The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism focuses on the period beginning with the French Revolution and extending to the uprisings of 1848 across Europe. It brings together leading scholars in the field to examine the intellectual, literary, philosophical, and political elements of European Romanticism. The volume begins with a series of chapters examining key texts written by major writers in languages including French, German, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Hungarian, Greek, and Polish amongst others. Then follows a second section based on the naturally inter-disciplinary quality of Romanticism, encapsulated by the different discourses with which writers of the time, set up an internal comparative dynamic. These chapters highlight the sense a discourse gives of being written knowledgeably against other pretenders to completeness or comprehensiveness of understanding, and the Enlightenment encyclopaedic project. Discourses typically push their individual claims to resume European culture, collaborating and trying to assimilate each other in the process. The main examples featuring here are history, geography, drama, theology, language, geography, philosophy, political theory, the sciences, and the media. Each chapter offers original and individual interpretation of individual aspects of an inherently comparative world of individual writers and the discursive idioms to which they are historically subject. Together the forty-one chapters provide a comprehensive and unique overview of European Romanticism.

The Historical Dictionary of Russian Literature contains a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 100 cross-referenced entries on significant people, themes, critical issues, and the most significant genres that have formed Russian Literature. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Russian literature.

In December 1825, a group of liberal aristocrats, officers, and intelligentsia mounted a coup against the tsarist government of Russia. Inspired partially by the democratic revolutions in the United States and France, the Decembrist movement was unsuccessful; however, it led Russia's civil society to new avenues of aspiration and had a lasting impact on Russian culture and politics. Many writers and thinkers belonged to the conspiracy while others, including the poet Alexander Pushkin, were loosely or ambiguously affiliated. While the Decembrist movement and Pushkin's involvement has been well covered by historians, Emily Wang takes a novel approach, examining the emotional and literary motivations behind the movement and the dramatic, failed coup. Through careful readings of the literature of Pushkin and others active in the northern branch of the Decembrist movement, such as Kondraty Ryleev, Wilhelm Küchelbecker, and Fyodor Glinka, Wang traces the development of "emotional communities" among the members and adjacent writers. This book illuminates what Wang terms "civic sentimentalism": the belief that cultivating noble sentiments on an individual level was the key to liberal progress for Russian society, a core part of Decembrist ideology that constituted a key difference from their thought and Pushkin's. The emotional program for Decembrist community members was, in other ways, a civic program for Russia as a whole, one that they strove to enact by any means necessary.

The works of Lord Byron and his friend Sir Walter Scott had an influence on European literature which was immediate and profound. Peter Cochran’s book charts that influence on France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland and Russia, with individual chapters on Goethe, Pushkin, and Baudelaire – and one special chapter on Ibsen, who called Peer Gynt his Manfred. Cochran shows that, although Byron’s best work is his satirical writing, which is aimed in part at his earlier “romantic” material and its readership, his self-correction was not taken on board by many European writers (Pushkin being the exception), and it was the gloomy Byronic Heroes who held sway. These were often read as revolutionaries, but were in fact dead-end. It was a mythical, not a literary Byron whom people thought they had read. The book ends with chapters on three British writers who seem at last to have read Byron, in their different ways, accurately – Eliot, Joyce, and Yeats.

From the contents: From Pantheon to Pandemonium (Richard Peace). - Karamzin's Gothic tale: The Island of Bornholm (Derek Offord). - Alessandra TOSI: At the origins of the Russian Gothic novel: Nikolai Gnedich's Don Corrado de Gerrera (1803) (Alessandra Tosi). - Does Russian Gothic verse exist? The Case of Vasilii Zhukovskii (Michael Pursglove). - The fantastic in Russian Romantic prose: Pushkin's The Queen of Spades (Claire Whitehead).

Downes presents a detailed examination of the significance of decadence in Central and Eastern European modernist music.