Home / Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Victorianism
Neo-Classicism, Romanticism and Victorian
. | Neo-Classical
(mid1700s - mid 1800s) Utilized their view of the ancient world to create order, self-control, and the promotion of ideal values. |
Romantics
(1780s - 1850s) Disillusionment with Enlightenment ideals; instead desired personal freedom, exploration of unknown, lived-experiences |
Victorian
(1850s - 1900s) Heirarchical Organization: morality, Evangelicalism, industrial work ethic, self-reliance, industriousness and individualism |
1. The Perfect Experience |
Idealize how to make the experience perfect
(The experience will be critiqued) |
Idealize the perfect love or experience last
(You reflect on the experience afterwards) |
Idealize the perfect love or experience first
(you think of what a perfect experience WILL soon be like) |
2. Best Pursuit |
Pursuit of knowledge
knowledge helps you act proper and higher status |
Pursuit of experience
You jump into experiences for the sake of experiencing |
Pursuit of ideal
You have a set of ideal situations and you seek them out |
3. Emotions |
Emotion is reserved | Expression and emotion as a bursting well, a spring of intense force | Appropriate reaction to emotional stimuli and duress |
4. Understanding is derived from |
Popular: The Classics is a paragon on how to act | Rejection (ignore) popular beliefs | Seek upper-class popularly-held beliefs of society |
5. Nature |
Nature is informed with reason and knowledge | "Mystic" perception of nature; nature knowable through intense experiences | Nature as setting for idealized encounter |
6. Engaging Experience |
Believe in neutrality; remain stoic | Duality of emotions as a sensation of experience: Dimorphic Expressions | Believe in opposites states of being: joy (love) vs. depression |
7. Worth of Experience |
Find the reason within each thing/experience | Seek the beautiful in any Experience | Concentrate experiencing the bold and the beautiful |
8. Platonic Friends |
Platonic love as professed ideal | Platonic Love as spiritual attachment | Platonic Love as sexual detachment |
9. Personal space/environment |
Control personal 'environment' | Against control of personal 'environment' | Controlling of their personal 'environment' |
10. Logic vs. Emotion |
Emotion is cowardly and ugly; use reason | Logic-only is cowardly and ugly; experience emotions | Escape the cowardly and the ugly; experience the beautiful |
11. The Perfect Experience |
Perfect the experience | Reflect on experience one had | Project experience that one seeks |
12. Aesthetics |
Form and function above contentment | Content before form and function | Form and function before content |
13. Individuals and society |
Individual in society | Individual above society | Individual in relationship |
14. Argument appeals |
Appeal to Tradition Fallacy | Pathetic(pathos)Fallacy | Sympathetic Fallacy (argumentum ad misercordiam) |
15. Reason and Passion |
Reason over emotion | Emotion then reason | Reason then emotion |
16. Lifestyle and Living |
Lifestyle relied on social class | Preference for country living | 'Lifestyle' dependant on idea pursued |
17. The Purpose of Fiction |
Fiction must have a moral to the story | Fiction can avoid morality and just tell a tale | Fiction should inform the reader with new wisdom and insight |
18. Death |
Death is inevitable but not discussed | Contemplation of death and grave as unknown | Contemplation of death and grave as depression and appropriate grief |
19. Central Societal Fear | alienation, loss of identity | subsumed by the status quo and be like the average person | To be exiled from one's social standing and economic class. |
20. Coping with Dread | Predilection with mundane and proper themes | Predilection for 'weird,' 'mysterious,' 'occult,' 'monstrous,' 'diseased.' | Predilection for excitement away from drudgery |
21. General ethos | objectivity, impersonality, rationality, decorum, balance, harmony, proportion and moderation | subjectivity, authentic being, passion, merged duality (like a yin-yang symbol), spontaneousness, excess exepriences | Sexual propriety, charity, family, self-control, self-reliance, self-discipline, and duty. |
22. Political. |
Hierarchical, better-thans and less-thans | Growth of humanism, egalitarianism | Aligns with social and familial connections |
23. Religion. |
Religion provided reason for everything | More personal religion | Religious affiliation dependant on social connections |
24. The Role of the Irrational. |
Irrational corrupted reason | Irrational aids imagination | The 'irrational' as evidence of love and romance |
25. Role of Imagination. |
Imagination breaks verisimilitude | Imagination is the gateway to transcendental experience and spiritual truth | Imagination 'fleshes out' idea to be pursued |
26. The Hero. |
Predilection for the educated and proper hero | Preoccupation with the hero as lone wandering adventurer | Preoccupation with hero as savior from loneliness and drudgery |
27. Concept of Change. |
Change disrupts order | Mutability -- continual change is integral to living | Change wanted for a better life; then no change |
28. Spontaneity. |
Spontaniety disrupted | Spontaneity must always exist | Spontaneity leads to security |
29. Beauty |
Beauty is a universal standard | Beauty as a life truly lived | Ideal 'common-held' notion of beauty |
30. Innocence |
Innocence is defeated to gain knowledge but not talked about | Continually both innocent and experienced | Person begins innocence gains experience |