In part a revolt against what was perceived as the cold rationality of the Enlightenment, romanticism was characterized by a belief in emotional exuberance, unrestrained imagination, and spontaneity in both art and personal life. Preoccupied with emotional excess, romantic works explored the awesome power of love and desire and of hatred, guilt, and despair. Where Enlightenment thinkers embraced secularization and civic life, romantics delved into religious ecstasy and the hidden recesses of the self. The romantics were passionately moved by nature and decried the growth of modern industry and industrial cities.

The French romantic painter Eugène Delacroix (oo-ZHEHN deh-luh-KWAH) (1798–1863) depicted dramatic, colorful scenes that stirred the emotions. He frequently painted non-European places and people, whether lion hunts in Morocco or women in a sultan’s harem. Like other romantic works, Delacroix’s art reveals the undercurrents of desire and fascination within Europe’s imperial ambitions in “exotic” and “savage” places in the nineteenth century.

It was in music that romanticism realized most fully and permanently its goals of free expression and emotional intensity. Abandoning well-defined structures, the great romantic composers used a wide range of forms to create musical landscapes and evoke powerful emotion. The first great romantic composer is among the most famous today, Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827).

Romanticism also found a distinctive voice in poetry. In 1798 William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and his fellow romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834) published their Lyrical Ballads, which abandoned flowery classical conventions for the language of ordinary speech. Wordsworth described his conception of poetry as the “spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling recollected in tranquility.”

Victor Hugo’s (1802–1885) powerful novels exemplified the romantic fascination with fantastic characters, strange settings, and human emotions. The hero of Hugo’s famous Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831) is the great cathedral’s deformed bell-ringer, a “human gargoyle” overlooking the teeming life of fifteenth-century Paris.

The study of history became a romantic passion. History was the key to a universe that was now perceived to be organic and dynamic, not mechanical and static as the Enlightenment thinkers had believed. Historical studies supported the development of national aspirations and encouraged entire peoples to seek in the past their special destinies.

In central and eastern Europe, in particular, literary romanticism and early nationalism reinforced each other. Romantics turned their attention to peasant life and transcribed the folk songs, tales, and proverbs that the cosmopolitan Enlightenment had disdained. The brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were particularly successful at rescuing German fairy tales from oblivion. In the Slavic lands romantics played a decisive role in converting spoken peasant languages into modern written languages.

Beginning in the 1840s romanticism gave way to a new artistic genre, realism. Influenced by the growing prestige of science in this period, realist writers believed that literature should depict life exactly as it is. Forsaking poetry for prose and the personal, emotional viewpoint of the romantics for strict scientific objectivity, the realists simply observed and recorded.

Realist writers focused on creating fiction based on contemporary everyday life. Beginning with a dissection of the middle classes, from which most of them sprang, many realists eventually focused on the working classes, especially the urban working classes, which had been neglected in literature before this time. The realists put a microscope to unexplored and taboo topics — sex, strikes, violence, alcoholism — shocking middle-class critics.

The realists’ claims of objectivity did not prevent the elaboration of a definite worldview. Realists such as the famous French novelist Émile Zola (1840–1902) and English novelist Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) were determinists. They believed that human beings, like atoms, are components of the physical world and that all human actions are caused by unalterable natural laws: heredity and environment determine human behavior; good and evil are merely social conventions. They were also critical of the failures of industrial society; by depicting the plight of poor workers, they hoped to bring about positive social change.