A compelling and persuasive account of how the Romantic Movement permanently changed the way we see things and express ourselves. Three great revolutions rocked the world around 1800. The first two - the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution - have inspired the greatest volume of literature. But the third - the romantic revolution - was perhaps the most fundamental and far-reaching. From Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Burns, to Beethoven, Wagner, Berlioz, Rossini and Liszt, to Goya, Turner, Delacroix and Blake, the romantics brought about nothing less than a revolution when they tore up the artistic rule book of the old regime. This was the period in which art acquired its modern meaning; for the first time the creator, rather than the created, took centre-stage. Artists became the high priests of a new religion, and as the concert hall and gallery came to take the place of the church, the public found a new subject worthy of veneration in paintings, poetry and music. Tim Blanning's sparkling, wide-ranging survey traces the roots and evolution of a cultural revolution whose reverberations continue to be felt today.

Constellations of a Contemporary Romanticism takes its title and point of departure from Walter Benjamin's concept of the historical constellation, which puts both "contemporary" and "romanticism" in play as period designations and critical paradigms. Featuring fascinating and diverse contributions by an international roster of distinguished scholars working in and out of romanticism-from deconstruction to new historicism, from queer theory to postcolonial studies, from visual culture to biopolitics-this volume makes good on a central tenet of Benjamin's conception of history: These critics "grasp the constellation" into which our "own era has formed with a definite earlier one." Each of these essays approaches romanticism as a decisive and unexpired thought experiment that makes demands on and poses questions for our own time: What is the unlived of a contemporary romanticism? What has romanticism's singular untimeliness bequeathed to futurity? What is romanticism's contemporary "redemption value" for painting and politics, philosophy and film?

The Bible is full of miracles. Yet how do we make sense of them today? And where might we see miracles in our own lives? In this installment of the Hansen Lectureship series, historian and theologian Timothy Larsen considers the legacy of George MacDonald, the Victorian Scottish author and minister who is best known for his pioneering fantasy literature, which influenced authors such as C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, G. K. Chesterton, and Madeleine L'Engle. Larsen explores how, throughout his life and writings, MacDonald sought to counteract skepticism, unbelief, naturalism, and materialism and to herald instead the reality of the miraculous, the supernatural, the wondrous, and the realm of the spirit. Based on the annual lecture series hosted at Wheaton College's Marion E. Wade Center, volumes in the Hansen Lectureship Series reflect on the imaginative work and lasting influence of seven British authors: Owen Barfield, G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, George MacDonald, Dorothy L. Sayers, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams.

Walter Benjamin and Romanticism explores the relationship between Walter Benjamin's literary and philosophical work and the tradition of German Romanticism, as well as Hlderlin and Goethe. Through a detailed and scholarly analysis of the major texts, the book explores the endurance of Benjamin's relationship to Romanticism, the residual presence of Romantic Goethean and Hlderlinian motifs in Benjamin's subsequent writings and how Benjamin's understanding of the relationship between criticism and Romanticism can still play a vital role in contemporary philosophical and literary practice.Contributors: Andrew Benjamin, Josh Cohen, David Ferris, Beatrice Hanssen, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Charlie Louth, Bettine Menke, Winfried Menninghaus, Anthony Phelan, Sigrid Weigel>

Sublime stillness: Capturing nature's moody splendor The solitude of man and the bleak beauty of nature are prominent themes in the work of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), the great romantic painter whose importance and influence have often been underestimated. Now widely considered to be the most important German artist of his generation, Friedrich died in obscurity and wasn t fully appreciated until the early 20th century. An important precursor to the Expressionists, Friedrich once wrote that an artist must "close your bodily eye so that you may see your picture first with the spiritual eye. Then bring to the light of day that which you have seen in the darkness so that it may react upon others from the outside inwards." About the Series: Each book in TASCHEN s Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions "

The Art & Ideas series offers introductory books on all aspects of the history of art. Each book is written by an outstanding expert in the field, in an accessible and lively style. Completely up-to-date and comprehensive, these books are essential reading for students and rewarding for anyone curious about art.

Romanticism was 'a way of feeling' rather than a style in art. In the period c. 1775-1830, against the background of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, European artists, together with poets and composers, initiated their own rebellion against the dominant political, religious and social ethos of the day. Their quest was for personal expression and individual liberation, and in the process, the Romantics transformed the idea of art, seeing it as an instrument of social and psychological change.

In this comprehensive volume, David Blayney Brown takes a thematic approach to Romanticism, relating it to the concurrent, more stylistic movements of Neoclassicism and the Gothic Revival, and discussing its relationship with the political and social developments of the era. He not only looks at how artists as diverse as Goya, Delacroix, Friedrich and Turner responded to landscapes or depicted historical events, but also examines artists such as David and Ingres who are not usually considered Romantics. As a result, the reader is given a clear understanding of a complex movement that produced some of the greatest European art, literature and music.

J. M. W. Turner is generally acknowledged not only as Britain's greatest painter, but as one of the finest and most original of all landscape painters. This work, written by a team of the world's foremost Turner scholars, is the first to provide an authoritative and comprehensive guide to his life and works, paying proper attention to the growth of scholarly and critical acclaim given to him, especially over the last two decades.

Moving beyond views of European Romanticism as an essentially poetic development, "Lessons of Romanticism" strives to strengthen a critical awareness of the genres, historical institutions, and material practices that comprised the culture of the period. This anthology--in recasting Romanticism in its broader cultural context--ranges across literary studies, art history, musicology, and political science and combines a variety of critical approaches, including gender studies, Lacanian analysis, and postcolonial studies.
With over twenty essays on such diverse topics as the aesthetic and pedagogical purposes of art exhibits in London, the materiality of late Romantic salon culture, the extracanonical status of Jane Austen and Fanny Burney, and Romantic imagery in Beethoven's music and letters, "Lessons of Romanticism" reveals the practices that were at the heart of European Romantic life. Focusing on the six decades from 1780 to 1832, this collection is arranged thematically around gender and genre, literacy, marginalization, canonmaking, and nationalist ideology. As Americanists join with specialists in German culture, as Austen is explored beside Beethoven, and as discussions on newly recovered women's writings follow fresh discoveries in long-canonized texts, these interdisciplinary essays not only reflect the broad reach of contemporary scholarship but also point to the long-neglected intertextual and intercultural dynamics in the various and changing faces of Romanticism itself.

"Contributors." Steven Bruhm, Miranda J. Burgess, Joel Faflak, David S. Ferris, William Galperin, Regina Hewitt, Jill Heydt-Stevenson, H. J. Jackson, Theresa M. Kelley, Greg Kucich, C. S. Matheson, Adela Pinch, Marc Redfield, Nancy L. Rosenblum, Marlon B. Ross, Maynard Solomon, Richard G. Swartz, Nanora Sweet, Joseph Viscomi, Karen A. Weisman, Susan I. Wolfson

Delacroix's Journal is one of the great documents in art history, a magnificent work of literature as well as vital documentary source for scholars and students. In it the artist discusses his own paintings, his life, his sorrow and hopes; the paintings and sculptures of Rubens, Michelangelo, Constable, Bonington and others: old and new literature and the music of Mozart, Rossini and Chopin, the events of his time.

In the age of revolutions, at the end of the eighteenth century, the mental and spiritual life of North America and Europe began to undergo a historic and irreversible change. The ideas of spontaneity, direct expression and natural feeling transformed the arts, encouraging artists to explore the extremes in human nature, from heroism to insanity and despair. Widely praised on its previous appearance as Romantic Art and now revised, William Vaughan's classic study analyzes the achievement of the leading artists of the age - masters such as Goya, Blake, Gericault, Turner and Delacroix - and sets in context a host of fascinating figures in painting, sculpture and architecture: Palmer, Runge, Soane, Gros, Overbeck, Schinkel, Flaxman, Pugin, Bingham and many more. The result is an invaluable account of a dramatic and contradictory artistic epoch.

..". provocative insights." -- Nineteenth-CenturyLiterature

..". a series of well researched and persuasiveessays examining what has been traditionally excluded from the Romantic literarycanon: the feminine, the domestic, the local, collective, sentimental andnovelistic." -- Women's Studies Network (UK) AssociationNewsletter

..". a contribution of real quality to ongoingdebates." -- British Journal for 18th Century Studies

Theessays in this collection question romanticism's suppression of the feminine, thematerial, and the collective, and its opposition to readings centering on theseconcerns.