The romantic movement in literature began in the late 18th century in Western Europe. It was a revolt against the Enlightenment of the previous century and the focus was on rational and scientific thought.

Characteristics of romantic literature involve emphasizing passion, emotion, and the natural world. Nationalism was one of the crucial factors in the Romantic movement, and as a result, many authors turned to native mythologies and folktales for source material. They returned to aesthetics and tried to emphasize the ethos of the medieval period.

The first examples of romantic literature began in Germany and the most important and notable literary figure was Goethe. his novel The sorrows of young Werther (1774), about a young and sensitive artist, was very popular throughout Europe. He used local folklore and myth as subjects for his poetry. He became a source of inspiration for a sentiment of German nationalism in the decades leading up to a unified Germany. After that, the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century brought romantic ideals such as liberty, liberty, and national pride.

Throughout the 19th century, Romanticism dominated English literature, and Romantic poetry in particular became the most important work of the age. William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Blake, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats are Britain’s notable Romantic poets. Nature, religious fervor, the emotional response to beauty, and ancient Greek aesthetics are some of the common themes in her work.

Romance novels were very popular in 19th century Britain. Romanticism was well present in the form of the Gothic novel, which exploited emotions such as romantic love and fear. by Mary Shelley Frankenstein (1818), by Charlotte Bronte jane eyre (1847) and Emily Bronte wuthering heights (1847) are some of the best known examples.

In the young United States, romantic literature flourished remarkably. You can see the work of Washington Irving, Edgar Allen Poe, and Nathaniel Hawthorne written in the Gothic style. On the other hand, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were able to place greater emphasis on natural beauty and on man’s identity as a natural being. Later, these themes resonated in the work of poets such as Walt Whitman.

The literature of other countries was also influenced by romanticism. In France, the novels by Stendhal and Victor Hugo are often characterized as part of the realist movement, but they certainly carry some romantic influence. If we talk about Eastern Europe, the Russian writers Mikhail Lermontov and Alexander Pushkin were some of the practitioners of the romantic movement.