Romanticism was a way of feeling rather than a style in art. In the period c.1775-1830, against the background of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, European artists, together with poets and composers, initiated their own rebellion against the dominant political, religious and social ethos of the day. Their quest was for personal expression and individual liberation, and in the process, the Romantics transformed the idea of art, seeing it as an instrument of social and psychological change. In this comprehensive volume, David Blayney Brown takes a thematic approach to Romanticism, relating it to the concurrent, more stylistic movements of Neoclassicism and the Gothic Revival, and discussing its relationship with the political and social developments of the era. As a result, the reader is given a clear understanding of a complex movement that produced some of the greatest European art, literature and music.