Romanticism

Romanticism was an artistic and intellectual movement that arose in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century and flourished in the nineteenth. It was partly a reaction against the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the changes of the Industrial Revolution, emphasising emotion, imagination, individuality and the power of nature. In literature it included the poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and John Keats, and in Germany Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Painters such as J. M. W. Turner, Caspar David Friedrich and Eugene Delacroix expressed it in landscapes and dramatic scenes, and composers like Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert in music. It also encouraged interest in folk traditions and national identity.

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