This chapter examines the early colonial imaginary of Australia. It demonstrates how there was no unified perception of the land but rather movement between utopic and dystopic visions, often according to audience. The chapter discusses poetic speculation on the expansion of empire into what was viewed as the ‘New World’ and the publicising of the colony as a space of pastoral idyll for prospective emigrants. It also considers the negative depictions of Australia as a penal colony, particularly through broadside ballads that were popular among the working class. Lastly, the chapter analyses the representation of female convicts and the adaptation of the eclogue form by Robert Southey.

While much has been written about race, colonization, and anticolonialism in fin-de-siècle Irish gothic works such as Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), this chapter focuses particular attention on Romantic-era Irish gothic fiction’s engagements with empire and the imperialized world. Written in the context of an increasingly expansive, globalized literary marketplace, the works assessed here – including Maria Edgeworth’s Castle Rackrent (1800), Catherine Cuthbertson’s Romance of the Pyrenees (1803), the anonymous Amasina; or the American Foundling (1804), and Henrietta Rouvière Mosse’s Arrivals from India (1812) – provide an instructive example of Irish writers’ deft manipulation of systems of global economy to debate and contest questions of empire, relative civilization/barbarity, and ethnographies of race. They also point to the formal evolution of Irish gothic encouraged and enabled by writers’ responses to the economic and material realities of empire. Keenly aware of their global readership and their novels’ status as commodities, these writers invoke and reshape the gothic to think about the nature of authorship itself. Their works thus invite a reconsideration of the accepted makeup and characteristics of Romantic gothic, at the same time as they insist on an expansion of traditional canons of gothic and Irish gothic literature.

The Nonet for Winds and Strings follows a four-movement “sonata cycle” design that had become standard in the Classical chamber music tradition by the 1840s: A sonata-form first movement in a fast tempo is followed by a slow movement and an upbeat Scherzo, then a sonata-form finale. Farrenc’s sonata forms demonstrate the influence of her teacher Anton Reicha, whose treatises provide a guide to the informed study of her works. Farrenc’s innovations include continuous development in these movements and colorful harmonic narratives that deviate from later “textbook” explanations of form. Her use of contrapuntal writing, learned variation techniques, and references to familiar pieces from the wind chamber repertoire (Septets by Beethoven and Hummel) demonstrate her compositional mastery. Throughout the Nonet, she writes expertly for the instruments and incorporates playful dialogue and brilliant-style writing for all nine players in every movement. The Nonet became her most popular work, in part, because it balances virtuosity with craftsmanship, and the fun interactions between friends within the ensemble create an atmosphere of learned play for listeners and performers alike.

Chapter 8 observes the emergence of frontier tycoons toward the close of the nineteenth century, carried by a wave of “South Sea Romanticism” in literature and politics, propagated publicly by a pathos of drift and discovery. Fueled by insurgent demands of popular rights in the 1870s, grassroots expansionists claimed a “national right” to adventure and opportunity in the ocean frontier. Petty entrepreneurs of questionable reputation and ambivalent attitudes towards the law “opened” remote isles where state control faded. Others, like the entrepreneur Koga Tatsushirō who appropriated the Senkaku (Diaoyu) islands in 1895, enjoyed governmental backing. Such island colonies were eventually absorbed by the empire’s corporate infrastructure and were refashioned as sandboxes for colonial administration. “Rogue entrepreneurs” meanwhile traveled as far as the Caroline Islands in Micronesia, where one businessman, operating below the government’s radar, eventually facilitated the installation of a Japanese South Seas Protectorate. The chapter argues that the Japanese empire’s modalities of expansion carried the imprint of these experiences.

Louise Farrenc grew up in Paris during the Revolutionary period that saw the rise and fall of Napoleon Bonaparte and of different monarchies in France. These political changes impacted the Parisian musical scene and influenced Farrenc’s career and that of her friends and colleagues. Farrenc began her career as a virtuoso pianist-composer writing popular works like sets of variations on opera melodies and folksongs, but at the end of the 1830s, she changed her musical path. In the 1840s, like many composers in Central Europe at the time, she abandoned the virtuoso music of her youth to write chamber music with and without piano as well as three symphonies. She became known as a composer of serious music, an upholder of “German” traditions in France, and critics wrote about her compositions as representing the best new music of France. Her Nonet for Winds and Strings provides a culmination of the work she had done up to that point as a composer and performer devoted to finding a “middle way” between the Classical and Romantic traditions.

This chapter explores Michael Field’s complex engagement with Romanticism, particularly their poetic and philosophical filiations with Keats, Shelley, and Wordsworth. While Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper express a desire to break free from literary precursors, their writings reveal a dynamic relationship with Romantic ideals that is enriched by their collaborative and sensory aesthetic. Analysing Bradley and Cooper’s life-writing and lyrics, the chapter focuses on their sensual interaction with the natural world, their pursuit of a posthumous life in letters, and their redefinition of the Sublime to accommodate shared ecstatic pleasure. Understanding Michael Field’s place in literary history requires a capacious approach to periodisation that acknowledges the fluidity between Romanticism and the Victorian era, particularly in their blending of Romantic and decadent sensibilities.

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.