Romanticism is the term used to describe the cultural, literary, psychological, social and political counter-culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a counter-culture that arose in response to - and in some cases, reaction against - the rationalist values of the Enlightenment. This subject studies the literature of the period that produced the French Revolution, the American Declaration of Independence, the first writing about human rights, women's rights, and animal rights, the beginnings of environmentalism and Western ecology, a radical rethinking of the idea of "nature", the ideas that good writing is original writing, that poetry will save the world, and that feeling is more important than thinking. Students look critically at a broad array of Romantic texts and investigate how their authors respond to and frame the questions thrown up by their times.

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