman art. Its preference for classical order provides a foil to Romantic fascination with wildness and the infinite.
Brothers Grimm : Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were German scholars who collected and published folktales and studied language. Their collection of folk narratives reflected Romantic efforts to preserve vernacular culture.
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