Romanticism, European

The movement known as European Romanticism arose in the late eighteenth century and dominated European literature throughout much of the nineteenth century. Attempts to define Romanticism have been complicated by the difficulty of unifying the distinct manifestations of the movement throughout Europe, as well as the problem of accounting for the various time periods in which it arose in different countries. However, critics are moving toward a recognition of Romanticism’s homogeneity; they have agreed that the movement arose as a reaction against the aesthetic tenets of Neoclassicism, which emphasized formal regularity and emotional restraint, and that the European Romantics were unified in stressing the importance of the imagination and the validity of individual expression in artistic creation. The Romantic temperament...