Book section
European Romanticism
- Alternative title:
- Ambivalent Responses to the Sense of a New Epoch
- Abstract:
- Attempts to define Romanticism characteristically begin by conceding the difficulty, even impossibility, of the task. The entry on the subject in an encyclopedia of German literary history summarizes the challenge: “The Romantic movement must be understood as a unity, but it is in itself so polymorphous and contradictory that both a definition and an historical presentation are extraordinarily difficult.” Rather than proposing a normative definition, as if that were possible, this chapter will take the resistance to definition and its historical roots as keys to understanding Romanticism as distinctly European and modern. Accordingly, the focus here will be less on the art produced during the early decades of the nineteenth century, when Romanticism began to be theorized as a contemporary concern, than on discursive self-understanding in that unsettled period in which, as the poet William Wordsworth acknowledged, “a shock had then been given / To old opinions; and the minds of all men / Had felt it.”
- Publication status:
- Published
- Peer review status:
- Peer reviewed
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(Preview, Accepted manuscript, pdf, 373.2KB, Terms of use)
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- Publisher copy:
- 10.1017/9781316160855.003
Authors
- Publisher:
- Cambridge University Press
- Host title:
- Cambridge History of Modern European Thought. Volume 1: The Nineteenth Century
- Pages:
- 40-64
- Series:
- Cambridge Histories - British & European History
- Publication date:
- 2019-08-29
- DOI:
- Language:
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English
- Keywords:
- Pubs id:
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pubs:743766
- UUID:
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uuid:c8a9e9e2-73c4-4a95-931c-098bf52de9a7
- Local pid:
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pubs:743766
- Source identifiers:
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743766
- Deposit date:
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2017-11-08
- ARK identifier:
Terms of use
- Copyright holder:
- Cambridge University Press
- Copyright date:
- 2019
- Rights statement:
- © Cambridge University Press 2019.
- Notes:
- This is the accepted manuscript version of the chapter. The final version is available online from Cambridge University Press at: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316160855.003
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