Romanticism, attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized many works of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography in Western civilization over a period from the late 18th to the mid-19th century. Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism in general and late 18th-century Neoclassicism in particular. It was also to some extent a reaction against the Enlightenment and against 18th-century rationalism and physical materialism in general. Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.
Among the characteristic attitudes of Romanticism were the following: a deepened appreciation of the beauties of nature; a general exaltation of emotion over reason and of the senses over intellect; a turning in upon the self and a heightened examination of human personality and its moods and mental potentialities; a preoccupation with the genius, the hero, and the exceptional figure in general and a focus on his or her passions and inner struggles; a new view of the artist as a supremely individual creator, whose creative spirit is more important than strict adherence to formal rules and traditional procedures; an emphasis upon imagination as a gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual truth; an obsessive interest in folk culture, national and ethnic cultural origins, and the medieval era; and a predilection for the exotic, the remote, the mysterious, the weird, the occult, the monstrous, the diseased, and even the satanic.
Works Cited
"Romanticism." Britannica Academic, Encyclopædia Britannica, 3 Jun. 2024. academic.eb.com/levels/collegiate/article/Romanticism/83836. Accessed 7 Jan. 2025.
Romanticism, realism and the lines of mimesis by 
Phillis Wheatley and the Romantics by 
Romanticism and the poetics of orientation by 
Romanticism and Consciousness, Revisited by 
The Edinburgh companion to romanticism and the arts by 
Dialectics of improvement : Scottish Romanticism, 1786-1831 by Late Romanticism and the End of Politics by 
Romanticism Memory and Mourning by 
The Cambridge Introduction to British Romantic Poetry by 
