ABSTRACT
One of the main characteristics of early Romanticism was excess, an intellectual and social aspiration for transgressing the borders, a yearning for the unknown and inexplicable. In the wake of the French Revolution, during the post-revolutionary warfare and post-Napoleonic European restoration, classicism and its harmonious principles were losing the best part of their aesthetic credibility in the upheaval brought by the technological and political innovations of the time. Artists, writers and intellectuals were in need of new expressive means of dealing with the situation so drastically changed. Responding to a persistent sense that concepts of intentionality, causation, memory and aesthetic purity had become acutely unreliable, English and German writers of the period thus shifted toward experimentation with aesthetic solutions to experiences often felt to be difficult to deal with. 1 In literature, the hard core of Romanticism, this emotional and epistemological bewilderment brought about stylistic modes such as irony, grotesque, Gothic horror and parody. They can all be seen as forms of excess, representations of the loss of the fundamental principles of art and knowledge. The origins of this attitude can be found at the turn of the nineteenth century. For the generation of intellectuals born in the 1770s in Germany, rational metaphysics, courtly culture and the politics of absolutism had become ambiguous and, in several respects, almost futile. Rousseau and Kant both played their epoch-making roles in this profound change. However, not everything of that heritage failed—quite the contrary. As the early Romantics broke with the past, one of the things that gained increasing importance was the human imagination. 2
