THE CONCEPT OF "CREATIVENESS" IN THE CONTEXT OF EUROPEAN ROMANTICISM

Abstract

In the context of the theories that prevailed in the Romantic era, the concept of ‘creativity’ had an important place as one that described the source of being and the purpose of being, which, in turn, was reflected in literary texts and philosophical studies. In the article, we study the concept of ‘creativity’ using approaches that allow us to highlight interpretations of the literary practice in relation to literary theory and philosophy. A significant number of works on Romanticism allow us to delve into the aspects of philosophical and ideological, formal and artistic, biographical, stylistic and comparative nature. This applies to the concept of ‘creativity’, which is considered by researchers to be fundamental. We examine texts by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Novalis, Juliusz Słowacki, Immanuel Kant, Antoni Malczewski, and others. In the samples of literary texts, programmatic documents, and philosophical studies to which we refer, we can trace the authors' attention to the problem of the genesis of existence in general or the specific environment of the speaker, and this, in turn, is extrapolated to the author: a large array of texts correlated with Romanticism demonstrates the tendency inherited from previous literary epochs to identify the character and the author, and within one particular method it ways to “author-centrism” and messianism. We emphasise the key aspects of understanding ‘creativity’ in the context of Romantic philosophy: ‘creativity’ as a mechanism for generating being is seen as a rich textual technology; the declared universalism of the creative process projects the understanding of the creation of a cultural landscape onto the course of the mental processes of the individual self; form is the product of the recipient's interaction with the message.