Romanticism

A literary and artistic movement, centered in Europe, that reacted against Enlightenment rationalism and neoclassical restraint by prizing individual emotion, the imagination, nature and, in many of its writers, a nostalgic or idealized version of the medieval past. In English poetry it is most associated with Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats; in the novel, the Gothic strain of the period and later, continental figures such as Victor Hugo carried Romantic concerns into prose. Its emphasis on subjective feeling over inherited convention shaped nearly every literary movement that followed it, including the Realism that in part defined itself against it.