Literary Movements: Romanticism

Identify Romantic values such as emotion, nature, imagination, and the individual in literature.

Romanticism was a literary and artistic movement that flourished in Europe from roughly the late 1700s to the mid-1800s, partly as a reaction against the Enlightenment's emphasis on reason and against the rapid growth of industrial cities. Romantic writers valued intense emotion, imagination, the beauty and power of nature, the individual's inner experience, and the ordinary lives of rural people. Poets such as William Wordsworth wrote that poetry arises from strong feeling recollected in tranquility.

A Romantic text often places a solitary figure in a wild landscape that mirrors or transforms their mood. Consider an original passage: 'Alone upon the ridge, he felt the storm enter him, and for the first time the city's ledgers and clocks seemed small. ' The storm, the solitude, and the rejection of the city's order are all Romantic markers. Knowing a work's movement helps readers see that its choices respond to a historical conversation, not only to the author's personal taste.

• 1Romanticism: roughly late 1700s to mid-1800s.
• 2Values emotion, imagination, nature, and the individual.
• 3Often reacts against reason and industrial life.