Post-romanticism: what is and how is this cultural movement

Actually, if we say that post-romanticism was one of the most influential currents, it is because it is composed of various important movements for the development of European art, especially in the literature. However, we must be very careful with the nomenclature, since, similar to what happens with many "isms", post-romanticism it is, in reality, a “mixture box” into which movements with highly differentiated characteristics have been thrown.

In today's article we are going to briefly examine what this artistic movement consists of and who its most important authors are.

What was post-romanticism?

As we have commented in the introduction, the denomination of “post-romanticism” encompasses a series of aesthetic currents that emerged from the mid-nineteenth century; precisely, when the romantic current threw its last breaths. Therefore, it is plausible to speak of "post-romanticism" if we refer to the movements that arose chronologically after Romanticism.

However, when analyzing the characteristics of these movements, we come across serious contradictions, which we analyze in the next section.

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The contradictions of the characteristics of post-romanticism

Why do we speak of contradictions when we refer to the "post-romantic current"? Precisely because of what we have discussed previously, an aspect on which we must insist: it is a somewhat "artificial" denomination (as also it is, for example, that of “pre-Romanesque”) that serves as a catch-all to locate countless currents in which they have wanted to see common characteristics.

Among the characteristics that supposedly share these "post-romantic" currents is, for example, the attempt to reconcile previous romanticism with the nascent realism. Let us remember that, in the 1850s (when Parnassianism began to triumph in France, one of the post-romantic movements) The type of language that triumphed in literature was realistic, at the hands of authors such as Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880), whose masterpiece, Madame Bovary (1856), he laid the foundations of realistic precepts, in addition to causing a real scandal for the subject matter (female adultery). Despite this, Flaubert is considered in many sources as a post-romantic author.

It is more plausible to include Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) in the post-romantic movement, since the "cursed poet" par excellence takes advantage of the romantic intimacy of the subjective self to make, in turn, a denunciation of Parisian society of the time. Baudelaire also corresponds to another of the characteristics of post-romanticism, that of the "lonely and tormented" writer who drowns in drugs and alcohol, but which, however, was also typical of the "canonical" romantics of the beginning of the century XIX.

On the other hand, the cultivation of supernatural environments and charged with mysteries (another characteristic that is attributed to post-romanticism) had already been The great master of the Gothic story, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), was made before the 1840s, although it is true that this type of literature acquired an impressive boom at the end of the 19th century, with authors such as Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), H.P Lovecraft (1890-1937) or Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893). We see it below.

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The survival of the terrible and mysterious

Truly, The rise of this type of story occurred in the 1880s., despite the fact that, as we have already pointed out, its origins are found in the Gothic stories of early Romanticism. The Horla, by Maupassant, published in 1887, is a chilling tale that speaks of the madness and darkness of the soul, essential elements of any movement ascribed to Romanticism or any of its variants.

For his part, Stevenson became famous throughout the world with his novel The strange case of Doctor Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), a fable that delves into the recesses of the human psyche and where the nature of Good and Evil is questioned. On the other hand, H.P Lovecraft (1890-1937) is one of the main references of the post-romantic Gothic story in the United States, with titles as lurid and cryptic as In the mountains of madness (1931), whose title is explicit enough, or the call of cthulhu (1926), which had a real echo in the pulp magazines that were successful at the time.

Can we consider, then, a characteristic of post-romantic authors the story with supernatural elements? Yes, indeed, but this type of literature already existed at the end of the 18th century. Let us remember that one of the first “Gothic” stories, The Castle of Otranto, by Horace Walpole, was published no less than in 1764, so, although the lurid is typical of the post-romantic writers of the late 19th century, it was also typical of the authors of the beginning of Romanticism.

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An extension of the romantic movement?

Perhaps we could consider, as some scholars maintain, that post-romanticism is nothing more than a kind of "turn of the screw" to the preceding romantic movement. In this case, the authors linked to the post-romantic currents would follow the romantic aesthetic, but taking it further and giving it a new dimension.

One of the characteristics that have been attributed to post-romanticism is greater social denunciation than its predecessors. And, although we cannot deny that this is true of some authors (especially if we consider Flaubert as post-romantic), in others, the statement incurs, once again, a contradiction. Why include Parnassianism in a supposedly "critical" post-romanticism, when the only thing this current wanted was to exalt beauty, that is, "art for art's sake"?

In the same way, other movements traditionally included within post-romanticism "squeak" forcefully in the classification. Is modernism a post-romantic movement? If we consider that it includes many ideas of Romanticism, of course it does. But if we stick to the characteristic of "social complaint", we will face nonsense.

Alphonse Mucha (1860-1939), one of the standard-bearers of Art Noveau, left us quite disturbing works in his last stage and very little typical of the aesthetics to which he has accustomed us. It was a series of social denunciations of hunger and the poor child education of the newborn Czechoslovakia. However, it is precisely these latest works that are least inspired by modernism and are considerably removed from its aesthetics.

Post-romantic authors?

In the sack of post-romanticism have been placed authors of obvious romantic invoice, such as the Spanish Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer (1836-1870). Because, although it is true that the writer composed his work in a few years in which Romanticism had already ceased to be booming, his poetry and his texts have an indisputably romantic character. And “canonical” romantic, we mean.

Their Rhymes and Legends they cannot in any way be separated from the Romanticism of the previous decades. The only sense of registering Bécquer in the post-romantic current, in our opinion, is his chronology late: her work saw the light when, in France, realist novels began to be all the rage, such as the already quoted Madame Bovary.

For all these reasons, we must insist on the danger of letting ourselves be carried away by labels. Art movements are too complex to fit into generic names. So, if we ask ourselves if there really was a post-romantic movement, we must answer that there were, in fact, quite a few.