Romanticism evolved in response to the French Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment that followed. Rather than focus on reason and rationality to explain man, romanticism focused more on emotions and feelings to explain nature and portray them.
Inspired by the ideas of Jean Jacques Rousseau romanticism emerged as a reaction to 18th-century values, asserting emotion and intuition over rationalism, the importance of the individual over social conformity, and the exploration of natural and psychic wildernesses over classical restraint. Major themes of Romantic art and literature include a love of atmospheric landscapes; nostalgia for the past, a love of the primitive, including folk traditions; cult of the individual hero figure, often an artist or political revolutionary; romantic passion; mysticism; and a fascination with death.
Jean Jacques Rousseau is of course mother of Romantic movement but we have seen many other sowing seeds of romanticism. Thomson, Collins, Gray, Richardson, and Prevost are those whose theology and art are the most marvelous romance of all. Many other includes William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord Byron, and Walter Scott in Britain; and Victor Hugo, Alfonse de Lamar tine, George Sand, and Alexandre Dumas in France. Above all Rousseau matured the seeds of romanticism in the hothouse of his emotions and delivered its offspring’s, full grown and fertile from birth in his works which include Discourses, the Contrat social, Emile and the Confessions.
Romanticism is an important literary movement which began in Western Europe during 17th century and went on till the second half of 18th century. Romanticism is a movement that emerged as a reaction against Neoclassicism, the age preceding the Romantic Movement. The Neoclassical age was also called the 'The age of Enlightenment', which emphasized on reason and logic. The Romantic period wanted to break away from the traditions and