Stages Of European Romanticism

Employs an innovative approach by stages to offer a unified vision of European Romanticism over the half-century of its growth and decline.

The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism focuses on the period beginning with the French Revolution and extending to the uprisings of 1848 across Europe. It brings together leading scholars in the field to examine the intellectual, literary, philosophical, and political elements ofEuropean Romanticism. The volume begins with a series of chapters examining key texts written by major writers in languages including French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Hungarian, Greek, and Polish amongst others. Then follows a second section based on the naturally inter-disciplinaryquality of Romanticism, encapsulated by the different discourses with which writers of the time, set up an internal comparative dynamic. These chapters highlight the sense a discourse gives of being written knowledgeably against other pretenders to completeness or comprehensiveness of understanding,and the Enlightenment encyclopaedic project. Discourses typically push their individual claims to resume European culture, collaborating and trying to assimilate each other in the process. The main examples featuring here are history, geography, drama, theology, language, geography, philosophy,political theory, the sciences, and the media. Each chapter offers original and individual interpretation of individual aspects of an inherently comparative world of individual writers and the discursive idioms to which they are historically subject. Together the forty-one chapters provide acomprehensive and unique overview of European Romanticism.

It was through Staël's bestseller, De l'Allemagne, that the term "Romanticism," coined in Germany, reached Europe and America. Around this term, Staël built a new and universal agenda: her manifesto offered Napoleon's Europe an alternative to everything he stood for. In this ground-breaking work, John Claiborne Isbell reasserts Staël's place in history and analyzes her vast agenda, which covers every Classical and Romantic divide in art, philosophy, religion and society from 1789 to 1815. This investigation sheds new light on the two different revolutions that created modern Europe, as seen here by a leader of both.

67 texts, including hymns, manifestos, articles or extracts from lengthy studies exemplify the relation between Romanticism and the national movements in the cultural space ranging from Poland to the Ottoman Empire. Each text is accompanied by a presentation of the author, and by an analysis of the context in which the respective work was born.The end of the 18th century and first decades of the 19th were in many respects a watershed period in European history. The ideas of the Enlightenment and the dramatic convulsions of the French Revolution had shattered the old bonds and cast doubt upon the established moral and social norms of the old corporate society. In culture a new trend, Romanticism, was successfully asserting itself against Classicism and provided a new key for a growing number of activists to 're-imagine' their national community, reaching beyond the traditional frameworks of identification (such as the 'political nation', regional patriotism, or Christian universalism). The collection focuses on the interplay of Romantic cultural discourses and the shaping of national ideology throughout the 19th century, tracing the patterns of cultural transfer with Western Europe as well as the mimetic competition of national ideologies within the region.

'Ideas can be, and are, cosmopolitan,' Chateaubriand observed; and certainly the scope of the nineteenth-century Romantic Movement was the widest imaginable: it not only affected all parts of Europe but even, to a lesser extent the Americas. This book provides a comprehensive study of this Movement - in literature, painting, music, philosophy, religion, and other fields - and a detailed interpretation of all its main issues: intellectual, emotional, social and historical. The initial revolt against eh ideas of the eighteenth century is first seen in the larger context of history, and particular Romantic ideas and sentiments are then illustrated and anatomized in pen portraits of individual Romantics. In this way the successive phases of the beliefs of such key figures as Schelling, Coleridge and Lamnnais - indispensable to any account of the Movement - are carefully documented. -- Publisher (back cover).