Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism in general and late 18th-century Neoclassicism in particular. It was also to some extent a reaction against the Enlightenment and against 18th-century rationalism and physical materialism in general. Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.
The example in Frankenstein will be:
Victor Frankenstein says, “No one can conceive the variety of feelings which bore me onwards, like a hurricane, in the first enthusiasm of success,” “Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through…. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me” (Shelley 51).
It shows that Victor Frankenstein is a romantic character. He reflected the romantic writers’ emphasis on a new way of seeing.
The terms related to Romanticism are Sublime and Supernatural
References:
- Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Romanticism.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 6 Dec. 2017, www.britannica.com/art/Romanticism.
- Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein(1831) Dover Publication, 1994.
