ABSTRACT
In the 1790s, under the double impact of the final stage of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution, misgivings and doubts which had gradually begun to be felt in the eighteenth century suddenly acquired deeper and more perplexing significance. The age-old mimetic theory of the arts was replaced by an expressive one. For the first time in Western thought, aesthetics moved from the periphery to the centre of philosophical systems, and the meaning and purpose of the arts were more profoundly questioned than ever before. The word Romantic has come to be used in a bewildering variety of ways, as a term of abuse or praise, as a chronological, aesthetic or psychological category. The many definitions of Romanticism published between the 1790s and the 1830s are symptomatic of an obsessive urge to explore, to describe and account for, the qualities in works of art and literature which had suddenly come to be most highly valued.
