The term neo-romanticism is used to cover a variety of movements in philosophy, literature, music, painting, and architecture, as well as social movements, that exist after and incorporate elements from the era of Romanticism.
It has been used with reference to late-19th-century composers such as Richard Wagner particularly by Carl Dahlhaus who describes his music as "a late flowering of romanticism in a positivist age". He regards it as synonymous with "the age of Wagner", from about 1850 until 1890—the start of the era of modernism, whose leading early representatives were Richard Strauss and Gustav Mahler (Dahlhaus 1979, 98–99, 102, 105). It has been applied to writers, painters, and composers who rejected, abandoned, or opposed realism, naturalism, or avant-gardemodernism at various points in time from about 1840 down to the present.
Late 19th century and early 20th century
Neo-romanticism as well as Romanticism is considered in opposition to naturalism—indeed, so far as music is concerned, naturalism is regarded as alien and even hostile (Dahlhaus 1979, 100). In the period following German unification in 1871, naturalism rejected Romantic literature as a misleading, idealistic distortion of reality. Naturalism in turn came to be regarded as incapable of filling the "void" of modern existence. Critics such as Hermann Bahr, Heinrich Mann, and Eugen Diederichs came to oppose naturalism and materialism under the banner of "neo-romanticism", demanding a cultural reorientation responding to "the soul's longing for a meaning and content in life" that might replace the fragmentations of modern knowledge with a holistic world view (Kohlenbach 2009, 261).
Late 20th century
"Neo-romanticism" was proposed as an alternative label for the group of German composers identified with the short-lived Neue Einfachheit movement in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Along with other phrases such as "new tonality", this term has been criticised for lack of precision because of the diversity among these composers, whose leading member is Wolfgang Rihm (Hentschel 2006, 111).
Beginning in the mid-1930s and continuing through World War II, a Japanese neo-romantic literary movement was led by the writer Yasuda Yojūrō (Torrance 2010, 66).
Button, Virginia. 1996. "Neo-Romanticism". Dictionary of Art, 34 volumes, edited by Jane Turner. New York: Grove's Dictionaries. ISBN9781884446009.
Clarke, Michael, and Deborah Clarke. 2001. "Neo-Romanticism". The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Art Terms. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.
Hentschel, Frank. 2006. "Wie neu war die 'Neue Einfachheit'?" Acta Musicologica 78, no. 1:111–31.
Hopkins, Justine. 2001. "Neo-Romanticism". The Oxford Companion to Western Art, edited by Hugh Brigstocke. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN978-0-19-866203-7.
Kohlenbach, Margarete. 2009. "Transformations of German Romanticism 1830–2000". In The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism, edited by Nicholas Saul, 257–80. Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN9780521848916.
Torrance, Richard. 2010. "The People's Library: The Spirit of Prose Literature Versus Fascism". In The Culture of Japanese Fascism, edited by Alan Tansman, 56–79. Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society. Duke University Press. ISBN9780822390701.
Further reading
British:
Ackroyd, Peter. 2002. The Origins of the English Imagination.[full citation needed]
Corbett, Holt, and Russell (eds.). 2002. The Geographies of Englishness: Landscape and the National Past, 1880-1940.[full citation needed]
Martin, Christopher. 1992. The Ruralists (An Art & Design Profile, No. 23).[full citation needed]
Martin, Simon. 2008. Poets in the Landscape: The Romantic Spirit in British Art.[full citation needed]
Johnson and Landow (Eds).[full citation needed] 1980. Fantastic Illustration and Design in Great Britain, 1850–1930. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Mellor, David. 1987. Paradise Lost: The Neo-Romantic Imagination in Britain, 1935–1955.[full citation needed]
Picot, Edward. 1997. Outcasts from Eden: Ideas of Landscape in British Poetry Since 1945.[full citation needed]
Sillars, S. 1991. British Romantic Art and The Second World War.[full citation needed]
Trentmann, F. 1994. Civilisation and its Discontents: English Neo-Romanticism and the Transformation of Anti-Modernism in Twentieth-Century Western Culture. London: Birkbeck College.
Woodcock, Peter. 2000. This Enchanted Isle: The Neo-Romantic Vision from William Blake to the New Visionaries.[full citation needed]
Yorke, Malcolm. 1988. The Spirit of the Place: Nine Neo-Romantic Artists and Their Times. London: Constable & Company Limited. Paperback reprint, London and New York: Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 2001. ISBN1-86064-604-2.
Indian
Brajendranath Seal. 1903. "The Neo-Romantic Movement in Literature". In New Essays in Criticism[full citation needed].
