"Romanticism" is a period, movement, style, or genre in literature, music, and other arts starting in the late 1700s and flourishing through the early to mid 1800s, a time when the modern mass culture in which we now live first took form: the rise of nation-states as defining social and geographic entities, increasing geographic and social mobility, people moving to cities, the growth of the middle class, new technologies including power from fossil fuels, and ideas or values including individualism, imaginative idealization of childhood, families, love, nature, and the past. The Romantic era is the historical period of literature in which modern readers most begin to see a reflection of themselves and their own modern conflicts and desires.
The Romantic period has passed, but its styles and values still thrive today in popular forms and familiar attitudes, e.g.:
belief in children's innocence and wisdom; youth as golden age; adulthood as corruption and betrayal nature as beauty and truth, esp. as the sublime (god-like awesomeness mixing pleasure and pain, beauty and terror) heroic individualism; the individual separate from the masses characters as symbolic typesdesire or will as personal motivation feelings, emotions, and imagination take priority over logic and facts ("Anything you want you can have if you only want it enough.") intensification, excess, and extremes nostalgia for the past common people idealized as dependable source of true common sense idealized or abstract settings the gothic as nightmare world of intense emotions
