Short answers, pulled from the story.
Romanticism was an artistic and intellectual movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century. It advocated for the importance of subjectivity, imagination, and the appreciation of nature in response to the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution. The movement peaked from 1800 until 1850.
Romanticism was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution and the prevailing ideology of the Age of Enlightenment, especially the scientific rationalization of nature. Romanticists rejected the social conventions of the time in favour of a moral outlook known as individualism, arguing that passion and intuition were crucial to understanding the world.
The first Romantic ideas arose from an earlier German Counter-Enlightenment movement called Sturm und Drang, meaning Storm and Stress. The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, published in 1774, began to shape the movement, and the events and ideologies of the French Revolution were also direct influences.
The key figures of English Romanticism include the poets William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and the older William Blake. The publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798, with poems by Wordsworth and Coleridge, is often held to mark the start of the movement.
In the visual arts, Romanticism first showed itself in landscape painting, with British artists turning to wilder landscapes and storms from the 1760s. Caspar David Friedrich and J. M. W. Turner took landscape painting to its Romantic extremes, while Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa of 1818 to 1819 is regarded as the greatest achievement of Romantic history painting.
Romanticism declined in the mid-19th century due to a confluence of circumstances, including the rise of Realism and Naturalism, Charles Darwin's publishing of On the Origin of Species, a shift to a more conservative political climate, and growing focus on the impact of technology and urbanization. By World War I it had dispersed into subsequent movements.
After its end, Romantic thought and art exerted a sweeping influence on art, music, speculative fiction, philosophy, politics, and environmentalism. The movement's advocacy for nature appreciation is cited as an influence on nature conservation efforts, and most film scores from the Golden Age of Hollywood were written in the lush orchestral Romantic style.