Short answers, pulled from the story.
Romantic literature is a broad literary movement that emphasized imagination, feeling, nature, and individual experience over reason and classical convention. In England, the publication of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth and Coleridge in 1798 is often held to mark the start of the movement, while in Poland it is taken to begin with Adam Mickiewicz's first poems in 1822.
The central English Romantic poets were William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Blake, followed by John Clare. Walter Scott and Mary Shelley were the major Romantic novelists, and William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb were important essayists associated with the movement.
Scott and Byron achieved enormous fame beyond Britain. Scott's historical novels, beginning with Waverley in 1814, were adapted into operas by composers including Donizetti and Bellini, and his narrative poems The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805) and Marmion (1808) were widely read across Europe. Byron's Turkish tales and the Childe Harold poems inspired writers and composers throughout the continent, and his death in 1824 at thirty-six while aiding the Greek War of Independence deepened his Romantic legend.
Polish Romanticism was uniquely shaped by the loss of national statehood. After the Great Emigration of the early 1830s, leading Polish writers including Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Slowacki, and Zygmunt Krasinski worked in exile in France, Germany, Great Britain, Turkey, and the United States. Their literature developed a messianic dimension, casting Poland as a nation chosen to suffer and be redeemed, with the poet functioning as a spiritual prophet for the nation.
Macpherson's Ossian cycle, published in 1762, is credited more than any single work with sparking the Romantic movement in European literature, particularly in Germany. The poems inspired Goethe and the young Walter Scott, and Fingal was quickly translated into many European languages. They were eventually shown not to be direct translations from Scottish Gaelic but flowery adaptations Macpherson composed himself.
The principal French Romantic writers were Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, Alfred de Vigny, George Sand, and Prosper Merimee. They worked across novels, drama, and poetry. Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre-Dame (1831) became a defining work of French Romanticism, while Dumas produced The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo in 1844. Stendhal is also associated with the period but stood closer to Realism.