Romanticism and Time

Romanticism and Time is a remarkable affirmation of border-crossings and international exchanges in many ways. This major collection of essays represents the work of eminent scholars from France, Germany, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, the United Kingdom, and the United States, as they in turn represent the Romanticisms that emerged not only from the "four nations” of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland but also from Continental Europe and America. Crossing many genres of writing and well as artistic media, too, the "Romantic poetics of time,” as editors Sophie Laniel-Musitelli and Céline Sabiron put it in their introduction, stage "a process in time that displays a form of agency over time”—an agency that variously registers and produces, combines, disorders, and transforms both time and history. The capacious Romanticism on offer in these pages is not limited to the decades straddling the year 1800. Rather, it emerges as a relationship to something prior and as the gestation of a future, by turns restorative and revolutionary. With their commitment to diversity, to change, and to exchange, and because of their awareness of the romanticism of periodization itself, the authors in this volume produce, as Wordsworth might say, a "timely utterance.”

Sophie Laniel-Musitelli and Céline Sabiron’s collection is a beautifully produced and meticulously edited volume that brings together young, innovative researchers with established, seasoned scholars from various backgrounds (France, Switzerland, Germany, the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America)—a truly cosmopolitan enterprise, it mirrors, in the diversity of its approaches, the heterogeneity of its material and is, in its own way, a continuation of Romanticism’s engagement with time and its self-questioning, self-positioning in cultural and political history.