Lessons of Romanticism

Moving beyond views of European Romanticism as an essentially poetic development, "Lessons of Romanticism" strives to strengthen a critical awareness of the genres, historical institutions, and material practices that comprised the culture of the period. This anthology - in recasting Romanticism in its broader cultural context - ranges across literary studies, art, history, musicology, and political science and combines a variety of critical approaches including gender studies, Lacanian analysis, and postcolonial studies.With over twenty essays on such diverse topics as the aesthetic and pedagogical purposes of art exhibits in London, the materiality of late Romantic salon culture, the extra-canonical status of Jane Austen and Fanny Burney, and Romantic imagery in Beethoven's music and letters, "Lessons of Romantacism" reveals the practices that were at the heart of European Romantic life. Focusing on the six decades from 1780 to 1832, this collection is arranged thematically around gender and genre, literacy, marginalisation, canonmaking, and nationalist ideology. As Americanists join with specialists in Geman culture, as Austen is explored alongside Beethoven, and as discussions on newly discovered women's writings follow fresh discoveries in long-canonised texts, these interdisciplinary essays not only reflect the broad reach of contemporary scholarship but also point to the long neglected intertextual and intercultural dynamics in the various and changing faces of Romanticism itself.