Analysis Of The ’Absurd’ Problem In Romantic Literature

Romantic literature is a sort of literary thought flourished all over Europe from the end of the eighteenth Century to the first half of the nineteenth Century. To revolt against the rationalism of classical literature, perceptual life is seen to be the only most real source of freedom in the romantic view. And this is such a humanistic philosophy that leads romantic literature to pay more attention on the freedom of life existence and human’s spiritual word. In the process of pursuing the perceptual freedom and abandoning the rational logic, the absurdity of human existence is discovered by romantic literature. In this work the absurdity topic of that period will be discussed in three parts. In the first part, three distinguished writers, who have relative profound performances on the absurd emotion in their romantic literature works, are mentioned; and more importantly, all the three different absurd emotions will be analysed in detail respectively, namely, fundamental loneliness of the personal presence, the fear of the unknown possibilities and the endless spiritual despair. In the second part, several writers’ artistic techniques under the care of absurd emotion are discussed, such as Hoffman’s fantasy theme, Allan Poe’s symbolic system for poetries and Kierkegaard’s philosophical systematic expatiation on Socrates’s irony which is closely interconnected to the development of the contemporary romantic irony theory. While in the last part, based on the logical combination of romantic literature and absurd, two causes, the first point is the irrationality and the other is the pursuit of freedom, are revealed to explain how the absurd concept highlighted so conspicuously in romantic literature. These two points is the link between romantic and absurd. At the end of the work a summary about the entire paper is made.