Romanticization

"Romanticize" redirects here. For the album, see Romanticize (album).

The Burial of Latané by William D. Washington, 1864, romanticizes slavery in the United States by portraying enslaved African Americans as loyal.

Romanticization is the act of treating a subject as more desirable or attractive than it is in reality. ^{[2] [3]} Common subjects of romanticization in popular culture include nature, ^[4] crime, ^[5] abuse, ^[6] mental illness, ^[7] war, ^[8] and history. Historical romance is a genre of historical fiction which involves such romanticization to amplify the experience of love, ^[9] and according to Anita Desai, myth itself is a romanticization of history. ^[10] Romanticization is often associated with nostalgia, the concept of longing for the past, although the two terms are not synonymous. ^[11] While nostalgia is notorious for its tendency to romanticize, ^[12] it can also arise from genuine memory. ^[13]

Etymology

Romanticize derives from the word romantic . ^[14] According to the Oxford English Dictionary , the English word romanticize dates to an 1818 letter by English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, thus the historian Carl Thompson considers him to have coined the word. ^[15] The German translation of the word, romantisieren, was previously coined in the 1797–98 writings of the poet Novalis in a series of terms related to his new definition of the romantisch. Novalis wrote that: ^[16]

By conferring on secret things an elevated meaning, on the everyday a mysterious prestige, on the known the dignity of the unknown, on the finite the appearance of the infinite, I romanticize them.

A leading member of the Romantic movement in Germany, Novalis sought to imbue the concept of the romantic with a deeper significance by highlighting untruth or strangeness as its defining characteristic. ^[17]

References

1. Stephens, Rachel (Spring 2020). ""Whatever is un-Virginian is Wrong!": The Loyal Slave Trope in Civil War Richmond and the Origins of the Lost Cause". Panorama (6.1).
2. Ndour & Foulkes 2025, p. 2297.
3. Kenasri & Sadasri 2021, p. 203.
4. Seddon, George (1998-09-28). Landprints: Reflections on Place and Landscape. Cambridge University Press. p. 8. ISBN   978-0-521-65999-4.
5. Duncan 1996, p. 190.
6. Béres, Laura (May 1999). "Beauty and the beast: The romanticization of abuse in popular culture". European Journal of Cultural Studies. 2 (2): 191–207. doi:10.1177/136754949900200203. ISSN   1367-5494.
7. Ndour & Foulkes 2025, p. 1.
8. Finger 2022, p. 27.
9. Fresno-Calleja & Teo 2024, p. 1.
10. "A passage from India". The Guardian . 1999-06-19. ISSN   0261-3077 . Retrieved 2026-02-05.
11. Mason 2024, p. 526.
12. Feldbrügge 2011, p. 56.
13. Feldbrügge 2011, pp. 7–8.
14. "romanticize" . Oxford English Dictionary (Online ed.). Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/OED/1201889346 . Retrieved 6 February 2026.(Subscription or participating institution membership required.)
15. Thompson, Carl (2007-05-31). The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination. Clarendon Press. p. 4. ISBN   978-0-19-153192-7.
16. Décultot 2014, pp. 908–909.
17. Eichner 1972, p. 124.

Bibliography

• Décultot, Elisabeth (2014-02-09). "Romantic". In Cassin, Barbara; Apter, Emily; Lezra, Jacques; Wood, Michael (eds.). Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. Princeton University Press. pp. 907–910. ISBN   978-1-4008-4991-8.
• Duncan, Martha Grace (1996). Romantic Outlaws, Beloved Prisons: The Unconscious Meanings of Crime and Punishment. New York: New York University Press. ISBN   978-0-8147-2110-0.
• Eichner, Hans (1972). "Germany / Romantisch – Romantik – Romantiker". In Eichner, Hans (ed.). "Romantic" and its cognates; the European history of a word. University of Toronto Press. pp. 98–156. ISBN   978-0-8020-5243-8 – via Internet Archive.
• Feldbrügge, Astrid (2011). Nostalgia, Home and Be-longing in Contemporary Postapartheid Fiction by Zakes Mda and Ivan Vladislavić (PhD thesis) (in German). Bayreuth: University of Bayreuth.
• Finger, Nathan Gregory (March 28, 2022). The First World War in British theatre (PhD thesis). Macquarie University. doi:10.25949/19436591.
• Fresno-Calleja, Paloma; Teo, Hsu-Ming (2024-12-04). "Introduction". Travel and Colonialism in 21st Century Romantic Historical Fiction (1 ed.). New York: Routledge. pp. 1–25. doi:10.4324/9781003495840-1. ISBN   978-1-003-49584-0 . Retrieved 2026-02-05.
• Kenasri, Priscila Asoka; Sadasri, Lidwina Mutia (2021-10-27). "Romanticized Abusive Behavior by Media Narrative Analysis on Portrayal of Intimate Partner Violence Romanticism in Korean Drama". Humaniora. 33 (3): 202–211. doi:10.22146/jh.68104. ISSN   2302-9269.
• Mason, Sarah (October 2024). "Community nostalgia and transgenerational trauma: reconciling dichotomies from women's oral history of West Belfast, 1975–1995 *". Irish Studies Review. 32 (4): 523–539. doi:10.1080/09670882.2024.2407043. ISSN   0967-0882.
• Ndour, Awa; Foulkes, Lucy (2025-08-01). "The romanticisation of mental health problems in adolescents and its implications: a narrative review". European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry. 34 (8): 2297–2326. doi:10.1007/s00787-025-02701-0. ISSN   1435-165X. PMC   12396996 . PMID   40220194.