Romanticism was a type of literature that arose in the beginning of the 1800's and continued for about sixty years. This style gave more value to feeling and intuition rather than reason. this was very common after the Industrial Revolution when everybody was trying to get away from their surroundings by reading of supernatural realms or of the natural world.

Romanticism is very obvious in the story Rip Van Winkle, by Washington Ir

ving. In the story, there is a very lazy man that does no work. One day while he is hunting, he thinks that he has found a group of old men playing ninepins. He joins them and gets very drunk. Eventually he wakes up and returns to his town, but finds out that he has been away for over twenty years. This is nothing like the realist story, To Build A Fire, by Jack London in which a man is walking along through the arctic and gets his feet wet. This wetting of his feet eventually leads to his death within a few hours. Romanticism stayed away from most negative feelings and dealt with things in a way that makes the unreal easy to believe. Realism is on the exact opposite side of the spectrum.

One of the greatest realist works is Life on the Mississippi, by Mark Twain. This story illustrates how a boy gets onto a riverboat and tr

Some common words found in the essay are:
Realism Romanticism, Jack London, Mark Twain, Wadsworth Longfellow, Washington Irving, Industrial Revolution, realism romanticism,
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