The Romanticists

Last update: 21 Apr 2025 21:17
First version:

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Political, religious and moral views. Scientific interests. Attitudes to technology. And the Enlightenment. And Nietzsche. And artistic modernism.

See:
• The Romanticists themselves. They read well. I lean towards the Shelleys, George Sand, Dumas, Pushkin.
• Jacques Barzun
  • "To the Rescue of Romanticism", The American Scholar (Spring 1940) [Online. Summary essay connected to his book.]
  • Classic, Romantic and Modern
  • Berlioz and His Century (one-volume abridgement of Berlioz and the Romantic Century omitting detailed music descriptions and criticism)
• Hector Berlioz, Evenings with the Orchestra (trans. Jacques Barzun. I strongly suspect this was one of Sterling's sources for "The Beautiful and the Sublime.")
• Thomas Love Peacock, Nightmare Abbey [Affectionate contemporary parody]

To read or see:
• Delacroix
• Caspar David Friedrich
• Gericault
• Heine
• Hoffmann
• Michelet
• Schiller

Secondary sources to read:
• Auden, The Enchafed Flood
• Sarah Burns, Painting the Dark Side: Art and the Gothic Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America
• Leon Chai, Romantic Theory: Forms of Reflexivity in the Revolutionary Era
• Louis Dupré, The Quest of the Absolute: Birth and Decline of European Romanticism [Review in NDPR]
• H. J. Jackson, Those Who Write for Immortality [Account by Carlin Romano]
• Karl Kroeber
  • Ecological Literary Criticism: Romantic Imagining and the Biology of Mind
  • Romantic Fantasy and Science Fiction
• Michael Lowy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity
• Praz, The Romantic Agony
• Richard C. Sha, Imagination and Science in Romanticism
• James B. Twitchell, The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature
• George S. Williamson, The Longing for Myth in Germany: Culture, Religion, and Politics from Romanticism to Nietzsche