| Neo-Classicism, Age of Reason, Enlightenment (1660s-1770s) | Romanticism (1770s-1830s) |
|---|---|
| head | heart |
| reason | feeling, passion, imagination |
| humans as social beings (products of social order) | humans as natural beings (products of Nature) |
| respect for authority | questioning of authority, identification with and love of Nature |
| symmetry, balance, harmony | diagonals, dynamic motion |
| stability | challenge to status quo |
| hierarchy | democracy |
| universality | individualism, egocentrism |
| conformity, representative truths | eccentricity, idiosyncrasy |
| tradition | originality |
| decorum | rebellion against form |
| measure and proportion | intensity, excess |
| clarity, simplicity | mysticism, ornateness |
| restraint, self-restraint | indulgence of feeling |
| public, daytime orientation | private, night orientation; joys of solitude |
| rational sense to universe: patterns, laws, meaning | mysterious universe: hidden, dark forces, the supernatural |
| mechanistic world | organic world |
| present world | exotic and medieval subjects |
| real world | yearning for the infinite and the ideal |
| sensibility as moral force | |
| sense of the sublime | |
| melancholy musings | |
| importance of childhood and the past | |
| impossibility of happy love | |
| Noble Savage | |
| Byronic hero | |
| Gothic world: morbid, forbidden impulses, animality, illicit forces | |
| René Decartes, French philosopher. "Cogito ergo sum." ("I think: therefore I am.") Discourse of Method (1637). | Jean-Jacques Rousseau, French writer. "Exister, pour nous, c'est sentir: et notre sensibilité est incontestablement antérieure à notre raison." ("For us, existence is feeling: and our capacity to feel inarguably precedes our reason.") Moral Letters. |
Copyright © 1997 by Bozenna Goscilo. All rights reserved.