ABSTRACT
Romantic movements occur in individual lands when the tendency has reached the stage of its fullest valid development and the precise form which they take is conditioned by the national context. The romantic was one of two main tendencies which vied for preeminence in eighteenth-century European literature, the other being in essence rationalistic and classicistic in its thrust. A non-romantic literature of high calibre, then, coexists with German Romanticism. The first stage of the rise of the romantic tendency in Germany is the 'Empfindsamkeit' which came to the fore in the late 1740s and corresponds to a cult of nature and feeling observable in England and France at about the same time. Escapism is the sign of an inadequate Romanticism. Classicism respects the progress made by the 'Sturm und Drang' in understanding the complexities of individual psychology, and tries to build on it.
