Romanticism Books

This book did not contain the type of poems that I was looking for. I am looking for many fairly short, and short poems that relate to more modern times.

As a teacher, I've looked for a good anthology for a Romantic poet unit and this collection suits all of my needs. It included all of the important works that would normally be included in an introduction to the Romantics, and the size of the edition works quite well.

Don't get me wrong, this is a great book. It encompasses almost all critical art and art history of Romanticism, and is complimented by a zesty layout and visually stimulating pictures throughout. But my one question is: WHY DO YOU PRINT THIS BOOK IN THIS SIZE? This book deserves to be two or three times this big... if not bigger. If this book was sold in only a 20'x20' version, you can bet that I would buy it. Maybe a good idea (editors of this book listen up!) would be to make full-size replicas of all the paintings within and sell this book as a series of giant tear-out sheets, so we could display these wonderful pieces of art in our own homes. Then you could keep the text version of the book in its original size and it would accompany the paintings. Another qualified idea is to have photographs or interprative sketches of the artists whose paintings we are studying in this book. It's nice to know what the people who made such beautiful art looked like.

One of the biggest problems with studying art is finding books you can carry and read. Coffee table books are nice to look at, but I find that most of the time I don't even bother trying to read the accompanying essays (which are rarely comprehensive).

I'm glad I discovered the Phaidon A&I series, because I'm finally able to make a real effort to learn about art. Yes, it's hard to see the illustrations in detail, but the pictures are usually large enough to accurately depict the author's intention in including it in the book in the first place. If you find yourself wanting to look at a picture in more detail, it's likely available on the web.

Why it's good: At around 400 pages it does a great job at being comprehensive (but without being overwhelming). By the time you're done, you feel you've captured all but the nittiest-grittiest of details regarding Romanticism. It can be read by amateurs (which I most definitely am) without feeling lost in a sea of jargon or references that art students are required to know but the average person does not. And you can carry it to work with you to read at lunchtime.

Why only 4 stars: I'm not sure I agree with the author's choice in dividing up the chapters on the basis of themes, some of which are virtually indistinguishable from others. In addition, you don't get a complete picture of some artists because they pop up sporadically throughout the book rather than have whole sections dedicated to them. Personally, I would've divided the book by region (French, German, French, Spanish, English, American), but as I didn't write it ...
My other main concern is the lack of Americans. Yes, I know that Romanticism was largely a European movement; however the Hudson River School of Artists were largely Romantic in nature (pun intended), and the brief discussion of Thomas Cole's Course of Empire should have been expanded (and all 5 works shown, not just the central one) because it perfectly applied to the theme of that chapter.
One final warning: have some small understanding of European history between 1789 and 1848, as the different revolutions and events throughout are touched on as they relate to the art, because if you're unfamiliar with the July Revolution, for example, you may find yourself missing the author's point.

Summary: Ignore the fact that my negative section is larger than the positive; this book is a great and inexpensive way to become educated about Romantic Art. Completists may want to start with Neo-classicism, but if you're looking to get immersed in 19th century art (or art in general), this is a great place to start. I'm looking forward to reading Impressionism next (I'll come back to Friedrich and Turner, available in A&I form as well, later this year).

A much needed attempt to explore Beckett's debt to the Romantics. The writers know Beckett, but at the times it seems that they do not know the Romantics as well.

The book combines plays/works from different time periods and offers a different perspective of Corneille's L'illusion comique, while adding a study of a stil not yet well know play by Fernando Arrabal.

I read this book as a student of Dr. Saiedi's in 1994. The depth of his analysis and the sophistication of his synthesis of literature, philosophy, and cultural sciences that I enjoyed in lectures are captured in this dense and labrynthine work. The core of his argument is that social theory is a unique syntehsis of various European intellectual traditions, especially the epistemology of the Enlightenment and the political action theories of Romanticism. This approach offers an understadning of social theory that cleaves essentialist dichotomies such as positivist/relativist, functionalist/Marxist, or conservative/radical. This perspective is not merely a question of social tehory's origins, but also reveals how current discourse draws from both traditions. I highly reccomend this work for those intrigued by our own capacity to conceive and anaylze the social realities we navigate.

While this book is probably not for the casual reader, anyone with a keen interest in Dante and/or British Romantic poets should read this book!

The great benefit of this book is the multi-visoned orientation. The articles are collected from diverse authors in such a way that, read as a whole it yields many good insights into the movement that swept Europe at the beginning of the 18th century. There are alos articles devoted to aesthetics across europe. Unfortunately it is limited to mainly England, Germany, France, and Italy. While these are arguabely the moswt important Romantic countries, there are only brief articles on Spain, Poland and Russia. There is no study of Scandinavia or Hungary.

The English Romantic period is conventionally defined as 1760-1815, and spans the reigns of King George III and King George IV, the American War of Independence, the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the British Industrial Revolution. My interest was more literary and poetic than historical. I was interested in learning more about the cultural environment that produced poets like Wordsworth, Coleridge, Blake, Shelley, Keats, and Byron.

Professor Marilyn Gaull's text, English Romanticism - The Human Context, was more encyclopedia-like than I had expected. I stayed the course for about 100 pages, but I eventually began to skip around, making good use of the extensive index to find topics of my choosing. Nonetheless, I expect that a student of English literature or English history would clearly benefit from Gaull's detailed, scholarly examination of this critical period in English history.

Although Great Britain did itself escape civil war during this turbulent time, restrictive laws and legislation only delayed social change. Technological advances, increasing secularization, and growing democratic aspirations were difficult to contain.

The Romantic poets championed change, especially the liberal principles espoused during the French Revolution, and they faced continual harassment from both government censors and political opponents. But not all change was equally welcome. These same poets lamented the loss of aristocratic patronage, and their growing dependence on a new, more broadly based reading public. Some poets, like Wordsworth, eventually dismissed this less appreciative public and addressed themselves to posterity.

Although I occasionally found Professor Gaull's text to be rather lengthy and detailed, I expect that it will long serve me as a useful reference tool. It is subdivided into short chapters with subsections that make it easy to browse. I recommend her work for both students and general readers interested in English Romanticism.

Anthony Pagden's 1993 book, "European Encounters with the New World," is a socio-cultural historical study of the ways and means by which the 'discovery' of the New World left indelible impressions upon the Old World. The book revolves around European attempts from Columbus in 1492, to Alexander von Humboldt, in 1799, to understand what the discovery meant - from how Europeans thought about the New World itself, its original inhabitants, and whether any approach could sufficiently provide them with an understanding of themselves in light of the discovery. Concerned with the themes of 'newness,' 'authority,' and the seeming impasse of 'cultural incommensurability,' Pagden very clearly lays out the stakes for a wide range of disparate, often conflicting European ideas about what America meant in the Early Modern Period. Pagden's approach was at once comfortable to me - he works almost exclusively with the products of cultural production - letters, histories, philosophy, dialogues, and fiction. Subtly, Pagden as a historian seems to dispense with a radical dependence on statistics and data, in favor of a history of representation. One strength of the book is that it works, simultaneously, as informed and interesting literary criticism and as a cultural and intellectual history.

Chapter 1 takes on the history of European encounters with the New World at the level of the processes by which Europeans actually came into contact with the New World. From Columbus through Humboldt, Pagden argues, a 'principle of attachment' governed these encounters. In order for a traveller, migrant, colonist (and other varieties all finely delineated) to come to grips with the alienness of the new world - he first attempts a kind of mental transference, mapping the startlingly new with familiar forms, from rocks to native people. This is the attempt, which haunts Early Modern Europe, of trying to make the incommensurable commensurable with European experience and epistemology, which comes out of an explicit history of textual interpretation. Beyond the individual experience of America, the next problem, as Pagden sees it, is how to relate these wholly unique experiences to Europeans in Europe. In light of the tradition of textual interpretation, which depended upon the Bible, the Church Fathers, and finally the Ancients - all of whom the very concept of a 'new' continent is beyond conception - how does a person legitimize and authenticate his experience and make it legible? Using the writings of contemporary Spanish writers and missionaries, principally Las Casas and Oviedo, Pagden argues that a new tradition of 'autopsy,' which he defines as appeal to the authority of the eyewitness. In line with recent developments in philosophy, the time was ripe for such a literature in which a named narrator claimed the truth of his observations. However, according to Pagden, as the Early Modern Period continued, the focus on observational authority became increasingly dependent on concomitant claims to objectivity.

Chapter 3 deals with the reckoning which the discovery of the New World brought to bear on religious and intellectual history, and how the intellectual establishment coped and adapted to the assault on the integrity of its big three - the Bible, Chruch Fathers, and Ancients. Pagden also takes up the developing mythos surrounding Christopher Columbus - they way that images of Columbus as a 'culture-hero' shift and change from Columbus' own time through Humboldt's appropriation of him. Chapter 4 finds Pagden dealing with the linguistic encounters between the Old and New Worlds - the ways in which European languages found difficulties relating their authority, political and religious to natives and their own languages. It also takes up issues of temporality - how the Old World envisioned its investment in the New World as providing a peek into some kind of common human history. Chapter 5, centering around Diderot's "Supplement to Bougainville's Voyage," Humboldt's "Kosmos," and the writings of Herder examines the way in which Enlightenment and early Romantic writers represents the difficulties inherent in crossing into New World spaces. 18th century debates range from vehement anti-colonialist discourse, to absolute incommensurability, to the impossibility of a universal good, to Humboldt's belief that he was the objective explorer that the European imagination had been awaiting since Columbus.

Dealing only briefly with developments in critical theory over the past 20 or so years prior to 1993, including post-colonial studies, Pagden acknolwedges the use of studies which claim the 'other' is always a construction. Similar omissions, acknowledged or not, include the absence of African slaves, and sustained emphasis on commercial and religious discourses from his cultural history. On the whole though, Pagden's clear writing style and deep engagement with his cultural source materials, spanning different languages and historical moments is impressive, informative, and highly entertaining.

Mario Praz seems to disapprove of much of the late Romantic and Symbolist, mostly French, writing from the late nineteenth century. It astounds me that Mario Praz would take the trouble to write an entire book about authors he doesn't seem to like very much. But he was at least thorough about it, and we can share in the fruits of his labours even if we cannot share in his judgments.

In fact, as in all works of this sort, a commentary telling us how decadent, sadistic, and depraved all of the sorts of fantastic fiction he collects is just the thing to whet a reader's interest. He condemns major authors like Flaubert, for his -Temptation of St. Anthony.- But he also introduces us to relatively less well known writers like Jean Lorrain; and to minor poets like Maurice Rollinat, the Alice Cooper or Marilyn Manson of fin-de-siecle France. Without Mr. Praz to tell me how eeeevil they are, I'd never have heard of 'em; and I'd be the poorer for it.

Works like this also serve the purpose of anthologising the more intriguing excerpts from these writers. Mr. Praz's work is no exception. Fortunately, entire poems are often quoted, and extensive passages from short stories, in both the original (usually French) and in English translation.

I can't entirely -endorse- this, but it is a fun and informative read, that you should have a look at if you have any interest at all in the period.