Romanticism,
attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized many works of
literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography in
Western civilization over a period from the late 18th to the mid-19th century.
Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony,
balance, idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism in general and
late 18th-century Neoclassicism in particular. It was also to some extent a
reaction against the Enlightenment and against 18th-century rationalism and
physical materialism in general.