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

Majismo, a cultural phenomenon that embodied the popular aesthetic in Spain from the second half of the eighteenth century, served as a vehicle to “regain” Spanish heritage. As expressed in visual representations of popular types participating in traditional customs and wearing garments viewed as historically Spanish, majismo conferred on Spanish “citizens” the pictorial ideal of a shared national character. In Framing Majismo, Tara Zanardi explores nobles’ fascination with and appropriation of the practices and types associated with majismo, as well as how this connection cultivated the formation of an elite Spanish identity in the late 1700s and aided the Bourbons’ objective to fashion themselves as the legitimate rulers of Spain. In particular, the book considers artistic and literary representations of the majo and the maja, purportedly native types who embodied and performed uniquely Spanish characteristics. Such visual examples of majismo emerge as critical and contentious sites for navigating eighteenth-century conceptions of gender, national character, and noble identity. Zanardi also examines how these bodies were contrasted with those regarded as “foreign,” finding that “foreign” and “national” bodies were frequently described and depicted in similar ways. She isolates and uncovers the nuances of bodily representation, ultimately showing how the body and the emergent nation were mutually constructed at a critical historical moment for both.

“Truth to Nature,” a rallying cry for those artists and critics aiming to reform art-making practices in Great Britain over the course of the nineteenth century, bound together artists as diverse as Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais, photographer P. H. Emerson, and bohemian modernist Augustus John. In order to understand “truth,” these artists turned to the rising disciplines of science, which offered new insights into physical phenomena, vision, and perception. Drawing on sources ranging from artists’ letters to scientific treatises, Nature’s Truth illuminates the dynamic relationship between art and science throughout the nineteenth century. Anne Helmreich reveals how these practices became closely aligned as artists sought to maintain art’s relevance in a world increasingly defined by scientific innovation, technological advances, and a rapidly industrializing society. Eventually, despite consensus between artists and critics about the need for “truth to nature,” the British arts community sharply contested what constituted truth and how truth to nature as an ideal could be visually represented. By the early twentieth century, the rallying cry could no longer hold the reform movement together. Helmreich’s fascinating study shows, however, that this relatively short-lived movement had a profound effect on modern British art. An insightful examination of changing conceptions of truth and the role of art in modern society, Nature’s Truth reframes and recontextualizes our notions of British art.

Conventionally, a Grand Tour leads from somewhere north of the Alps to the historical sights of Italy. In the case of Emel'jan Michailovich Korneev (1780-1843), the journey began in St. Petersburg, took him through Siberia to the border with Mongolia and eventually to Crimea, from where he traveled onward to Greece and Asia Minor. His trip concluded with the classic tour through Italy. Years later, he even circumnavigated the globe as an expedition illustrator on board a Russian ship. The premiere presentation of the drawings from E.M. Korneev's journey through Italy at Munich's Stadtmuseum is an apt occasion to familiarize a broader public outside Russia with the output of this fascinating artistic figure for the first time.

This anthology outlines a research project at the Angermuseum in Erfurt and forms the start of a new assessment of the landscape painter Friedrich Nerly (1807-1878) from Erfurt, who spent the main years of his career in Italy, particularly in Venice. If one wants to do justice to the phenomenon of Nerly, it is necessary to take a look at the changes in artistic, economic, and social contexts. Nerly's oeuvre should be connected with the innovative painting practices and finding of motifs of the early plein-air painters as well as with sales strategies that reacted to the globalization of the art market and tourism. In line with research on cultural transfer, questions, for instance, regarding the achievements that Nerly brought to Italy or inspirations that he found in his home country emerge cross-nationally.