Talk:Neo-romanticism

q. surely this page needs some examples of neo-romantic authors?

a. quite right - have added a range of authors from other art forms.

I am very interested in the way in which this label is used. Neo-Romanticsm is an extremely loose, and capacious term which seems to be able to take in any artist or thinker from the last 100 years who was not materialist, realist or modernist. Generally there is also a 'mystical' response to landscape. To me this is a useful starting point, it does certainly highlight a cultural trend which is often ignored as irrelavent or simply not seen by specialists in various fields. However, I feel that there is a lot of work needs to be done in researching the philosphical and aesthetic foundations of some of the key figures and to see if a more specific and detailed theoretical foundation can be discovered. I wonder if any books on this sort of line have already been published? Ackroyd's wonderful study Albion, appears to not go much futher than identifying a set of moods or motifs, and in any case these are only applied to the British end of a much larger trend. One fruitful line of enquiry that occurs to me is the theme of a relationship to nature which is neither consoling nor exactly Romantic in the sense understood by Coleridge et al, but is nevertheless 'mystical' or transrational. Such a relationship would be particularly concerned with the ways in which nature eludes our strategies of control, is 'wild' and 'other', may destroy us if not respected, and yet seems to speak to us of our deepest longings and is identified with the deepest mythological strata of our cultures. The poetry of Ted Hughes would be a particularly pertinent example of this, as well as the paintings of Nash and Sutherland. I wonder if this approach would not lead to a somewhat narrower, but more useful understanding of the term, or possibly a label such as 'eco-Romanticism' would serve better for what I have in mind.

Ratnargbha (talk) 11:08, 19 February 2009 (UTC)