Trevor,
sure it was the European bourgeoisie who embraced romanticism, depoliticised the liberal social order, and transformed political debate into an endless conversation.
And Australia?
I suspect that there is a substantial discourse on romanticism in twentieth century Australia, concentrating mainly on German and French writers. It can be traced from Christopher Brennan, who above all was profoundly influenced in imagery and outlook by the French symbolists through Randolph Hughes and Alan Chisholm to the Angry Penguins and MacAuley. It is important that this discourse be recovered and understood as a significant element of Australian intellectual history.
I reckon that political romanticism from the 1930s to the 1940s, was associated with the right; it was associated with the left in the 1960s and 1970s.
Romanticism stood in opposition to the Australian Enlightenment of the early European settlers in Australia. The utilitarian settlers saw themselves and their world in terms of Australia being a ‘terra nullius’ waiting to be made through their efforts. ‘Improvement’ as one of the key words in their vocabulary: the new Australian world was there to be understood and improved. Nature was to be classified, analysed and then made bountiful--hence the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electricity Scheme of the 1940s and the attempts to dam the wild Franklin River in the 1980s.
Romanticism, conventionally understood as the reaction against the rationality of the Enlightenment that emphasised feeling, had a hard time in Australia because of the lack of both a sacred landscape and an organic past with which the present could be contrasted. Australian romanticism became a romanticism of alienation. In our time it has become an integral part of the environmental movement and its defence of wilderness.
Hence we have a duality in Australian culture: on the one side there is science, law and economics and on the other side the arts, moral self-righteousness and emotion. I know it looks like the old positivist duality, but it does give some insight into the way that political romanticism poeticizes politics.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at August 5, 2004 11:09 PM | TrackBack