The Era of Romanticism and the Transcendentalist Movement     Romanticism was a widespread literary movement that became predominant both in the US and Europe in the early-mid 19th century, after which it was increasingly replaced by realism and naturalism. Initially, it was largely a reaction to Puritanism and, to some degree, the scientific view resulting from the Age of Reason. The Romantics felt that emotion and spirituality and feeling were superior to pure thought to some degree, and that life must be lived through the emotions rather than through pure reason. They gloried in nature and its beauties; imagination and emotion, for them, were of cardinal importance. Human beings had many divine characteristics in their opinion, simply because they were of nature. They despised conformity and valued individualism; many felt that the individual was more important than the society. In fiction, many of their characters were either entirely evil or wholly good; there was not much of a middle ground. They dramatized characters who were often larger than life and embodied romantic ideas. The movement was especially strong in Europe.     In America, the romantic movement appeared in the guise of transcendentalism, a slightly modified offshoot of romanticism. Like the romantic movement, the transcendentalists idealized the emotions and nature; they felt that life could only be lived properly through intuition and that one must transcend the world of the senses and reason to live fully. Like the romantics, they felt that the universe was benevolent and that one must have faith both in it and in oneself. American romantics and transcendentalists often tended to concentrate on American themes, believing them to be as good as if not superior to European ones. American romantic and transcendentalist writers included Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, Hawthorne, Longfellow, James Fenimore Cooper, and others.