FOCUS QUESTION What were the characteristics of the Romantic movement?

The early nineteenth century brought changes to literature and the other arts as well as political ideas. Followers of the new Romantic movement, or Romanticism, revolted against the emphasis on rationality, order, and restraint that characterized the Enlightenment and the controlled style of classicism. Forerunners appeared from about 1750 on, but the movement crystallized fully in the 1790s, primarily in England and Germany. Romanticism gained strength and swept across Europe until the 1840s, when it gradually gave way to Realism.