Romanticism was an artistic and intellectual movement that originated in late 18th century Western Europe. In part a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms of the Enlightenment period and a reaction against the rationalization of nature, Romanticism is an aspect of what has been called the Counter-Enlightenment. In art and literature it stressed strong emotion as a source of aesthetic experience, placing a new emphasis on such emotions as trepidation, horror, and the awe experienced in confronting the sublimity of nature.

The ideologies and events of the French Revolution are thought to have influenced the movement. Romanticism elevated the achievements of what it perceived as misunderstood heroic individuals and artists that altered society, and legitimized the individual imagination as a critical authority which permitted freedom from classical notions of form in art. There was a strong recourse to historical and natural inevitability in the representation of its ideas.

Characteristics

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In a general sense, Romanticism refers to several distinct groups of artists, poets, writers, musicians, political, philosophical and social thinkers and trends of the late 18th and early 19th centuries in Europe. This movement is typically characterized by its reaction against the Enlightenment; whereas the Enlightenment emphasized the primacy of reason, Romanticism emphasized imagination and feeling. Rather than an epistemology of deduction, the Romantics demonstrated elements of knowledge through intuition. But a precise characterization and a specific description of Romanticism have been objects of intellectual history and literary history for all of the twentieth century without any great measure of consensus emerging. Arthur Lovejoy attempted to demonstrate the difficulty of this problem in his seminal article "On The Discrimination of Romanticisms" in his Essays in the History of Ideas (1948); some scholars see romanticism as completely continuous with the present, some see it as the inaugural moment of modernity, some see it as the beginning of a tradition of resistance to the Enlightenment, and still others date it firmly in the direct aftermath of the French Revolution. Perhaps the most instructive—and most succinct—definition comes from Charles Baudelaire: "Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in a way of feeling."

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