In this week of the course, you will be studying Romanticism.  Romanticism was an
artistic and intellectual movement which emerged in Europe in the late eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries.  In many respects romanticism was an outcome of the
French Revolution and a reaction to the perceived excessive rationalism of the
Enlightenment, Scientific Revolution and the developing Industrial Revolution.  

The center of the Romantic movement was poetry, and Romanticism found its best
expression in the work of a small group of English poets (Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth,
Keats and Coleridge), some of whose poetry you have available to read.  The
romantics glorified nature, the human soul and the mystical world, as opposed to the
scholarly, scientific, rational outlook of the Enlightenment.  The romantics felt that the
preoccupation of intellectuals with the rational mind had led intellectuals to neglect the
equally important non-rational, or irrational, part of the human experience.  Besides,
from a romantic point-of-view, what had all that science, critique, rational philosophy,
brought other than twenty-six years of bloody warfare to Europe in the form of the
French revolutionary era.

Romanticism found expression in a number of intellectual and artistic pursuits.  There
was a Romantic movement in literature, music, art, history, even philosophy.  And it
should not seem surprising that the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels was a direct
offshoot of the Romantic movement.  Romanticism also impacted the study of history. 
For the first time intellectuals began to treat national histories as the study of almost
living organisms, with their own stories.