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Neo-romanticism is an art movement that emphasizes internal feelings and emotions, inspired by the Romantic era and a reaction to naturalism, modernism, and postmodernism. It covers painting, literature, and music and promotes the power of imagination, the exotic, and the unfamiliar. The movement seeks to revive romanticism and medievalism and includes the expression of strong emotions, supernatural experiences, and semi-mystical evocations. It continues into the 20th and 21st centuries and has been used to depict the grim experiences of war. Famous neo-romantic painters include Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, and Eugene Berman, while writers include JRR Tolkien and Dylan Thomas. The term has also been used in music, starting from 1950 onwards.
Neo-romanticism is a broad, border-crossing movement in art that placed more importance on the depiction of internal feelings. It started as a reaction to naturalism in the 19th century and was inspired by the Romantic era, but has since become a reaction to modernism and postmodernism. Neoromanticism began in Britain around the 19th century but later spread to other parts of the world including Eastern Europe, America and even India. It covers painting, literature and music.
Characteristics of neo-romanticism include the expression of strong emotions such as terror, awe, horror and love. The movement sought to revive romanticism and medievalism by promoting the power of the imagination, the exotic and the unfamiliar. Other features include the promotion of supernatural experiences, the use of and interest in Jungian archetypes, and the semi-mystical evocation of home and nation.
Human emotions were as important as the supernatural. Neo-romanticism sought to promote ideas such as perfect love, the beauty of youth, heroes and romantic deaths. These included the romantic traditions of Lord Byron.
In terms of style, the paintings tended to veer towards the historical and the natural. There has been a conscious and intellectual movement away from the ugly machine of the Industrial Revolution and towards the streamlined beauty of a bygone era. Most of this was nostalgia mixed with fantasy, ideas of the past stripped of their grim reality.
Neo-Romanticism continued into the 20th and 21st centuries in painting. Perhaps they reached their peak after World War I and again after World War II when the style was used to depict the grim experiences of war. Such paintings include Keith Vaughn’s “Communication of Hate” and John Caxton’s “Dreamer in Landscape.” Other famous neo-romantic painters include Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland and Eugene Berman.
Writers and poets from Lewis Carroll to Alan Ginsberg have been called neoromantics. Other writers include JRR Tolkien and Dylan Thomas. Tolkien, for example, was influenced by the landscapes of the village of Sarehole in relation to the devastation of nearby Birmingham by the Industrial Revolution. This juxtaposition strongly influenced his writing and The Lord of the Rings contains a number of neo-romantic features including the comparison of the love of nature seen in the Hobbits and Rohan with the industrialization imposed by Saruman.
The term neo-romanticism has also been used in music. It started earlier than in the literature and is generally accepted as covering a style of music from 1950 onwards. Richard Wagner first used the term to decry cheap versions of Romantic music produced in France, but in an ironic twist, the term has since been used to classify his own musical creations.
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