The Mind Of The European Romantics

'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).

Special emphasis is placed on the interplay between Romantic culture and social, political and economic change in this study of the course of Romanticism in various European countries.

What, and when, is British Romanticism, if seen not in island isolation but cosmopolitan integration with European Romantic literature, history and culture? The essays here range from poetry and the novel to science writing, philosophy, visual art, opera and melodrama; from France and Germany to Italy and Bosnia.

"The introductory essay is superb, the best short introduction to Romanticism I know. It is comprehensive, covering both the wide range of spheres that Romanticism affected--literature, philosophy, art, music, politics, nationalism--and the broad spectrum of European countries in which it was an influential cultural current. It offers a distinctive, unified interpretation of Romanticism that nonetheless does justice to the complexities of Romantic ideas." --Gerald Izenberg, Washington University in St. Louis