Teaching the Romantic Mind

Abstract

mously complex historical events, like Renaissance and Reformation, which have been found useful in highlighting some features of a period, but which historians constantly warn us not to take too seriously. The term romanticism was first used in the late nineteenth century to point up a set of characteristics that seemed especially prominent in the works of some writers and artists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. People like Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, and so on, would likely have been puzzled to hear themselves called romantics, as a romance to them was a kind of gothic narrative inhabited by peculiar characters like Sir Galahad-hardly their cup of tea. But the term was chosen to highlight a set of characteristics, some of which can be quite easily listed: delight in the exotic, emphasis on individualism, revolt against conventional forms, stress on the importance of imagination, intense inquiry about the self, resistance to order and reason, glorification of transcendent human qualities, and so