Why are material objects so prominent in European Romantic literature, both as symbol and organizing device? This collection of essays maintains that European Romantic culture and its aesthetic artifacts were fundamentally shaped by "object aesthetics," an artistic idiom of acknowledging, through a profound and often disruptive use of objects, the movement of Western aesthetic practice into Romantic self-projection and imagination. Of course Romanticism, in all its dissonance and anxiety, is marked by a number of new artistic practices, all of which make up a new aesthetics, accounting for the dialectical and symbolistic view of literature that began in the late eighteenth century. Romanticism and the Object adds to our understanding of that aesthetics by reexamining a wide range of texts in order to discover how the use of objects works in the literature of the time.

Why are material objects so prominent in European Romantic literature, both as symbol and organizing device? This collection of essays maintains that European Romantic culture and its aesthetic artifacts were fundamentally shaped by "object aesthetics," an artistic idiom of acknowledging, through a profound and often disruptive use of objects, the movement of Western aesthetic practice into Romantic self-projection and imagination. Of course Romanticism, in all its dissonance and anxiety, is marked by a number of new artistic practices, all of which make up a new aesthetics, accounting for the dialectical and symbolistic view of literature that began in the late eighteenth century. Romanticism and the Object adds to our understanding of that aesthetics by reexamining a wide range of texts in order to discover how the use of objects works in the literature of the time.

Innovative, alternative account of romanticism, exploring how art and science together contested the evidentiary authority of the human body.

The Romantic Movement in Europe was both a revolt and a revival, a philosophy of life as well as of art. In the earliest expressions of romantic theory by Rousseau and Diderot, it is seen as a revolt against rationalism. In Great Britain and Italy it appears as a revolt against classicism, in Spain as a revival of the tradition of the Moorish courts, and in Germany, where it excited the greatest enthusiasm, as both a revolt against rationalism and a revival of the Gothic and Germanic. Despite the differences of aim and emphasis across Europe, Professor Cranston argues that romaticism was a European phenomenon, as universal as the Renaissance. He isolates its common features - liberty, introspection, and the importance of love; truth in the expression of feeling as much as of thought; nature seen as an object of devotion rather than scientific study; a tolerance of the grotesque coupled with an interest in the exotic, the primitive and the medieval; a concern for the value of intuition over ratiocination; and a preference for audacity over prudence. The Romantic Movement is part of the common European heritage, and its influence is by no means at an end. The book is the first to describe its philosophy, history, and cultural and artistic manifestations, and the ways these varied across the countries of Europe.

Sha concludes that both fields benefited from thinking about how imagination could cooperate with reason—but that this partnership was impossible unless imagination's penchant for fantasy could be contained.

This collection of essays explores the remarkable range and cultural significance of the engagement with ‘infancy’ during the Romantic period. Taking its point of departure in the commonplace claim that the Romantics invented childhood, the book traces that engagement across national boundaries, in the visual arts, in works of educational theory and natural philosophy, and in both fiction and non-fiction written for children. Essays authored by scholars from a range of national and disciplinary backgrounds reveal how Romantic-period representations of and for children constitute sites of complex discursive interaction, where ostensibly unrelated areas of enquiry are brought together through common tropes and topoi associated with infancy. Broadly new-historicist in approach, but drawing also on influential theoretical descriptions of genre, discipline, mediation, cultural exchange, and comparative methodologies, the collection also seeks to rethink the idea of a clear-cut dichotomy between Enlightenment and Romantic conceptions of infancy.