THE CHILD’S PERCEPTION THROUGH THE ROMANTIC LITERARY OPTICS

Abstract

The article studies the peculiarities of the way the child’s worldview is modeled in the philosophic and aesthetic discourse of Romanticism. Works by W. Blake, W. Wordsworth, and E. T. A. Hoffmann serve as the basis for defining the specifics of literary implementation of the romantic ideas related to the establishment of the distinctive paradigm of the childhood. The analysis conducted confirms that the Romantic creative thinking is child-oriented and children’s images are filled with deep philosophic meanings and generalizations harmonized with Romantic concepts. In W. Blake’s and W. Wordsworth’s poetic experiments, there is a firmly established idea of the artistic and children’s worldviews being identical. Children’s fantasies, dreams, and revelations create the dual world as well as the axiological horizon of the Romantic personality. The dominant features of the child’s worldview are innocence, purity, integrity of the reality perception, and affinity with the Absolute. The image of the Romantic child predetermined the two poets’ individual mythopoetry, led to the creation of the Child mythologeme which, along with the traditional Romantic characteristics, reveals the authors’ individual philosophy. In E. T. A. Hoffmann’s literary world, there is an established concept of the Child as a Superperson. The child’s identity markers in the fairy novella “The Nutcracker and the Mouse King” are imagination, play, sincerity, melancholy feeling, search for harmony between the adults’ and children’s worlds. The given analysis of axiological features of the child’s world perception proves that Romanticism authors perceived the ideal of childhood as the fundamental principle of true beauty and divine nature cognition. The ontological status of childhood liberates the Romantic perception from social and historical determinism, widens the worldview borders, and forms the atemporal ideal of the universal reality.