"A History of Romantic Literature provides a richly integrated account of shared themes, interests, innovations, rivalries, and disputes among the writers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It examines the literatures of sensibility and intensity as well as the aesthetic dimensions of horror and terror, sublimity and ecstasy. Because Romanticism infiltrated religious, philosophical, scientific, and ideological discourse as thoroughly as it did literature and the arts, its impact was pervasive and pan-European. The authors crafted a poetry and prose of emotional extremes, and a writing style prioritising spontaneity, improvisation, and originality. Not entirely without paradox, they also found their originality in folk traditions and the antiquarian revival of literary forms and themes of the medieval past. In examining Romanticism as historical movement, this History adheres to theories of assemblage: it addresses the social networking among authors, the informal dinners and teas, the clubs and salons, and the more formal institutions that emerged to establish and manage relations between readers and writers"-- |