<P> The group of words with the root "Roman" in the various European languages, such as "romance" and "Romanesque", has a complicated history, but by the middle of the 18th century "romantic" in English and romantique in French were both in common use as adjectives of praise for natural phenomena such as views and sunsets, in a sense close to modern English usage but without the sexual connotation . The application of the term to literature first became common in Germany, where the circle around the Schlegel brothers, critics August and Friedrich, began to speak of romantische Poesie ("romantic poetry") in the 1790s, contrasting it with "classic" but in terms of spirit rather than merely dating . Friedrich Schlegel wrote in his Dialogue on Poetry (1800), "I seek and find the romantic among the older moderns, in Shakespeare, in Cervantes, in Italian poetry, in that age of chivalry, love and fable, from which the phenomenon and the word itself are derived ." </P> <P> In both French and German the closeness of the adjective to roman, meaning the fairly new literary form of the novel, had some effect on the sense of the word in those languages . The use of the word did not become general very quickly, and was probably spread more widely in France by its persistent use by Madame de Staël in her De l'Allemagne (1813), recounting her travels in Germany . In England Wordsworth wrote in a preface to his poems of 1815 of the "romantic harp" and "classic lyre", but in 1820 Byron could still write, perhaps slightly disingenuously, "I perceive that in Germany, as well as in Italy, there is a great struggle about what they call' Classical' and' Romantic', terms which were not subjects of classification in England, at least when I left it four or five years ago". It is only from the 1820s that Romanticism certainly knew itself by its name, and in 1824 the Académie française took the wholly ineffective step of issuing a decree condemning it in literature . </P> <P> The period typically called Romantic varies greatly between different countries and different artistic media or areas of thought . Margaret Drabble described it in literature as taking place "roughly between 1770 and 1848", and few dates much earlier than 1770 will be found . In English literature, M.H. Abrams placed it between 1789, or 1798, this latter a very typical view, and about 1830, perhaps a little later than some other critics . Others have proposed 1780--1830 . In other fields and other countries the period denominated as Romantic can be considerably different; musical Romanticism, for example, is generally regarded as only having ceased as a major artistic force as late as 1910, but in an extreme extension the Four Last Songs of Richard Strauss are described stylistically as "Late Romantic" and were composed in 1946--48 . However, in most fields the Romantic Period is said to be over by about 1850, or earlier . </P> <P> The early period of the Romantic Era was a time of war, with the French Revolution (1789--1799) followed by the Napoleonic Wars until 1815 . These wars, along with the political and social turmoil that went along with them, served as the background for Romanticism . The key generation of French Romantics born between 1795--1805 had, in the words of one of their number, Alfred de Vigny, been "conceived between battles, attended school to the rolling of drums". According to Jacques Barzun, there were three generations of Romantic artists . The first emerged in the 1790s and 1800s, the second in the 1820s, and the third later in the century . </P>

When did the romantic time period take place
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