‘Swimming Against the Stream’: Rush’s Romantic Critique of Their Modern Age

Historians, literary scholars, and cultural critics have been struggling to define, classify, and explain Romanticism ever since a group of German poets and thinkers in Jena referred to themselves as Romantics. Most scholars define Romanticism as a literary and artistic movement possessing common attributes that began in the late eighteenth century and lasted until the early to mid-nineteenth century. Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre note that significant problems arise from such definitions that reduce Romanticism to a literary school identified by specific formal elements, because scholars tend to focus on certain features they find peculiarly interesting, relying only on empirical expressions of literary and cultural phenomenon. Ultimately, various unresolved contradictions emerge between different descriptions of Romanticism, and these definitions do not elucidate the artists’ underlying cognitive, spiritual, economic, social, and cultural motivations. Instead of proliferating idiosyncratic definitions or creating a definition based upon an extensive list of observable artistic qualities and literary characteristics, what if we were to see Romanticism as a critical worldview that began in the mid-eighteenth century as a critique of modernity and that continues today exposing, confronting, and addressing the dehumanizing aspects of current society using contemporary modes of cultural expression? This definition of Romanticism as a worldview allows us to examine contemporary manifestations of Romanticism in rock bands like Rush while also reexamining and clarifying our current understanding of Romanticism.