Romanticism vs Realism

Amanda Bodby December 3, 2003
General Humanites Purnins Shah

5: Compare and contrast Realism with Romanticism, using examples from both literature and art as the basis of your essay.



Romanticism can be defined as an intellectual, artistic, and literary movement that began in the late eighteenth century as a reaction to the neoclassicism and that stressed the emotional, mysterious, and imaginative side of human behavior and the unruly side of nature. Realism can be defined as, in medieval philosophy, the school that asserted that objects contained common or universal qualities that were not always apparent to the human senses but that were more real or true than the objects’ physical attributes; opposed to Nominalism. In art and literature, a mid- to late- nineteenth-century style that focused on the everyday lives of the middle and lower classes, portraying their world in a serious, accurate, and unsentimental way; opposed to Romanticism.
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