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Unit 5: Major Literary Terms-V

seeing it as a period of pessimism and nostalgia for the classical age, while others have instead Notes
focused on the continuity between the two eras. Indeed, some have called for an end to the use of
the term, which they see as a product of presentism–the use of history to validate and glorify modern
ideals. The word Renaissance has also been used to describe other historical and cultural movements,
such as the Carolingian Renaissance and the Renaissance of the 12th century.
The Renaissance was a cultural movement that profoundly affected European intellectual life in the
early modern period. Beginning in Italy, and spreading to the rest of Europe by the 16th century, its
influence affected literature, philosophy, art, politics, science, religion, and other aspects of intellectual
inquiry. Renaissance scholars employed the humanist method in study, and searched for realism
and human emotion in art.
In all, the Renaissance could be viewed as an attempt by intellectuals to study and improve the
secular and worldly, both through the revival of ideas from antiquity, and through novel approaches
to thought. Some scholars, such as Rodney Stark, play down the Renaissance in favor of the earlier
innovations of the Italian city states in the High Middle Ages, which married responsive government,
Christianity and the birth of capitalism. This analysis argues that, whereas the great European states
were absolutist monarchies, and others were under direct Church control, the independent city
republics of Italy took over the principles of capitalism invented on monastic estates and set off a
vast unprecedented commercial revolution which preceded and financed the Renaissance.

5.3 Hellenism

Hellenism, as a neoclassical movement distinct from other Roman or Greco-Roman forms of
neoclassicism emerging after the European Renaissance, is most often associated with Germany and
England in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Germany, the preeminent figure in the
movement was Johann Joachim Winckelmann, the art historian and aesthetic theoretician who first
articulated what would come to be the orthodoxies of the Greek ideal in sculpture (though he only
examined Roman copies of Greek statues, and was murdered before setting foot in Greece). For
Winckelmann, the essence of Greek art was noble simplicity and sedate grandeur, often encapsulated
in sculptures representing moments of intense emotion or tribulation. Other major figures include
Hegel, Schlegel, Schelling and Schiller.
In England, the so-called “second generation” Romantic poets, especially John Keats, Percy Bysshe
Shelley, and Lord Byron are considered exemplars of Hellenism. Drawing from Winckelmann, these
poets frequently turned to Greece as a model of ideal beauty, transcendent philosophy, democratic
politics, and homosociality or homosexuality. Women poets, such as Mary Robinson, Felicia Hemans,
Letitia Elizabeth Landon and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were also deeply involved in retelling the
myths of classical Greece.
The Victorian period saw new forms of Hellenism, none more famous than the social theory of
Matthew Arnold in his book, Culture and Anarchy. For Arnold, Hellenism was the opposite of
Hebraism. The former term stood for “spontaneity,” and for “things as they really are; the latter
term stood for “strictness of conscience,” and for “conduct and obedience.” Human history, according
to Arnold, oscillated between these two modes. Other major figures include Swinburne, Pater, Wilde,
and Symonds.

5.4 Supernaturalism

Supernaturalism is the theological belief that a force or power other than man or nature is ultimate.
This supernatural force (God) regulates both man and nature, making both of them subordinate to it.
• God as creator.
• Man is considered to be higher than the rest of nature.

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