Title: 
Headings: 

Content: Romantic poetry and novels are characterized by sentimentality and characters in thrall to powerful emotions and in search of sublime experiences. Exoticism: A further means by which the Romantics distanced themselves from the emphatic empiricism of the Enlightenment, was to imagine parallel worlds and times through which to contemplate new ways of approaching relationships, religion, and politics. The Romantics often symbolized alternative modes of living and thinking—as well as the authenticity and naturalness of those living in pre-civilized states—with images of foreign places. We see Spain, Italy, and particularly the Near East and northern Africa as the setting for a number of poems and novels of the period. Emphasis was placed on the exoticism of these places, often through the use of endlessly repeated stereotypes of the presumed decadence and strangeness of Africans and Arabs or the supposedly relaxed, colorful, and sensual living of southern Europeans. But the Romantic age was also a period in which Europeans traveled more than ever to examine at first hand the far-off lands of which they had read. Several of the major Romantic poets traveled extensively throughout Continental Europe and lived abroad for extended periods. The Importance of Individualism
The Romantic period was also the period of the industrial revolution, which created a new and very wealthy class of businessmen and entrepreneurs that was much larger than the ancient aristocracies of Europe. This new class tended to see themselves as struggling against aristocratic codes of behavior—and tax codes.