Romanticism
Feeling, nature and the individual are set against reason and industry.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 50 years
- Known to
- ± 10 years
- Era
- Industrial, Holocene
From the 1790s, Romantic writers, painters and composers place emotion, imagination, the sublime in nature and the interior life above neoclassical order. Beethoven transforms the symphony; Wordsworth and Goethe write about consciousness; Turner dissolves landscape into light. It is in large part a reaction to industrialisation and to the Enlightenment's confidence in reason, and it supplies the vocabulary of nationalism as well as of art.