‘Master-pieces of their kind’

This chapter discusses the compositions of the blind seventeenth- and eighteenth-century harper-composer Turlough Carolan (Toirdhealbhach Ó Cearbhalláin) and the manner in which they were employed during the Celtic Revival by eighteenth-century Irish antiquarians and scholars in their recovery of the Gaelic past. Motivated by an interest in the native music and song of Ireland that was in turn sparked by the romantic movement, the vogue for primitivism, and the cult of the bard, scholars such as Joseph Cooper Walker, Charlotte Brooke, and James Hardiman re-invented Carolan’s image as that of a bard and a musical genius and elevated his compositions to a higher status than they had achieved during his lifetime. In doing so, they brought his work to a wider English-speaking audience.

Science and Social Reform in the Age of Reason

The idea of progress, the creation of the social sciences, and the cause of social reform became entangled with the power of reason-based natural science to reveal reality. This was coordinate with the spread of Newtonianism, an eclectic fusion of the physics of Newton, Descartes, and Leibniz. Although that physics was deterministic, the creators of the social sciences—sociology, economics, political science, and psychology—supported platforms of reason-based reforms of society, challenging authority and tradition-based social institutions that empowered the Church, monarchy, and aristocracy. A number of dramatic events reinforced the idea that scientific reasoning revealed truths about reality, which seemed to confirm the connection between Newtonian physics and reality. Meanwhile, opposition to the hegemony of reason in human affairs emerged in the form of a nascent Romantic movement whose champions, most notably Jean-Jacques Rousseau, held that feeling and will, rather than reason, were central to human affairs.

The Influence of Indian Philosophy on French Romanticism

France’s connection to India dates back to the seventeenth century when the French came to establish trading relations with India and neighboring countries. Even in the heydays of Enlightenment, France, the champion and cradle of Reason and Rationality in Europe, was looking for an alternative and philosophers like Rousseau, Diderot and Voltaire looked towards India as a source of inspiration. That tradition was continued by the French Romantics who were even more influenced and inspired by Indian philosophy and wanted to change the course of French literature with the help of it. This paper aims to explore literary transactions between India and France culminating in the movement called Romanticism in French literature. The paper shall trace the trajectory of how Indian philosophy and thought traveled to Europe in the form of texts and influenced the works of the French from Voltaire in the eighteenth century to Jules Bois in the twentieth. The central argument of this diachronic study, based on the theory of influence, is to prove how significant the role of India and her literary/religious texts have been in the context of the Romantic Movement in French literature in the nineteenth century.

Aryans, Semites, and Jewish Scholars

The awareness of the proximity of Judaism and Islam to Christianity was nearly lost in the secularization process. Christian affinities with Judaism and Islam ceased to be a matter of evidence, immediately recognizable. More and more, literati started perceiving Christianity as a (or rather the) European religion, while its Near Eastern roots were trimmed far back, or even, in some cases, pulled up entirely. In German-speaking lands, in particular, the Romantic movement and the “discovery” of Sanskrit brought to the perception of “Indo-Europeans,” or Aryans and Semite peoples, throughout history, in contradistinction and opposition to one another. Within a climate of growing racist anti-Semitism, Jewish scholars started to develop modern scholarship on Judaism.

Romanticism in the North American Short Story

El Romanticismo fue un movimiento extremadamente influyente que surgió a finales del siglo 18 y que tuvo un gran impacto en varias áreas, incluida la literatura. Innumerables escritores han representado en sus obras características esenciales del Romanticismo como la representación de horror y emociones intensas, el uso de entornos naturales exóticos y salvajes, el nacionalismo, el individualismo, la mente humana, y el simbolismo, entre muchas otras. En este artículo, se muestra cómo el Romanticismo influyó, en concreto, la narrativa breve norteamericana analizando cinco obras: “Rip Van Winkle,” de Washington Irving; “The Minister’s Black Veil,” de Nathaniel Hawthorne; “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” de Herman Melville; y “The Minister’s Black Veil” y “The Tell-Tale Heart,” de Edgar Allan Poe. Los resultados que se han obtenido de este análisis han demostrado que estas cinco historias breves se pueden considerar trabajos románticos porque reflejan múltiples características del Romanticismo. De hecho, estos autores retratan las peculiaridades de los dos sub-campos más importantes del Romanticismo Americano conocidos como “Romanticismo Claro” y “Romanticismo Oscuro.” Romanticism was an extremely influential movement which flourished at the end of the 18th century and which had a huge impact on various areas, including literature. Countless writers have represented in their works key Romantic features such as the depiction of horror and intense emotions, the use of exotic and wild natural settings, nationalism, individualism, the reproduction of the human psyche, and symbolism, among many others. In this paper, it is shown how the Romantic Movement influenced, more specifically, the North American short story by analysing five works: Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil,” Herman Melville’s “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.” The results which have been obtained from this analysis have demonstrated that these five short stories can be considered as Romantic works because they reflect multiple characteristics of the Romantic Movement. In fact, these writers portray the peculiarities of the most important subfields of American Romanticism, which are known as “Light Romanticism” and “Dark Romanticism.”

„Listka jednego, ni ząbeczka w liściu”. Norwid – poza romantyzmem

The article polemicizes with those findings in the history of literature that situate Norwid’s output within the Romantic movement, especially conclusions drawn by Zofia Stefanowska, Zofia Trojanowiczowaand Edward Kasperski, but also certain ideas developed by Rev. Antoni Dunajski, who argues that the poet’s historiosophic reflection is rooted in Hegelian dialectics (or German philosophy in general), seasoned with the Christian tradition and readings from the Bible. The authoremphasizes certain properties of Norwid’s poetics: an original concept of the protagonist, a personalist concept of history, irony, and the development of both the lyrical subject and the virtual lyrical audience, which all decidedly confirm that the poet functioned outside the said literary and ideological movement. These claims are also informed by the idea that even though Norwid operated beyond the Romantic convention, he would not embrace some other, existing trend (e.g. positivism or Parnassianism), or already represent one from the future (e.g. modernism). Instead, as a pre-modernist and precursor of contemporary lyricism, or a symbolist, he foreshadowed future literary movements. Accordingly, the article claims that Norwid’s work constitutes a separate and original phenomenon, at least in Polish literature.

Scottish Romanticism

What is a national Romanticism, and what in particular is Scottish Romanticism? In answering these questions, this essay identifies five of the central underpinning features of national cultures. It then goes on to explain how the strength of a national Romanticism in Scotland derives from them, before assessing the importance of the key writers of the Romantic movement in Scotland in terms of this framework and in the context of their relationship to Romanticism in its wider context.

Love, Mobility, and Fate in Turn-of-the-Century Berlin

This chapter examines dating in turn-of-the-century Berlin as mobility. Whereas the fluidity of the metropolis set in motion potential relationships every minute, the strictures of hegemonic middle-class virtue vis-à-vis love and intimacy formed countless roadblocks to men and women looking for connection. Dating offered the promise of upward mobility, and yet the current of modern, urban life made it hard for those on the margins of society (women, the petit bourgeoisie) to stay afloat and avoid going under. New approaches to dating emerged as a way of counteracting the barriers to romantic movement, however, and this chapter focuses on one common and contested version—chance meetings on the street that blossomed into relationships—as a way of examining the interplay of love and mobility.

8. Historical and anthropological jurisprudence

This chapter, which discusses the development of historical and anthropological jurisprudence, first identifies the characteristics that distinguish the Western legal tradition from other systems. It then discusses the German Romantic Movement, which found its most powerful spokesman in jurist, Friedrich Karl von Savigny; its foremost champion in England was Sir Henry Maine. Maine exercised a significant influence over what has come to be called anthropological jurisprudence or legal anthropology, an approach to law that developed in the twentieth century and which was recognized as essential to an understanding of law by the American realist judge Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

The Prose Poem’s Post-Romantic Inheritance

This chapter discusses prose poetry's connection to Romanticism. Although contemporary writers take the fragmentary nature of the prose poem for granted, it was once an important innovation to celebrate fragmentary literary forms — an innovation that took hold with the Romantic movement. Given the relationship between prose poetry and the Romantic fragment, comprehending one offers the opportunity to better appreciate the other. Moreover, if “the extended influence of Romantic fragments into Modernist and even Postmodernist poetry” is uncovered, then this underscores the view that the contemporary prose poem is simultaneously a product of postmodernism, modernism, and Romanticism. While contemporary prose poetry is sometimes self consciously fractured and fragmentary, destabilizing and interrupting notions of TimeSpace in ways Romantic writers rarely attempted, the prose poem's Romantic inheritance remains.