This study presents a new approach to the theory of Romanticism. Peer proceeds though key Romantic documents about form and structure, while displacing and condensing modern scholarly assumptions that interrupt modern theoretical protocol. A line of development is suggested, moving from eighteenth-century explorations in Kant, Fielding, and Diderot, through Schlegelian Romantic beginnings, and on through Emily Bronte, Pushkin, and the Romantic Manifesto, culminating in the profound achievement of Manzoni. Summarizing Romantic narrative implications by looking at the modern discipline of Comparative Literature, this book deliberately deforms both our contemporary ideas about Romanticism as well as our non-Romantic way of teaching it.

The vexed question of what the Romantics themselves said about Romanticism has been approached in a number of different ways, but their major public declarations have never been gathered together. Indeed, with the exception of a few of these (such as Stendhal's Racine et Shakespeare), this body of evidence has been unavailable to the English-speaking audience. Many of these manifestos are translated here for the first time: the remaining are newly translated for this collection. Taken together, they show Romanticism as a coherent and unified movement appearing in pulses throughout Eastern and Western Europe in the early nineteenth century, with a continual spiritual kinship to Schlegelian origins.

New essays offering fresh glimpses of Romanticism as interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic, illuminating the discursive features and the pan-European nature of the movement. Romanticism bubbled up as lava from such historical eruptions as the Napoleonic Wars. The power of its flow across disciplines and linguistic borders reminds us that the use of the term in a context limited to one linguistic, national, or political tradition, or to one discipline or area of human development, shows an essential ignorance of the ideational configurations elaborated and lived out by the movement. Among its consistent norms are the notion ofreality as a transcendent self-unfolding Geist, everything existing in a dialectical relationship with all else; the position that art reveals mythic understructures of reality; and that all kinds of kinship are more normalthan isolation. This book brings together essays that highlight the inclusivity of Romanticism. A team of eleven scholars offers fresh glimpses of Romanticism as it manifests itself in a number of disciplines, including most prominently literature, but also music, painting, and the sciences. In so doing, the contributors treat Romanticism as interdisciplinary and cross-linguistic, providing data and interpretive viewpoints that illuminate the discursive features and the pan-European nature of the movement. Contributors: Lloyd Davies, Ellis Dye, Stacey Hahn, Hollie Markland Harder, Jennifer Law-Sullivan, Sarah Lippert, Marjean D. Purinton, Ashley Shams, Kaitlin Gowan Southerly. Larry H. Peer is Professor of Comparative Literature at Brigham Young University. Christopher R. Clason is Professor of German at Oakland University.

Essays on key aspects of Romanticism, viewed in a wider European context. Despite a century of sustained critical activity and an interest level in the last ten years never before reached (as reflected in the sheer number of scholarly works produced), the study of Romanticism remains focused for the most part through individual, national, and linguistic views, and is now largely embedded in the complications of contemporary theory as applied through those limiting views. Partly responsible is the fact that Romanticism itself forms a set of rhetorical, cultural, and ideological lenses refracting a multiplicity and even chaos that at times seems to defy comparative analysis. In an attempt to refocus on Romanticism without trying to invent a new synthesis for the movement, the editors have selected thirteen essays from a variety of older and newer scholarly voices that represent a rethinking of key Romantic texts and interrelations through the lens of three fundamental theoretical issues: power, gender, and subjectivity. They call for a newly comparative sense of Romanticism that avoids the kind of critical explication of these issues limited to single national, linguistic, or cultural traditions, or seenthrough too narrowly applied contemporary theoretical `-isms'.