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Romanticism is a movement which was not just philosophical but was manifest in the arts, music, architecture, and literature. It had little influence in Britain and the United States and such influence as it had was mainly in literature and music. The English poets Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, and Keats are often classified as Romantics but sometimes this seems to say no more than that they were disposed to write soppy love poetry.

Romanticism was officially pronounced dead by the start of the Great War, but like many movements pronounced dead it had already begun to regroup under a new name: that new name was postmodernism, which dates from developments in music, painting, and architecture in the late 19th century, and was more clearly identified as such (in order to escape the ‘dead’ tag of Romanticism) after the end of World War I.

(5)  Recent Times: This is the age we entered at the time of World War I, and in which we now live.

Postmodernism is a loose alignment of developments in architecture, the arts generally, literature, philosophy, and – more recently – education, which are hostile to the very idea of the systematic, or of the systematic as preferable to the loose or unstructured. It condemns “high culture” as an elitist concept concerned essentially with preserving the social power of establishment critics, and inflating the asset value of “anointed” art works which play the same commodity role for the wealthy economically as do precious metals (e.g. gold).

2. Some Aspects of Postmodernism

It is difficult to define Postmodernism but it is possible to state some of the more significant influences and elements:

• The Influence of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900). Nietzsche predicted (accurately, but several decades later than he expected) the collapse of traditional moral, social. and aesthetic values, and the received ways of interpreting historical, social, and cultural phenomena, and wanted to go beyond the inevitable consequential nihilism he predicted.

• The Reduction of Authority to Power. Inversion of the traditional view that legitimate power is a consequence of legitimate authority, to the view that all authority is a manifestation of (more or less disguised) power, and all power (or all except …. ) is illegitimate and may be justly resisted and overturned (fill in the dots with your preferred post-revolutionary power bearer). Examples: Karl Marx (1818-1883). Law (and custom) is the power instrument by which the ruling class, ruling in its own economic interest, exercises “authority” (i.e. power) over the ruled. Sigmund Freud (1856-1939). A person’s “authority” over his or her mental states (motives, desires, attitudes etc.) is a generally unacknowledged manifestation of the power of the libido.

• New wave feminism (post 1960) cherry-picked aspects of each of the above to generate its doctrine of social authority as a reflection of male (wrongly called masculine) sexual (wrongly called gender) power.

•  Critical Legal Studies (Harvard 1965 +) cherry-picked all of the above together with post-de Saussurian linguistic theory (vide infra) to develop a post-Marxist sceptical analysis of legal reasoning (as practiced in common law jurisdic本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。