Romanticism is a movement within both art and literature throughout the 18th to 19th century. It came about as a form of revolution against the previous Neoclassical movement prevalent in Europe within the 17th to 18th centuries, which promoted a return to classical Greek and Roman artistic elements.
"literature depicting emotional matter in an imaginative form"
- Friedrich Schlegel in regards to romantic literature (from Athenäeum-Fragment, 1798)
Primarily, romantic writers focused on the exploration of individuality, spirituality, nature, and sometimes an appreciation of isolationism as core tenants of their literature.
In terms of literary devices, personification and pathetic fallacy were heavily utilised as a byproduct of Romanticism's greater focus on nature. Karl von Martius, an early Romantic author, used such techniques in his volume report Flora Brasiliensis:
"Even today those trees speak to me and fill my spirit with a certain pious fear,"
- Karl von Martius, Flora Brasiliensis (1840)
| Author | Famous Work |
|---|---|
| William Wordsworth | "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" |
| Samuel Taylor Coleridge | "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" |
| Percy Bysshe Shelley | "To a Skylark" |
| William Blake | "Songs of Innocence and of Experience" |
| John Keats | "Ode to a Nightingale" |
| Mary Shelly | "Frankenstein" |
