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Emily Anderson
Humanities 100
7/10/2018
19th Century European Literature
The 19th-century European literature witnessed significant revolutions in ideas and
writing styles. First, the Romanticism emerged as a revolution in research as a champion of
freedom of expression of personality and emotions as articulated by Collingwood (4). As a
result, romantic poets, novelists, and musicians emphasized individuality, passion, and emotional
expression in their writing styles. Consequently, the medieval romance tales and ballads of
chivalric adventures replaced formal writing styles of classical literature. The above gave more
emphasis on heroism as expounded by Collingwood (9). Also, romanticism included literary
styles such as myths, legends, and songs revered diverse cultural expressions.
On the other hand, realism emerged opposing the focus of inner self-fronted by
romanticism. In particular, realism concentrated on portraying the present as close to reality in a
scientific manner according to Collingwood (11). As a result, the novel emerged as the dominant
literary style as opposed to poetry preferred during romanticism. Novelists concentrated on the
expression of ideas such as social abuse. For instance, Charles Dickens ad Nikolai depicted
social injustices in their novels. The idea was to express how social and economic forces affected
the behavior of humans. In this era of literature, the objective of the writers of novels was to
depict humans as socially unjust. Such social injustices affected the behavior of human beings
such that by studying a novella about a particular community or a social set up, one could predict
the social prejudices that prevailed in such communities (Collingwood 17).
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Evolution of realism led to the emergence of naturalism. The idea behind this critical
stage was that writers wanted to demonstrate the relationship between social environment and
human behavior. In particular writing styles focused on the role of social context in predicting
human traits. The dominant literary form during the naturalism period was the novels in which
writers expressed how their environment conditioned humans. Collingwood (21) argue that by
studying and reading the story about the social climate of the particular human being, one could
predict the behavior of that human since the social environment influences the response.
Therefore, the primary idea of the novelists during the naturalism was to show that there is a
causal relationship between human behavior and the social environment (Collingwood 22).
Afterward, European literature advanced to symbolism. This form of literary style was
articulated primarily by French poets such as Arthur Rimbaud and Charles Baudelaire who
