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WHAT IS NEO-ROMANTICISM?
Neo-Romanticism is a broad tendency in the arts. It is not limited to the British Isles, and can be found in other nations. The high-art mode has been particularly strong in Eastern Europe, while a vigourous pop-culture hybrid form has grown up in symbiosis with Japanese culture. The neo-Romantic arts may share some or many of the following characteristics:- a strong interest in archetypes, myth, often outside (or perhaps at the heretical edges of) traditional religion. cultivation of a "natural supernaturalist" experience - experiencing an other-worldly immanence through the bringing-to-bear of inner experience upon the world of nature. cultivation of a mystical/visionary sense of homeland in the British landscape, usually a rural or garden landscape. cultivation of a "sense of place", often through cherishing the history-in-landscape elements. a longing for perfect love, youthful beauty and innocence. an interest in arcadian or transfigured landscapes, nature reclaiming ruins. an interest in the 'outsider' hero, and romantic death. distrustful of ideological or theoretical ways of comprehending art. trusting of human intuition and dreams, acknowledging that being human is about desire and fantasy as much as reason. loyalty to a traditional English way of life. Neo-romanticism has tended to shed, somewhat, the emphasis of Romanticism on 'the hero' and a Byronic romantic nationalism. venerating the romantic past, while having the ability to think intelligently and creatively about the past, and thus to consider how it might be re-presented or re-imagined through the arts. (Thus going beyond static and curatorial 'folk-ism', that which merely names and pickles the past). at its gloomier fringes, neo-Romanticism can blur into goth darkness & a rudderless aesthetic decadence. A pertinent criticism of neo-Romanticism is that it tends to lack an adequate conception of evil in the modern world. one can also note a close correlation between sexual non-conformity and the exploration and uses of the modes of neo-romanticism.
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Made in Staffordshire, England. © 2007.
Last updated: 18th Jan 2007. Site search by PicoSearch. Some of the initial E-BNR text was sourced or partly derived from Wikipedia, used here under the GNU licence. | ||||||||||||||||||||
