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spirit or tendency.
(usually initial capital letter) the Romantic style or movement in literature and art, or adherence to its principles (contrasted with ).
Contemporary Examples

romanticism is historical fact, but more than that: a cultural feeling, an aesthetic idea.
What Is Romanticism? Jimmy So September 24, 2011

The question of what romanticism is will never be put to rest with a single answer.
What Is Romanticism? Jimmy So September 24, 2011

Nostalgia for the past is out; so is romanticism about the future.
Rick Perry: America’s Next Top Strategist? James Poulos September 19, 2014

So it is that romanticism is a basket of ideas, many of them contradictory.
What Is Romanticism? Jimmy So September 24, 2011

Music is somehow related to it, and a metaphor of restlessness, romanticism, utopia somehow.
Hedi Slimane Interview: ‘California Song’ at MOCA Los Angeles (PHOTOS) Isabel Wilkinson January 19, 2012

Historical Examples

The flamboyant side of romanticism and its noisy gatherings had little appeal for him.
Vie de Bohme Orlo Williams

Humor and romance often go hand in hand, but humor is commonly fatal to romanticism.
The American Mind Bliss Perry

In the flush of romanticism the zealots neglected those studies which give firmness to the mind.
Vie de Bohme Orlo Williams

Yes, our generation has been soaked in romanticism, and we have remained impregnated with it.
His Masterpiece Emile Zola

Gautier was never more definitely the exponent of romanticism than in saying “I am a man for whom the visible world exists.”
French Art W. C. Brownell

noun
(often capital) the theory, practice, and style of the romantic art, music, and literature of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, usually opposed to classicism
romantic attitudes, ideals, or qualities
n.

1803, “a romantic idea,” from romantic + -ism. In literature, 1823 in reference to a movement toward medieval forms (especially in reaction to classical ones) it has an association now more confined to Romanesque. The movement began in German and spread to England and France. Generalized sense of “a tendency toward romantic ideas” is first recorded 1840.

A movement in literature and the fine arts, beginning in the early nineteenth century, that stressed personal emotion, free play of the imagination, and freedom from rules of form. Among the leaders of romanticism in world literature were Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Victor Hugo, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Friedrich von Schiller.

A movement in literature and the fine arts, beginning in the early nineteenth century, that stressed personal emotion, free play of the imagination, and freedom from rules of form. Among the leaders of romanticism in English literature were William Blake, Lord Byron, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and William Wordsworth.

A movement that shaped all the arts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Romanticism generally stressed the essential goodness of human beings (see Jean-Jacques Rousseau), celebrated nature rather than civilization, and valued emotion and imagination over reason. (Compare classicism.)

A movement in literature, music, and painting in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Romanticism has often been called a rebellion against an overemphasis on reason in the arts. It stressed the essential goodness of human beings (see Jean-Jacques Rousseau), celebrated nature rather than civilization, and valued emotion and imagination over reason. Some major figures of romanticism in the fine arts are the composers Robert Schumann, Felix Mendelssohn, and Johannes Brahms, and the painter Joseph Turner.