New Conceptions of Art and the Artist

This book sets out the dramatically different conceptions of what art is and what artists do, characteristic of the eighteenth century on the one hand, and Romanticism on the other, the most important change in the conceptions of art in European history to date. The ideas that art is essentially an expression of some facet of the inner life and that artists are set apart from humanity because they possess a mysterious faculty of genius, are notions which we owe to the Romantic movement. These ideas and their eighteenth-century predecessors are explored through guided reading of primary source texts of the time.You will engage with three acknowledged masterpieces of the period: Goethe's classic verse-drama, Faust Part One; a selection of Schubert's songs in the form of musical settings of poems by Goethe; and Byron's narrative poem Childe Harold, Canto III.