Romanticism was a secular and intellectual movement in the history of ideas that originated in late 18th century Western Europe. It stressed strong emotion (which now might include trepidation, awe, and horror as aesthetic experiences), the individual imagination as a critical authority (which permitted freedom within or from classical notions of form in art), and overturning of previous social conventions, particularly the position of the aristocracy. There was a strong element of historical and natural inevitability in its ideas, stressing the awe of "nature" in art and language and the experience of sublimity through a connection with nature. An influence upon the Romantic movement by the ideologies and events of the French Revolution is thought to have characterized the movement. Romanticism is also noted for its elevation of the achievements of what it perceived as misunderstood heroic individuals and artists that altered society altogether. It followed the Enlightenment period and was in part inspired by a revolt against aristocratic social and political norms from the previous period, as well as a reaction against the rationalism of nature by the Enlightenment.
In a general sense, Romanticism refers to several distinct groups of artists, poets, writers, musicians, political, philosophical and social thinkers and trends of the late 18th and early 19th centuries in Europe. But a precise characterization and a specific description of Romanticism have been objects of intellectual history and literary history for all of the twentieth century without any great measure of consensus emerging. Arthur Lovejoy attempted to demonstrate the difficulty of this problem in his seminal article "On The Discrimination of Romanticisms" in his Essays in the History of Ideas (1948); some scholars see romanticism as completely continuous with the present, some see it as the inaugural moment of modernity, some see it as the beginning of a tradition of resistance to the Enlightenment, and still others date it firmly in the direct aftermath of the French Revolution.