The Origins of Romanticism

"What is ‘Romanticism’? Jonathan Bate goes in search of what Isaiah Berlin described as ‘the greatest single shift in the consciousness of the West’.

A lecture by Sir Jonathan Bate CBE FBA, Gresham Professor of Rhetoric 18 September 2018

https://www.gresham.ac.uk/lectures-an...

The historian Isaiah Berlin described the Romanticism of the late 18th and early 19th centuries as ‘the greatest single shift in the consciousness of the West that has occurred’. What is the justification for this claim, what do we mean by ‘Romanticism’ and when did it begin? In the first of a series of lectures on English Romanticism, Jonathan Bate will go on a journey from the Scottish Highlands to a teenage suicide in London to the Geneva of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in search of the origins of Romanticism.

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