section_path: Defining Romanticism/Etymology
section_name: Etymology
paragraph_text: Etymology
  
  The group of words with the root "Roman" in the various European languages, such as "romance" and "Romanesque", has a complicated history. By the 18th century, European languages—notably German, French and Slavic languages—were using the term "Roman" in the sense of the English word " novel ", i.e. a work of popular narrative fiction. This usage derived from the term "Romance languages", which referred to vernacular (or popular) language in contrast to formal Latin. Most such novels took the form of " chivalric romance ", tales of adventure, devotion and honour.
  
  The founders of Romanticism, critics (and brothers) August Wilhelm Schlegel and Friedrich Schlegel, 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 1800 essay Gespräch über die Poesie ("Dialogue on Poetry"):
  
  The modern sense of the term spread more widely in France by its persistent use by Germaine 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,
  
  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.