European Romanticism

Abstract

Given that many British Romantic writers were strongly influenced by Continental literature and philosophy, and that some of them (most obviously Byron and Scott) had a strong impact on European culture in the first half of the nineteenth century, it is unfortunate that undergraduates are rarely encouraged to consider Romanticism in a transnational context.¹ The aim of this essay is to offer a detailed examination of the problems and opportunities arising from teaching an undergraduate course on European Romanticism, based on my experience of teaching such a course at two British universities. I hope that it will encourage others to develop courses in this area, or, at least, to do more to encourage students to consider British Romanticism in relation to European culture. With increasing academic interest in the forces of transnationalism and globalization, this is a particularly apposite time for the study of Romanticism as a European phenomenon. As Peter Mortensen puts it, “studying literature in a migratory age… cannot but heighten our consciousness of the ways in which literary innovation was always, to a certain extent, the product of complex cultural intersections whose faultlines rarely, if ever, coincided with the borders of modern nation states” (2004: 6). Similarly, Michael Ferber notes that in American (and I would add British) universities, “there is now a strong trend towards diversity and ‘world literature’ as well as a growing awareness that English Romanticism is not fully comprehensible outside its greater European context” (2005b: xxix).²