Neo-Romanticism

The figure of Rolf Gardiner (1902-1971) remains contentious, not only because of his connections with right-wing European politics in the interwar period, but also for the diversity of causes with which he was involved. Gardiner’s belief in personal and national regeneration though reconnection to the land underpins his commitment to ruralism, ecology, organic farming and the revival of English folk dances, songs and customs. However, while Gardiner’s reimagining of morris dancing and his establishment of the Springhead Ring apparently advocate a philosophy of pagan abandon and occult communion rooted in the soil, they also display an obsession with discipline and deep anxiety about wild and untamed forces.
By exploring this contradiction, this paper will argue for a long overdue recontextualisation of Gardiner; one which looks further than the politics of interwar Europe and back to the literary and cultural climate around the turn of the last century. Writers and thinkers during this period often display a troubled ambivalence about the British landscape, presenting it on the one hand as a magical palimpsest overlaid with history and culture, and on the other as containing threatening forces which must be harnessed. Placing Gardiner within a wider matrix of early twentieth century visionary writers such as D.H. Lawrence and Arthur Machen reveals an eco-occultism far more complex than what some critics have dismissed as ‘gaudy mysticism’. Gardiner’s troubled relationship with landscape also needs to be explored with reference to the folk revivalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Although he eventually rebelled against the tenets and practices laid down by organisations such as the emergent English Folk-Dance Society, Gardiner was, like them, intensely preoccupied with attempting to establish ritual and occult significance to folk culture whilst simultaneously imposing regulations and restrictions on its revival.
Interrogating Gardiner’s various ways of connecting with land and landscapes, this paper will argue that the tension between abandon and discipline is the factor which both unites and undermines his occult ideology.

This paper explores the concept of Gothic in relation to the contemporary Japanese Gothic & Lolita movement (G&L). Although it discusses G&L as a whole, it places a specific focus on the Gosurori (Gosu-loli, Gothloli, or Gothic Lolita) by tracing the evolution of the fashion-based Lolita subculture, from its historical, transcultural origins, and the development of its meanings.

The Japanese Lolita subculture, now becoming an increasingly worldwide preoccupation, is represented by women who dress as doll-like children. The image of this “Lolita,” which may either be categorized as “Gothic” or “Sweet,” or both, is inspired by traditional European clothing from the French Rococo and Victorian periods. Whilst it emerged from “little-girl” Japanese street styles of the 1970s, it transitioned through the New Romantic 1980s, picking up more frills, lace and ribbons on the way. For the Gothic Lolita, these influences were also fused with Neo-Victorian characteristics of gothic subcultural fashions, including elements of mourning dress, and accessories such as cameos, crosses, crucifixes, and rosary beads.

The transmigration and translation of ideas that have contributed to the G&L phenomenon are examined in context with the formulation of the gothic aspects of the Gosurori identity. In doing so, the following question will be raised and investigated, “What is gothic about Lolita?”

Since the 1970s, Buber has often been suspected of being a Volkish thinker. This essay reconsiders the affinity of Buber’s late writings with Volkish ideology. It examines the allegations against Buber’s Volkish thought in light of his later biblical and Hasidic writings. By illuminating the ideological affinity between these two modes of thought, the essay explains how Buber aims to depart from the dangers of myth without rejecting myth as such. I argue that Buber’s relationship to myth can help us to explain his critique of nationalism. My basic argument is that in his struggle with hyper-nationalism, Buber follows the Baal Shem Tov and his struggle against Sabbateanism. Like the Besht, Buber does not reject myth, but seeks instead to repair it from within. Whereas hyper-nationalism uses myth to advance its political goals, Buber seeks to reposition ethics within a mythic framework. I view Buber’s exegesis and commentaries on biblical and Hasidic myths as myth-activism.

Link to the essay (open access):
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/10/2/96

The twentieth century witnessed two devastating wars which made the earlier style of living upside down. Men became wild, and sadness gripped human psyche. Against this backdrop, T.S. Eliot discovered 'hollow men'. However, the earth is not going to perish tomorrow, so we must live. It is an eternal paradox that despite misfortunes which come not as single flies but in battalions men rise up and strive to start life afresh - enjoying the morning sun, listening to the cuckoos and the nightingales, having sunbath on the sea beach, singing songs, being in love, writing poems, growing crops and breeding children. This attitude of man has generated a new kind of Romantic mood in English poetry in the 21st century. I believe Romanticism shapes the earth more beautifully than any other creed.

Romanticism swayed English poetry from 1798 to 1832. It is considered to begin with the publication of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798 and terminate formally in 1832 when the Reforms Bill was passed. It is new movement in English literature, especially in the field of poetry, but it defies specific definition. Walter Pater's definition that Romantic style means 'addition of strangeness to beauty' is generally acceptable in respect of the poems by Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats, but Shelley and Byron added new features to Romantic movement in English poetry. Romanticism is not featured in poetry only; it is also traceable in essays like those of Hazlitt and De Quincey. Though a late poet, Walter de la Mare follows Coleridge whose use of the supernatural in Christabel, Kubla Khan and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner are marvellous poems of the Romantic period.

I have experimented with Neo-Romanticism in The Shadow of Light: An Album of Poems as I believe, after much of dejection, chaos and dismay, a new breeze begun to blow in the field of English poetry.

Title (Article) ヒレル・ツァイトリンとポーランドにおけるユダヤ神秘主義の再生
Author ヨナタン メイール. 向井 直己 訳.
Series etc. 2015年度文化講座より
Parallel Title Hillel Zeitlin and the Renaissance of Jewish Mysticism in Poland
Call No. Z71-D380
Title (Journal) ナマール = נמל = Port : 港 / 日本・ユダヤ文化研究会 編.
Publisher etc. 神戸 : 日本・ユダヤ文化研究会, 1996-
Vol. / Date (20):2015
Vol. / Date (20):2015
Pages 28-38
ISSN 2188-5621

ВИСВІТЛЕНО СПРИЙНЯТТЯ СПАДЩИНИ ПАНТЕЛЕЙМОНА КУЛІША в добу українського раннього Модерну. Творчість великого попередника привабила літературну молодь такими своїми рисами, як кордоцентризм, естетизм, індивідуалізм. Встановлено, що П. Куліш відіграв роль своєрідної зв’язкової ланки між романтизмом і неоромантизмом.
КЛЮЧОВІ СЛОВА: романтизм, неоромантизм, модернізм, кордоцентризм, «хутірська філософія», духовий аристократизм. 
THE PERCEPTION OF PANTELEYMON KULISH'S HERITAGE of the Ukrainian early modernism age has been enlightened. The works of a great antecedent attracted the young literary circles by such distinguishing features as cardiocentrism, aestheticism, individualism. It has been ascertained that P. Kulish plaid a part of a peculiar link between the Romanticism and the Neo-Romanticism.
KEYWORDS: Romanticism, Neo-Romanticism, Modernism, cardiocentrism, “farm philosophy”, spiritual aristocratism.

In this paper, I present my thesis that Martin Buber offers a narrative of historical forgetfulness similar to that of his contemporary Martin Heidegger. I name this phenomenon Dialogsvergessenheit. Buber never used this term, nor did he develop this idea explicitly. Rather, It is implicit in his writings. To elucidate my thesis, I will look at Heidegger’s thought on the oblivion of Being, known as Seinsvergessenheit. The proximity of the two positions presented here is particularly interesting in light of their political implications. This common narrative leads the two thinkers to opposite nationalist conceptions.

The influence of process metaphysics on the development of abstraction between 1800 and the second half of the 20th century can best be exemplified with the case of the American Expressionist painter and theoretician Robert Motherwell (1915-1991). Taking as its starting point Motherwell’s exposure to the History of Idea of Romanticism, Arthur O. Lovejoy’s yearlong seminar at Harvard (1937-38), the artist’s affinity with fluid forms through motion brushstrokes in Romanticist painting is analyzed as a preformative stage of his own transitory creations. This is done by structural comparison between Motherwell’s written reflections and Romanticist art theory. Motherwell’s specific perception through Bergson’s and Whitehead’s lens of immanence and multiplicity, I argue, resonates Lovejoy’s principle of ‘‘Romantic Evolutionism,’’ in its turn from being to becoming, derived from the philosophies of the Spiritualist Maine de Biran and the Idealist-Empiricist George Berkeley.

Yalnızlık, ‘insan’a özgü evrensel bir duygudur. Yalnızlık, yaşantıdan kaynaklanan bazı durum/lar veya bu durum/ların yol açtığı bazı davranışların sonucunda ortaya çıkar. Fakat kaynağı ne olursa olsun, yalnızlık insan yaşamının önemli bir parçasıdır. Yalnızlığın hangi durumlarda ortaya çıktığı ve insanda nasıl davranış değişikliklerine yol açtığı/ açabileceği hakkında yapılan araştırmalarda “psikotik, otistik, sosyal, gizli, varoluşsal, manastır, içsel” vb. birçok sınıflandırma (taxonomy) ile karşılaşmak mümkündür. Yazı, insanî öze ilişkin bu konuyu, Modernizmin sonucu olarak bireyin öne çıkışıyla görülmeye başlanan “varoluşsal yalnızlık” açısından ele alıp konunun Behçet Necatigil’in eserlerinde nasıl ortaya çıktığının izini sürmektedir. / Loneliness, is a universal emotion unique to “human being”. It may spring from certain situations originated from certain experiences or certain behaviours caused by those situations. Regardless of its source, it is an important part of human life. Studies on sources and behavioural changes of loneliness shows different categorizations of loneliness such as psychotic, autistic, social, hidden, existential, monastic, or internal. This study aims to discuss this topic regarding the human essence in terms “existential loneliness”, and to trace how it appears in works of Behçet Necatigil.

Examining the art of the Graham Sutherland, Dr Daniel Frampton argues that the noted British artist’s oft-quoted title “Neo-romantic” has obscured the true nature of his art, which Dr Frampton argues is “essentially religious and especially Catholic”. What was the effect of Sutherland’s faith on his art? Dr Frampton, reflecting on Sutherland’s most significant works, including Crucifixion (1946), Pastoral (1930) and Thorn Head (1947), shows that we may seriously consider these works “as a protracted series of religious icons invested with a newfound modernist vocabulary of forms borrowed most obviously from Picasso”. Such paintings, influenced in part by the thought of the noted neo-Thomist Jacques Maritain, communicated a Catholic sense of order. As Sutherland said: “The Church objectifies the mysterious and the unknown. It gave my aspirations towards certain ends a more clearly-defined direction than I could ever have found alone.”

The lecture will discuss portrayals of Eastern European Hasidism as "pure mysticism" in the writings of Martin Buber (especially his early stories about R. Nahman of Bratslav and the Baal Shem Tov), as well as the reception of such portrayals by non-Jews and mystics in Eastern Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Many scholars have already analyzed the romantic picture painted by Buber, but without sufficient attention paid to the responses of Hasidim and other Eastern European thinkers to that picture. It seems that at precisely the time that Buber was holding up a form of "pure Hasidism" in contradistinction to the contemporary movement - which, in his opinion, had become stagnant -- a profound renaissance was in fact occurring in Eastern European Hasidism. Not only were Buber's portrayals disconnected from historical reality, he will fully ignored the Hasidic renaissance happening at the time. The lecture will discuss briefly the responses of a few Eastern European thinkers and scholars who contested Buber's description, while focusing on the unique response of the Warsaw mystic Hillel Zeitlin.

This text deals with the manners in which Romanian and Polish politicians and writers imagined their countries in relation to the West in two important moments of the nineteenth century: the political events of the 1848 and the political radicalism in the context of mass society of the 1890s. These moments are known as Romanticism and, respectively, Neo-Romanticism due mainly to being contemporary with the homonymous art trends.
The study shows that the mentioned actors employed arguments from the language of art to support their political projects. Consequently, they employed aestheticism as a dependent category of art (e.g. art for the artʼs sake) in the attempt to describe the status of their country at the given time. Aware that they were coming from a geographic periphery, they tried to represent, define, and negotiate this quality of their countries, sometimes with surprising outcomes.

Key words: (Neo-)Romanticism, Fin-de-Siècle, Central and Eastern Europe, Nineteenth Century, Center-periphery dichotomy