Cultural Interactions in the Romantic Age: Critical Essays in Comparative Literature

Charts the interactive contours of European culture of the late eighteenth to mid-nineteenth centuries, extending the chronological limits of Romanticism by identifying fresh links among works, authors, contexts, and institutions across national and linguistic borders.

It has been observed that the reevaluation of Romanticism is a special feature of post-New Critical or revisionist criticism in America. Constituting a lively ecumenical dialogue between literary historians and theorists, and between critics based in comparative literature and national literature departments, the essays in Cultural Interactions in the Romantic Age offer abundant proof that this process continues unabated. Focusing on a broad range of interactive relations from 1750 to 1850, these essays reveal as factitious the national and linguistic borders erected within the Academy and strike a blow against the tendency of literary studies to ossify into arbitrary ethnocentric categories. Cultural Interactions in the Romantic Age makes a strong argument for the position that literary activity in the Romantic Period is inseparable from international dialogue and appropriation.

Contributors include April Alliston, Frederick Burwick, Annette Wheeler Cafarelli, James Engell, Lilian R. Furst, David C. Hensley, Roberta Johnson, Marc Katz, Kari Lokke, and John L. Mahoney.