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.”

This chapter focuses on the political commitments of the Cénacle, a group of authors whose writings appeared in Haitian print culture in the 1830s. Among the Cénacle’s political aims was the development of a unique national literature structured around a democratic romanticization of Black and Indigenous figures. While scholars have traditionally historicized the Haitian Cénacle as merely imitative of French romanticism, this chapter argues that the writings of the Cénacle instead reveal the limitations of idealized European romantic citizenship. In particular, Haitian romanticism’s engagement with Vodou, and specifically Vodou as practiced by women and gender fluid people, offers a different way of imagining collective historical memory, albeit one that cannot be fully embraced by the writers of the Cénacle. Through readings of Haitian print culture, this chapter demonstrates how the Cénacle mobilized Haitian Vodou practices in order to reshape the nation’s political future, and in doing so, attends to the unnamed Vodouwizans abandoned in the margins of romantic history.

Nineteenth-century studies has – like other fields – sought to move beyond the notion of progressive secularization in which religious beliefs disappear in modernity. But what will replace this paradigm? A compelling alternative emerges when we attend to how the Romantics and Victorians resist what Charles Taylor calls “excarnation” – the modern construal of religion primarily as inward belief unhooked from material reality and ritual forms. The Romantics’ and Victorians’ liturgical fascinations signal a suspicion of excarnation and an attempt to re-poeticize religion. The full significance of this use of liturgy, however, only appears in light of a much deeper genealogy of modernity stretching back to the late-medieval rise of voluntarism and nominalism. Such a genealogy reveals the theological origins of so many modern bifurcations (natural/supernatural, reason/faith, etc.) – bifurcations that nineteenth-century texts challenge and rethink by way of liturgy. Examples from Keats, Hopkins, Carlyle, Arnold, Dickens, and others forecast the book’s main arguments.

In The Prelude (1805/1850), Wordsworth reimagines time through the ritual calendar and festivals of revolutionary France. The Revolution’s rituals, moreover, complicate the common notion that Wordsworth retreats from politics into poetry. By way of ritual, Wordsworth enters what Walter Benjamin calls now-time or higher time, moments in which the past – via memory – becomes simultaneous with the present. Such now-times allow Wordsworth to juxtapose, on the one hand, his own past calling to a poetic vocation with, on the other hand, the Revolution’s founding vocation to bring liberty. In that juxtaposition, Wordsworth’s own faithfulness to his poetic calling tacitly critiques the Revolution’s infidelity to its origins. The higher time of ritual, then, mediates between Wordsworthian memory and revolutionary history. Wordsworth provides foundations for many Victorian liturgies. His sacralization of material reality, his resistance to the market’s dehumanizing rituals, his imbrication of memory and higher time – each of these undergoes further elaboration as the century unfolds.

Chapter 2 surveys extant theories of the nation and outlines the main positions in the historiographical debate. It begins with the primordial theories first posited by German Romantics, before turning to the “dominant orthodoxy,” modernism. It remains widely accepted that the nation is a distinctly modern type of community, the product of the profound intellectual and structural changes Western Europe underwent from the eighteenth through twentieth centuries. The chapter draws attention to the role of the state in modernist theories to explain why nations are generally defined as sovereign political communities. Medieval historians for their part have contested the modern dating of the emergence of nations and provided plentiful evidence for the existence of national communities prior to the sixteenth century. Even so, many scholars adhere to a political conception of the nation. The chapter highlights a tendency among medievalists to gauge the presence and cohesion of medieval nations principally by their degree of political institutionalization and discusses the anachronism of previous approaches to nationhood, thus illustrating the historiographical relevance of the study.

The liturgical forms depicted in William Wordsworth’s Excursion (1814) provide the foundational instance of the nineteenth-century resistance to excarnation and the natural/supernatural binary. Rather than naturalizing otherworldly Christian doctrines – as seminal readings of Romanticism suppose – The Excursion’s rituals disclose how material reality already participates in the divine. This participatory vision challenges voluntarist pictures of God as a large, powerful being who exercises his arbitrary will over creation – a picture of God often unwittingly adopted by modern readers. Divine participation, moreover, challenges typical readings of Wordsworth’s lyrical inwardness. For, liturgy not only draws the poem’s characters out of themselves, it also sacralizes nature. Nature’s sacredness in turn opposes the desecrating rituals – or anti-liturgies – of industrialization. Via liturgy, then, Wordsworth comments on material conditions and remains historically engaged. The Victorians will repeatedly echo this use of liturgy to sacralize material reality and to resist any forces that would violate that sacrality.

Clare had the good fortune to be born into a period of excitement and experimentation in poetry. Ideas about poetry were changing, as were practices of reading and writing. This chapter examines how Clare participated in these changes. He helped to elevate the meditative lyric to the pinnacle of literary prestige by showing how everyday experiences yield pleasure and insight; by using forms with roots in oral and folk cultures, including popular song; and by modelling his poems on the music of nature and the structure of bird nests. He took part in contemporary experiments with form, language, and voice. His poems draw on the philosophical atmosphere of the Romantic age by offering readers opportunities carefully to observe Clare’s world and, by doing so, to come to know it.

This chapter delves into the profound interplay between Haitian revolutionary history, literature, and the broader context of global romanticism. Drawing on the pivotal work Le Romantisme en Haïti: La vie intellectuelle, 1804-1915 by Dolcé, Dorval, and Casthely, it critiques the dominance of Western thought and the triumph of Eurocentrism in global romanticism. Through a meticulous exploration of Haiti’s post-independence history and its relationship to French colonialism, it asserts the emergence of a distinctly national form of romanticism deeply entrenched in the country’s intellectual and literary evolution. Tracing the trajectory of Haitian romanticism from its roots in the Haitian Acte de l’Indépendance to the commencement of the US Occupation, it argues that Haitian poets’ blending of politics, history, and literary creation resonated with, at the same time as it transcended, romantic ideals popular in the British and French traditions. Fusing historical scholarship and literary critique, the chapter aims to reshape perceptions of Haitian intellectual history, unearthing the obscured ties between revolutionary actions, poetic expression, and the global romantic movement.

Florence Naugrette examines the genesis and legacy of the nineteenth century’s most celebrated movement, romanticism. Whereas romanticism is often susceptible to being cast at the opposite end of the spectrum to classicism, Naugrette argues that it took its cues from wherever it could find them: the noble classical and neoclassical genres of tragedy and comedy; opera and comic opera; the Elizabethans; bourgeois drama; and popular genres including pantomime, féerie and above all melodrama. Romantic theatre thus appeared in all registers from comic to tragic, realist to fantastical. Naugrette also dispels the myth that Victor Hugo and his best known contemporaries Dumas, Vigny and Musset, all consecrated by posterity, were romantic theatre’s sole figureheads. She affords due credit to a host of other playwrights who contributed to the movement, notably women such as George Sand, Virginie Ancelot and Delphine de Girardin; and offers visibility to the actors and actresses who contributed to the success of the romantic theatre not only by playing its characters but also by inspiring playwrights and inventing new acting methods. Naugrette concludes by positing that French romanticism, originating predominantly in the French Revolution’s ethos of democratization, was also a nascent form of national popular theatre.

This chapter explores some understudied affinities between the essay and psychoanalysis as practices of living and writing. Pointing to a shared commitment to living a more ‘real’, or more vivid life, and the developmental task of coming to face reality for oneself, the chapter focuses on the way the ‘middle group’ of psychoanalysts in twentieth-century Britain – which included D.W. Winnicott, Marion Milner, and Masud Khan – drew on the resources of the essay form, and the literary culture of Romanticism, in order to develop a particularly essayistic mode of psychoanalytic writing and practice. The chapter makes the case that the essay is particularly suited to exploring just what is distinctive about psychoanalytic therapeutic experience. It concludes with a more extended study of the career of Milner in the context of the development of the British welfare state, as she transitioned from essay writing to clinical practice.

This chapter investigates how Australian women poets mobilised Romantic sensibility and the figure of the poetess to navigate the complex dynamic between liminality and voice. It proposes a transnational extension of a female Romantic tradition to advocate for the rights of those disempowered in colonial and patriarchal structures. The chapter explores how writers like Eliza Hamilton Dunlop, Mary Bailey, and Caroline Leakey linked themes of exile and transportation with Romantic tropes such as the ‘fallen woman.’ It demonstrates how their poetry reveals an emotional range that extends the domestic affections into expressions of anger and distress at injustices. It also considers how religion informed their responses to regimes of regulation. The chapter also analyses Ada Cambridge’s critique of marriage in the suppressed volume Unspoken Thoughts, as well as her amplification of a broader gendering of harm and shame.

This chapter provides an overview of vegetarian and vegan practice from Ancient times to the beginning of the twentieth century. The first section focuses on the representation of Pythagoras in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and on the Aristotelian and Biblical depictions of the relationship between humans and non-human animals; the second explores Early Modern attitudes, including a discussion of the vegetarianism in More’s Utopia; the third offers readings of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Goldsmith’s The Citizen of the World; the fourth details the emergence of the word ’vegetarian’ in the context of Romanticism and Transcendentalism.

This chapter makes an argument that two of the most successful Victorian novelists, Charles Dickens and R. S. Surtees, those new men of the 1830s (Surtees was twenty-five when he begins Jorrocks’s Jaunts and Jollities; Dickens twenty-four at the conception of the Pickwick Papers), were both marked deeply by what came before in the late Georgian period’s popular-cultural print culture, notably its sporting comicalities. Though they took that tradition in very different paths – Surtees stayed in the sporting groove throughout his career, while Dickens very soon abandoned it – both were fashioned by it, and both initially positioned themselves within it. Both joined the key post-Napoleonic tradition of picaresque evident in the work of ‘Cockney’ humourists, in the fiction of Pierce Egan, and, indeed, in the poetry of Lord Byron. The chapter reads both men’s early writing against the wider context of late-Georgian print culture, addressing their relationship to the Romantic-era popular-cultural literary forms that inform their early work. The chapter brings to light this vibrant culture, focussing on Dickens and Surtees but also addressing such figures as Pierce Egan, Robert Seymour, and Thomas Hood.

Chapter 14 traces the development of Romanticism and positions Goethe within it. It addresses the factors that shaped Romanticism, such as the rise of the prose novel and the revival of interest in folklore, and positions the movement in relation to the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Above all, the chapter demonstrates that – despite his well-known ambivalence about aspects of Romanticism – Goethe contributed to it throughout his life, paving the way for it with his early works, and embodying many of its tendencies later on, above all in Faust.