19th century

===Literature===
{{main|Romantic poetry|19th century in literature}}

On the literary front the new century opens with [[romanticism]], a movement that spread throughout Europe in reaction to 18th-century rationalism, and it develops more or less along the lines of the Industrial Revolution, with a design to react against the dramatic changes wrought on nature by the steam engine and the railway. [[William Wordsworth]] and [[Samuel Taylor Coleridge]] are considered the initiators of the new school in England, while in the continent the German ''[[Sturm und Drang]]'' spreads its influence as far as Italy and Spain.  French arts had been hampered by the [[Napoleonic Wars]] but subsequently developed rapidly. [[Modernism]] began.<ref>David Damrosch and David L. Pike, eds. ''The Longman Anthology of World Literature, Volume E: The Nineteenth Century'' (2nd ed. 2008)</ref>

The Goncourts and [[Émile Zola]] in France and [[Giovanni Verga]] in Italy produce some of the finest [[Naturalism (literature)|naturalist novels]]. Italian naturalist novels are especially important in that they give a social map of the new unified Italy to a people that until then had been scarcely aware of its ethnic and cultural diversity. There was a huge literary output during the 19th century. Some of the most famous writers included the Russians [[Alexander Pushkin]], [[Nikolai Gogol]], [[Leo Tolstoy]], [[Anton Chekhov]] and [[Fyodor Dostoyevsky]]; the English [[Charles Dickens]], [[John Keats]], [[Alfred, Lord Tennyson]] and [[Jane Austen]]; the Scottish [[Sir Walter Scott]], [[Thomas Carlyle]] and [[Arthur Conan Doyle]] (creator of the character [[Sherlock Holmes]]); the Irish [[Oscar Wilde]]; the Americans [[Edgar Allan Poe]], [[Ralph Waldo Emerson]], and [[Mark Twain]]; and the French [[Victor Hugo]], [[Honoré de Balzac]], [[Jules Verne]], [[Alexandre Dumas]] and [[Charles Baudelaire]].<ref>M. H. Abrams et al., eds., ''The Norton Anthology of English Literature'' (9th ed. 2012)</ref>

Some American literary writers, poets and novelists were: [[Walt Whitman]], [[Mark Twain]], [[Harriet Ann Jacobs]], [[Nathaniel Hawthorne]], [[Ralph Waldo Emerson]], [[Herman Melville]], [[Frederick Douglass]], [[Harriet Beecher Stowe]], [[Joel Chandler Harris]], and [[Emily Dickinson]] to name a few.