The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism

Book excerpt: 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 of European 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-disciplinary quality 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 a comprehensive and unique overview of European Romanticism.