Romanticism was an artistic and literary movement that began in the late 18th century and peaked in the 19th. It emphasized emotion, individualism, and nature. It was a reaction against the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution’s smoke and factories.

Romantic writers celebrated the wild, the spontaneous, and the sublime. William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads in 1798, often seen as the movement’s starting point in England. In Germany, Goethe and Schiller led the Sturm und Drang. In America, Emerson and Thoreau wrote in a related spirit. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is a Romantic novel, full of ambition and horror. Romanticism valued childhood, imagination, and the common person. It also had a dark side: fascination with death, madness, and the supernatural. The movement influenced music, painting, and politics. It still shapes how we think about art and authenticity.

Key traits

• Emotion over reason
• Individualism and heroism
• Nature as a source of truth
• Interest in the supernatural and exotic