Romanticism

Romanticism is a powerful artistic movement of the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth century that arose as a reaction against the rationalism of the Enlightenment and Classicist normativity. Romanticism proclaimed the cult of feeling, imagination, and creative freedom, an interest in the unique personality, the historical past, folk culture, the exotic, and the fantastic; it is marked by the opposition of ideal and reality, 'world sorrow', and a duality of worlds. World models are the poetry of Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, the dramas of Friedrich Schiller, and the prose of E. T. A. Hoffmann. In Ukrainian literature Romanticism played a decisive role in the national awakening: it nourished interest in folklore, the history of the Cossacks, and the idea of national character. It was represented by the Kharkiv school of Romantics, Panteleimon Kulish, and the 'Ruthenian Triad' in Galicia, and attained its highest flight in the early work of Taras Shevchenko.