Romanticism in Germany and England

Many of the sensibilities later called Romantic were anticipated by the Genevan philosopher and writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His epistolary novel Julie, ou la Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) celebrated intense feeling and the beauty of the natural landscape, while his posthumously published Confessions modeled a new kind of unguarded, introspective self-examination. Rousseau's insistence that natural feeling and the individual conscience mattered more than inherited social convention gave later writers across Europe a vocabulary for exploring emotion, nature, and selfhood that classical and Enlightenment aesthetics had largely set aside.