The Nineteenth Century: Romanticism to Realism

  • • Romantic movement begins

  • • Age of Progress and the Industrial Revolution

  • • Ludwig von Beethoven composes the Third Symphony (Eroica) in honor of Napoleon

  • Period: to

    • Napoleon becomes Emperor of France and much of continental Europe

  • • William Wordsworth, The Prelude

  • • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust

  • • George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

  • • Napoleon’s army invades Russia and is routed

  • • Napoleon is defeated and sent into exile; European monarchies are restored at the Congress of Vienna

  • • Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

  • • Walter Scott, Romantic novelist, Ivanhoe

  • • John Keats, “La Belle Dame sans Merci”

  • • Russian military officers attempt to establish a constitutional government in the failed Decembrist uprising of 1825

  • • Victor Hugo, Les Misérables

  • • Heinrich Heine, “The Lorelei”

  • Period: to

    • Darwin voyages aboard the Beagle

  • • Alexander Pushkin, Russian poet and novelist publishes Yevgeny Onegin

  • • Victorian era in England begins as Victoria is crowned

  • • Honoré de Balzac, combines Romantic and Realist elements in his collection of novels and short stories The Human Comedy

  • • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels develop theory of scientific socialism in The Communist Manifesto

  • • Louis Napoleon Bonaparte becomes president of France in the Revolution of 1848

  • Period: to

    • Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

  • • Louis Napoleon Bonaparte becomes Emperor Louis Napoleon III; Second French Empire begins

  • • Charles Baudelaire, Fleurs du Mal

  • • Charles Baudelaire, Fleurs du Mal

  • • Charles Darwin develops a theory of biological evolution in On the Origin of Species

  • Period: to

    • Alfred, Lord Tennyson combines Romanticism with Victorian standards in Idylls of the King

  • • Italy is unified

  • • Emancipation Edict frees Russian serfs from enslavement

  • • Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace

  • Age of the Russian Novel

  • Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment

  • • French poets Paul Verlaine and Arthur Rimbaud help found the Symbolist movement

  • Period: to

    • Franco-Prussian War

  • • Germany is unified

  • Period: to

    • Otto von Bismarck becomes German imperial chancellor and virtual dictator

  • • Third French Republic is established

  • • Henrik Ibsen ushers in Realism in drama with A Doll’s House

  • • French writer Émile Zola and his followers found the Naturalist movement

  • Period: to

    • Guy de Maupassant perfects a brief form of the short story

  • • Social unrest grows in Russia; Czar Alexander II is assassinated by terrorists; succeeding czar steps up repression of liberalism

  • • Anton Chekhov’s play The Sea Gull is the first production of the Moscow Arts Theater

  • • Spanish-American war

  • • Marie and Pierre Curie discover first radioactive element