The same adjective " romantic" is used for the two nouns. So majority of people associate being romantic with romance , that is love affection and courtship experience. However, to literary critics , romantic love is impossible love that seeks freedom in a rigid society. Romance Literature is 17th century English Elizabethan period whereas Romanticism Literature is 19th century literary of rebellion in Europe.
Principles of Romanticism are nights, dreams, imagination, nature and double. These are defended by romantic writers to negotiate for freedom through their works. In fact, Romance Literature is the father of Romanticism since it contains impossible love and courtship experience.
I think there is difference between Romance and Romanticism. In my view, Romance is the creation of a world of all possibilities and where the hero or heroine is living in a world of never-never time and never-never space! Romanticism, I see, is learning from nature what we don't like or have in society: Romanticism is of two types: the 19th century Romanticism, where nature dictates its inspiration and where the individual is lost within its beauties and bounties, and neo-Romanticism, where the individual is more active: The individual gives sense to nature, whereas the 19th century Romanticism, Nature gives to the individual.
In Gothic Romanticism the symbols often revolve around mirrrors, voyages, and vortices. Incest and narcissism are common themes, as well as Promethean revolt against stifling and fossilized dictates of the gods and, as with Frankenstein, subversion of the natural order and porteayal of the ego as the ultimate vortex or whirlpool. Much of Poe’s incredible work falls in this category, including the little-revognized masterpiece, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.
Romance Literature predates Romanticism - the latter is a late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century aesthetic break from the values of the Enlightenment: the primacy of reason, science and empiricism. Romanticism prioritizes emotion and feeling ('sensibility'), advocates an introspective return to Nature (not as an external fact but a state of being) and questions the social and psychic ramifications of the Industrial Revolution- the quantification and commodification of culture, the rise of utilitarianism and a disassociation between thought and feeling. Romance, on the other hand, is a medieval mode of writing that utilises tropes of adventure, chivalry ('the knight in shining armour' and 'the damsel in distress') and the supernatural to invoke a world that the modern reader finds distinctly unrealistic and escapist ('King Arthur and the Round Table' is a representative example).
Romanticism refers to a literary movement in the 18th century, led primarily by literary giants like Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, Coleridge, and Shelley, advocating freedom of expression and emotion, and the wonders of Nature. Romance literature is not a literary movement led by literary poets, but rather simply a genre of literature one might find in novels written by latter day novelists like Danielle Steele, stressing romantic love within the melodrama of human relationships.
In hispanic culture, "romance": a) designs the idioms issued from latin, b) also, a love's story, c) a form of poetry (8 syllabs and no consonantic rime) practized at both levels, popular and cultivated. For the meaning of love's story, I dont see differences, in hispanic world, between superficial or absolute relation. The strophism of "romance" knows a long and fecond life, between centuries XV and XXI.
The romanticim (XIX) focuses his attention on conlficts between the individuals and the society, in the fields philosophical, political (freedom for Greece, Poland, etc.), ethical, artistic (frenc theater against the classics "three rules") etc. One of the fiedls of rebellion is the love, with the plot of impossible love ("Werther" of Goethe) but we can found also narrations of possible love. The romantic love is not "alwaya impossible.
I can understand confusion here. "Romance" is a linguistic term, referring to all literature in any of the Romance languages: French, Italian, Spanish...
"Romanticism" is a genre or style of literature in any language. Romantic literature is part of the Romantic movement of the 19th Century that rebelled against the neo-Classical 18th Century. You find this all over Europe including Russia because this term has nothing to do with language families. Modern romance novels have followed a kind of romantic format in that a gallant man can rescue a woman from scary surroundings a la Jane Eyre. Neo-romantic fiction can come from anywhere in the world.
Make sense?
Is William Shakespeare a playwright of Romance or Romanticism? He was the pioneer of Romanticism because he was a rebel writer in English Romance of Elizabethan period. Is Victor Hugo a playwright of Romance or Romanticism? He is a playwright of 19th century in France. Romance depicts the feelings that occur in love relationship, courtship and secret lovers or impossible lovers. Romanticism is a philosophy of freedom that is manifested in Literature, Fine Arts, Music and painting of the 19th Century in Europe and America. Going out of Literature, Romanticism is a spirit of quest for endless freedom, pursing impossible dreams, being subjective and individualistic in approach and being insatiable in anything.
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