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Thomas Thorild (Svarteborg, Bohuslän, 18 April 1759 – Greifswald, Swedish Pomerania, 1 October 1808), was a Swedish poet, critic, feminist and philosopher. He was noted for his early support of women's rights. In his 1793 treatise Om kvinnokönets naturliga höghet he advocated gender equality.
Munkedal Municipality is a municipality in Västra Götaland County in western Sweden. Its seat is located in the town of Munkedal.
Bohuslän is a Swedish province in Götaland, on the northernmost part of the country's west coast. It is bordered by Dalsland to the northeast, Västergötland to the southeast, the Skagerrak arm of the North Sea to the west, and the county of Østfold, in Norway, to the north.
Greifswald, officially the University and Hanseatic City of Greifswald, is a city in northeastern Germany.
He was born in Svarteborg, Sweden and died at Greifswald, which was then Swedish Pomerania, and is now part of the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. His original name was Thomas Thorén and he studied at Lund University in Sweden and worked or studied at the University of Greifswald in Germany.
Sweden, officially the Kingdom of Sweden, is a Scandinavian Nordic country in Northern Europe. It borders Norway to the west and north and Finland to the east, and is connected to Denmark in the southwest by a bridge-tunnel across the Öresund, a strait at the Swedish-Danish border. At 450,295 square kilometres (173,860 sq mi), Sweden is the largest country in Northern Europe, the third-largest country in the European Union and the fifth largest country in Europe by area. Sweden has a total population of 10.2 million of which 2.4 million has a foreign background. It has a low population density of 22 inhabitants per square kilometre (57/sq mi). The highest concentration is in the southern half of the country.
Swedish Pomerania was a Dominion under the Swedish Crown from 1630 to 1815, situated on what is now the Baltic coast of Germany and Poland. Following the Polish War and the Thirty Years' War, Sweden held extensive control over the lands on the southern Baltic coast, including Pomerania and parts of Livonia and Prussia.
Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, also known by its anglicized name Mecklenburg-West Pomerania, is a state of Germany. Of the country's 16 states, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern ranks 14th in population, 6th in area, and 16th in population density. Schwerin is the state capital and Rostock is the largest city. Other major cities include Neubrandenburg, Stralsund, Greifswald, Wismar and Güstrow.
Thorild was a supporter of the Sturm und Drang movement and considered an opponent of French-inspired classicism. In 1795 he became a professor and librarian at the University of Greifswald.
Sturm und Drang was a proto-Romantic movement in German literature and music that occurred between the late 1760s and early 1780s. Within the movement, individual subjectivity and, in particular, extremes of emotion were given free expression in reaction to the perceived constraints of rationalism imposed by the Enlightenment and associated aesthetic movements. The period is named for Friedrich Maximilian Klinger's play of the same name, which was first performed by Abel Seyler's famed theatrical company in 1777.
Classicism, in the arts, refers generally to a high regard for a classical period, classical antiquity in the Western tradition, as setting standards for taste which the classicists seek to emulate. The art of classicism typically seeks to be formal and restrained: of the Discobolus Sir Kenneth Clark observed, "if we object to his restraint and compression we are simply objecting to the classicism of classic art. A violent emphasis or a sudden acceleration of rhythmic movement would have destroyed those qualities of balance and completeness through which it retained until the present century its position of authority in the restricted repertoire of visual images." Classicism, as Clark noted, implies a canon of widely accepted ideal forms, whether in the Western canon that he was examining in The Nude (1956), or the literary Chinese classics or Chinese art, where the revival of classic styles is also a recurring feature.
The University of Greifswald is a public research university located in Greifswald, Germany, in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.
He was an important member of the cultural elite in Stockholm during the Gustavian era. He was popular among women because of his beauty and because of his ideas of gender equality; he aroused much attention with his idea, that just as a man was seen as a person first, and as a man (a gender and sexual object) second, a woman, who was seen as a gender and sexual object first and as a person second, should have the right to be seen upon the same way: "Just as foolish as it is to regard a woman only in the capacity of a SHE, it would be to regard a man only in the capacity of a HE".
Gustav III was King of Sweden from 1771 until his assassination in 1792. He was the eldest son of Adolf Frederick, King of Sweden and Queen Louise Ulrika, and a first cousin of Empress Catherine the Great of Russia by reason of their common descent from Christian August of Holstein-Gottorp, Prince of Eutin, and his wife Albertina Frederica of Baden-Durlach.
Thorildsplan is named after him.
