Romanticism towards history

Abstract

The article concerns the attitude of Romanticism to history: the phenomenon of historicism and its pre-Romantic development, reaching out to the traditions of other cultures and nations, publication of works distant in time and space, the cult of the North and medievalism, interest in pre-Christian times and in the Middle Ages. Another perspective is constituted by relativisation of the point and time of reference in aesthetics, religion and poetic, visual and musical imagination, the emergence of the concept of picturesqueness, which defies clearly defined criteria, and also historicism. The issues of freedom and patriotism, determined by the historical situation of various countries, contribute to the special places in romantic culture held by Greece (its culture, art and eventual decline) and Poland. Names mentioned in the article include: Giambattista Vico, Montesquieu, Edward Gibbon, George Gordon Byron, William Wordsworth, Horace Walpole, John Keats, Robert Southey, Walter Scott, Thomas Percy, James Macpherson, Johann Gottfried Herder, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Johann Joachim Winckelmann Ludwig Tieck, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Ludwig Uhland, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Julius Mosen, Joseph von Eichendorff, Paul Henri Mallet, Adam Gottlob Oehlenschläger, Esaias Tegnér, João Baptista Almeida Garrett, Alfred de Vigny, Alfred de Musset, Alphonse de Lamartine, René de Chateaubriand, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Prosper Mérimée, Victor Hugo Alessandro Manzoni, Silvio Pellico, Juan Eugenio Harzenbusch, José Zorrilla, Dhionísios Solomós, Sandor Petöfi, Joachim Lelewel, Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki, Zygmunt Krasiński.