Since their discovery in the 1960s, Webern’s early compositions have been shrouded in myths. Woven into the rich tapestry of their reception history are many misconceptions and clichés that require careful unpicking. The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, it examines the methodological criteria and discursive strategies based on which Webern’s early work has been made the subject of scholarly inquiry. Secondly, it unravels how prevailing understandings of Webern’s early work implicitly theorise earliness as a historiographical category and inherently articulate ideas about origins and beginnings. In so doing, this chapter situates the monograph in relation to the multiplicity of interpretations offered by generations of Webern scholarship, while highlighting the heuristic potential that the category of earliness holds, in relation to Webern’s early work and beyond.

Christian Wolff develops a theory of Enlightened absolutism and a paternalistic interventionist state on broadly Leibnizian promises, assigning to the state the role of promoting happiness amongst its subjects as material, intellectual, and spiritual thriving. He posits a state of nature characterised not by conflict but by stagnation. The duty of self-perfection impels individuals to leave the state of nature and to surrender their natural rights, and the state assumes the duty of co-ordination and steering of individual efforts, consistently with cameralist political economy. Herder reads Leibnizian monads as collective or national subjects, each contributing to the progressive realisation of species-capacities, and in principle harmoniously integrated with all others. He gives rise to expressive Romanticism, where self and world correspond, in contrast to ironic Romanticism, where such accord is in principle impossible, and to idealism, where the accord is a practical task.

With the advent of nationalism in the nineteenth century, intangible cultural heritage such as folklore and folk customs acquired immense significance as the foundational script for the revival of national identities - albeit interpreted, in many cases, through an intensely romantic hermeneutical lens. This period saw the advent of both folklore-collecting and comparative mythology, as well as the fashioning of new mythologies by authors such as Teodor Narbutt, Friedrich Kreutzwald, and Andrejs Pumpurs. Furthermore, in the 1870s, a movement among the Mari people of the Volga actually revived a form of Mari traditional religion and rejected Christianity, anticipating the twentieth-century ‘pagan revivals’ of native faith movements that would take place in many eastern European nations. This chapter examines nineteenth-century perceptions of ‘paganism’, as well as the ways in which the projection of ideas formed in this period onto the past has distorted the historiography of the final phase of Europe’s pre-Christian religions.

This chapter focuses on “imaginary space” – literary spaces without a real-world referent. The question of how detached fantasy worlds like C. S. Lewis’ Narnia came to be thinkable in the twentieth century frames the chapter, which argues for fantasy space as a strategic response to the alienations produced by twentieth-century capitalism. Weaving together a history of exploration with a history of different types of imaginary space, the chapter traces the emergence of works like Lewis’ The Chronicles of Narnia out of earlier forms of imaginary space. Types of space reviewed include the settings of the traveler’s tale (e.g., Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West), Thomas More’s Utopia, and the Romantic atopias of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and William Wordsworth’s Prelude. The chapter draws on the theories of Yi-Fu Tuan, Fredric Jameson, Henri LeFebvre, and Michel Foucault to explain the distinctions between different formations of imaginary space. It concludes with a reading of Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi as a text reflecting the changing value of fantasy space in the twenty-first century.

This chapter discusses Shelley’s complex orientation towards Romantic-period drama and theatre culture. For Shelley, drama provided a key opportunity for generic experimentation that is continuous with his lyrical innovations. These innovations, however, go beyond producing new kinds of Romantic ‘closet dramas’, which were intended for a smaller, more bourgeois reading public. To argue this claim, the chapter attends to how Shelley’s writings on ancient Greek dramaturgical principles resonated with his interest in Romantic-period popular theatre. As shown in his dramatic poetic theory, Shelley attempted to realise his ideal intersection of aesthetics, historical progress, and contemporary social change in works sometimes intended for popular consumption. As demonstrated by his hopes to stage certain plays, Shelley’s dramatic efforts indicate that embodiment and mixed media forms were essential to his broader poetics.

Shelley’s translation of Plato’s Symposium as The Banquet, composed with great speed over ten days in July 1818, radically transformed the poet’s thoughts on love, translation, originality, and ancient philosophy. Shelley became Shelley through Plato. Rather than an arbiter of forms and banisher of poets from his ideal republic, Shelley’s Plato is himself a poet, as he claims in ‘A Defence of Poetry’. Through his reading and translation of the ancients – and particularly Plato – philosophy and poetry become concomitant for Shelley. Ultimately, Shelley is indebted to the philosopher’s use of literary forms over any straightforward adoption of his philosophy of forms. This chapter looks before and after Shelley’s translation of Plato’s Symposium to trace the poet’s reading of the ancients from 1812 until his accidental death in 1822, revealing the lasting, shifting influence of ancient philosophy on Shelley’s poetry.

We tend to rehearse familiar narratives with the aid of familiar writing about plants, but a turn to the non-canonical helps us to understand those canonical works in rather different ways. This chapter argues that we should be alive to those longue durée yet intimate traditions that are so often the stuff of lone engagements with individual plants, and which are most often expressed as moments of intense emotion. The chapter also suggests that we should at least question that other familiar narrative of a newly discovered ‘Romantic’ transcendence: turning to moments of emotional engagement with plants both in earlier writing and in writing outside of the ‘Romantic’ tradition, helps us to recognise a much longer tradition of transcendent emotion of which the Romantics are only a part.

The Johnson legend owes most to James Boswell, yet despite writing the classic biography Boswell only knew Johnson in the last twenty-one years of his life, and less well than other biographers. There were also several short biographies, part of a vast literature on Johnson which was already sizeable in his lifetime. Much of it was hostile: he was caricatured as inhuman, dictatorial, and aggressive. Boswell, notwithstanding the brilliance of his account, was partly to blame for cementing this idea: he privileged Johnson as a debater over the other sides of a very complicated personality, and sometimes turned Johnson’s conversations into monologues. The Romantics, who despised Johnson’s literary principles, amplified this caricature, and the nineteenth century was in general a low point of Johnson’s critical reputation. Yet his books were widely read in the nineteenth century, and in the twentieth he won many admirers among both scholars and authors.

Wedderburn’s final pamphlet, Address to the Lord Brougham and Vaux, contributed to the early nineteenth-century political “war of representation” about whether Black people in the West Indies would be willing to work for wages after emancipation. Although seeming to reiterate the proslavery claim that enslaved people in the West Indies had better living conditions than European wage laborers, Wedderburn’s vision of dwelling on the land outlined a nuanced, speculative decolonial future. The Conclusion finally argues that narratives of the Romantic revolutionary age should include Black abolitionist geographies, a revolution cultivated on common land with pigs, pumpkins, and yams.

This chapter reconstructs Schopenhauer’s complex discussion of human sociability. Schopenhauer thought that agents in the domains of politics and morality cannot conceive of human togetherness. For him, the areas of politics and morality correspond to the exercise of egoism and the spontaneous feeling of compassion, respectively. But he added that egoism is rooted in a form of practical solipsism, and compassion is rooted in a metaphysical insight into the inessential nature of individuals. It follows that neither egoistic nor compassionate individuals ultimately care about others as others. Yet Schopenhauer supplemented these treatments of others as reducible with his discussion of sociability. His analysis of social interaction exemplified by conversations, games, and other diversions includes accounts of interpersonal harmony and friction among individuals who remain distinct from one another. Even though Schopenhauer rejected sociable interaction as superficial and embraced misanthropy, his reflections on sociability contain a conception of human community.

Frederik Van Dam argues that the conceptualisation of new, ethical forms of cosmopolitanism in the 1850s is apparent in the informal diplomatic practices of Richard Monckton Milnes, an unduly neglected figure who was central to the literary world of the decade. Milnes’s ‘diplomatic cosmopolitanism’ found expression in his bibliophile activities as well as in his engagement with the legacy of European Romanticism, as can be seen in occasional poems such as ‘A Monument for Scutari’ (1855) and in his reviews of European fiction about Bohemia. Examining how the 1850s marked a new stage in the conduct of international affairs, Van Dam considers developments in the circulation of commodities as well as the breakdown of the so-called concert of Europe. Monckton Milnes embodies the diplomatic possibilities for literature and culture on the eve of a new European order.

This chapter elaborates a contextualized account of Horace’s interests in nature and the nonhuman. It traces the connections in his lyric poetry between the nonhuman environment and various concepts of nature. Drawing on long-standing poetic traditions, as well as developments in Hellenistic philosophy, Horace forges a poetry in which distilled perceptions of the nonhuman world undergird insights into ethical concepts of nature by which humans should live their lives. The chapter finds in this poetics a complex form of nature poetry that usefully complicates that concept within the history of the lyric. In order to write this poetry, Horace authenticates his vatic status through claims about his own special relationship with the nonhuman environment and the gods. Horace’s special connection to the divine allows him to enjoy a privileged relationship with his nonhuman surroundings. And it is because of this status that he can command us with urgency and authority to attend to our environments. Horace represents himself as a supernatural poet of nature, whose literary achievement transcends nature even as it teaches about nature’s limits.

This chapter examines the tension between mysticism and science in Aldous Huxley’s novels of ideas. It deploys the new critical terminology of Rachel Potter and Matthew Taunton and illustrates its utility. Those Barren Leaves (1925) is a good example of the ‘comic novel of ideas’, in that the high seriousness of Cardan and Calamy’s disputations is interspersed with low farce. Point Count Point (1928) exemplifies the ‘serious novel of ideas’: in addition to staging a Hegelian dialectic between the paganism of Rampion and the Manicheanism of Spandrell, the narrative tests their ideas. Eyeless in Gaza (1936) is an ‘asymmetric novel of ideas’: the dialectic between a version of D. H. Lawrence’s philosophy and a broadly Buddhist worldview is enacted in the person of Anthony Beavis, rather than being expounded in ‘character-character dialogue’. Beavis’ metaphor of the ocean and the waves signals the triumph of mysticism over Lawrence’s ‘psychological atomism’.

This chapter argues that the brevity and inherent orality of the Russian short story allows for the introduction of new, often stigmatised subject matter and for experimentation with form and language. The short story laid the groundwork for the novel, but not by providing shorter pieces to be assembled into a more complex plot. Rather, its role was to work out innovative aesthetic and thematic models that the novel would later carry into the cultural mainstream. For this reason, the short story often came to the fore during periods of literary and ideological change. The chapter presents the evolution of the Russian short story in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with particular attention to Anton Chekhov, the author who finalised the shift to what we now recognise as the typical concerns of the modern short story.

This chapter covers the period from the late 1780s through the late 1840s, and introduces two closely intertwined cultural movements: Russian Sentimentalism (or the age of sensibility) and Russian Romanticism (also known as the Golden Age of Russian poetry). Departing from debates on the paradoxes of Russian Romanticism, the chapter considers the genealogy and basic features of the movement by assessing the oeuvre and literary impact of the ‘father of Russian Romanticism’, the poet Vasilii Zhukovskii. To paraphrase a dictum wrongly attributed to Fedor Dostoevskii, it would not be an exaggeration to say that the literary spectre of Russian Romanticism came out of the angelic robes of this lofty, melancholy, and chaste poet, who playfully called himself the ‘poetic guardian of the English and German devils and witches’.

The final Chapter argues that Grouchy should be seen as a red thread that ties eighteenth-century to nineteenth-century thought. She allows us to see the ideas that emerged following the Revolution not as a caesura, but as a continuation of earlier preoccupations. Using the example of Benjamin Constant, who was a close friend and interlocutor with Grouchy, it argues that the stress placed by Constant and others on the political importance of sympathy was not a Romantic rejection of Enlightenment rationalism, but the perpetuation of an eighteenth-century grappling with how sentiments could be combined with reason to act as a means of uniting the individual and the community, and therefore as a foundation for political society. In the case of Constant, Grouchy was a significant conduit for these ideas. The Chapter explores how many of Constant’s major texts of the period 1800–1815 engaged in various ways with Grouchy’s concept of ‘particular sympathy’, and the potential threat that it poses to the proper development of moral ideas. It suggests, moreover, that Constant’s idea of ‘religious sentiment’ was an alternative solution to the problem posed by particular sympathy, equivalent to Grouchy’s turn to aesthetic philosophy.

This chapter introduces the essays in the volume, which work through various understandings of “romanticism” and “race,” addressing how these terms acquire meaning via other concepts taking shape in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, such as “blackness,” “whiteness,” “sovereignty,” “property,” and “freedom.”