Title: Romanticism - Wikipedia
Headings: Romanticism
Romanticism
Contents
Defining Romanticism
Basic characteristics
Etymology
Period
Context and place in history
Literature
Germany
Great Britain
Scotland
France
Poland
Russia
Spain
Portugal
Italy
South America
United States
Influence of European Romanticism on American writers
Architecture
Visual arts
Music
Outside the arts
Sciences
Historiography
Theology
Chess
Romantic nationalism
Polish nationalism and messianism
Gallery
Emerging Romanticism in the 18th century
French Romantic painting
Other
Romantic authors
Scholars of Romanticism
See also
References
Citations
Sources
Further reading
External links

Content: It had a significant and complex effect on politics, with romantic thinkers influencing liberalism, radicalism, conservatism, and nationalism. The movement emphasized intense emotion as an authentic source of aesthetic experience, placing new emphasis on such emotions as apprehension, horror and terror, and awe —especially that experienced in confronting the new aesthetic categories of the sublimity and beauty of nature. It elevated folk art and ancient custom to something noble, but also spontaneity as a desirable characteristic (as in the musical impromptu ). In contrast to the Rationalism and Classicism of the Enlightenment, Romanticism revived medievalism and elements of art and narrative perceived as authentically medieval in an attempt to escape population growth, early urban sprawl, and industrialism . Although the movement was rooted in the German Sturm und Drang movement, which preferred intuition and emotion to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, the events and ideologies of the French Revolution were also proximate factors. Romanticism assigned a high value to the achievements of "heroic" individualists and artists, whose examples, it maintained, would raise the quality of society. It also promoted the individual imagination as a critical authority allowed of freedom from classical notions of form in art. There was a strong recourse to historical and natural inevitability, a Zeitgeist, in the representation of its ideas. In the second half of the 19th century, Realism was offered as a polar opposite to Romanticism. The decline of Romanticism during this time was associated with multiple processes, including social and political changes.