Absolute Idealism
19th-century version of idealism in which the world is equated with objective or absolute thought, rather than with the personal flux of experience, as in subjective idealism. The doctrine is the ...
Achim von Arnim
(b Berlin, 1781; d Wiepersdorf, 1831).Ger. poet who can claim inclusion in a music dictionary because of his co‐editorship with his future brother‐in‐law Clemens Brentano of the anthology of German ...
Adam Heinrich Müller
(Berlin, 1779–1829, Vienna),ennobled (1826) as Ritter von Nittersdorf and known as Adam Müller, was the son of a Prussian civil servant, and was for a time a private tutor ...
Adam Mickiewicz
(1798–1855),the outstanding poet of Poland, and the founder of the Romantic movement in Polish literature. Born and educated in Vilna, he was exiled in 1829, and lived thereafter mainly ...
Adam Oehlenschläger
(1779–1850)tends to be considered the Danish Wordsworth. His writings reveal his fascination with folklore, and in 1816 he translated Märchen by Musäus, Fouqué, Hoffmann, and Chamisso into Danish, ...
Aesthetics of Difficulty
This entry traces the development of the aesthetics of difficulty (namely, writing or creating art that seems deliberately hard to understand or interpret) from the beginning of modernity up through ...
Akseli Gallen-Kallela
(b Pori, 26 Apr. 1865; d Stockholm, 7 Mar. 1931).Finnish painter, graphic artist, designer, and architect. A major figure in the Art Nouveau and Symbolist movements, Gallen-Kallela travelled widely ...
Aldo Palazzeschi
(1885–1974).Florentine poet and novelist who made distinctively whimsical and ironic contributions to crepuscolarismo and Futurism. His privately published early poetry reworks symbolist and ...
Alessandro Manzoni
Title sometimes given to Verdi's Requiem, which was comp. in memory of It. novelist and poet Alessandro Manzoni (1785–1873). F.p. Milan 1874, London 1875.
Alessandro Sanquirico
(born 27 July 1777 in Milan, died 12 March 1849 in Milan), Italian painter and set designer. Sanquirico first worked for the Teatro alla Scala in Milan in 1805, and ...
Alexander Runciman
(b Edinburgh, 15 Aug. 1736; d Edinburgh, 21 Oct. 1785) and(b Edinburgh, 1744; d Naples, winter 1768/9).Scottish painters, brothers, who specialized in religious, literary, and historical subjects in ...
Alexandre Dumas
(1824–95)French dramatist. He became one of the most successful dramatists of the Second Empire. His play La Dame aux camélias (1852) was based on Dumas's own novel (1848) and inspired Verdi's opera ...
Alexandre Guiraud, baron
(1788–1847).Poet and dramatist, with the blend of royalist and Catholic views which typified the Romanticism of the Restoration. A founder of the La Muse française (1823–4), he was elected ...
Alfred de Musset
(1810–57)French poet and dramatist. The youngest and most original of the romantic playwrights, Musset was little performed in his lifetime. After the failure of La Nuit vénitienne (1830), many ...
Alfred de Vigny
(1797–1863)French Romantic poet, dramatist, and novelist. After an undistinguished ten‐year military career, he established himself as a poet and a novelist in 1826, publishing his Poèmes antiques et ...
alla prima
[from the Italian, ‘at first’]Used to describe painting directly on to the canvas without preliminary underdrawing or underpainting (i.e. building up successive layers of paint). Synonymous terms are ...
Alphonse de Lamartine
(1790–1869)French poet and politician. His poetry, from the Méditations poétiques (Poetic Meditations) of 1820, established him as a leading figure in the French Romantic movement; he also produced ...
American Renaissance
Seminal critical study by F. O. Matthiessen, published in 1941, analyzing Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, and Whitman in their concern with the relation of the individual to society, ...
Analytical Review
(1788–99),an important literary and radical periodical, published by J. Johnson, which was an early influence in encouraging the growth of Romanticism. It included Gilpin's theories on the ...
Ancients
Group of English Romantic artists inspired by William Blake and active for about a decade in the late 1820s and early 1830s. Their name (evidently first used in May 1827, shortly before Blake's ...
